Presidential elections Colombia: Gustavo Petro goes into second round with surprise runner-up Rodolfo Hernández

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – With 99% of the votes counted, Gustavo Petro and surprise runner-up Rodolfo Hernández will contest the second round of Colombia’s presidential election.

Polling stations closed at 4 p.m. local time on Sunday after eight hours of voting in the first round of the presidential election, a day that passed without significant incidents.

Throughout the country, 102,152 polling stations were set up in 12,263 polling stations where Colombians will elect the president for the 2022-2026 term. This is because no candidate today received half plus one of the required votes.

A total of six candidates competed in these presidential elections, of whom the leftist Gustavo Petro of the Pacto Histórico was considered the favorite in the polls, followed by the Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez of the Equipo por Colombia Fico and the independent conservative Rodolfo Hernández of the Liga de Gobernantes Anticorrupción (League of Anti-Corruption Government).

The other three were Sergio Fajardo of the Centro Esperanza coalition, evangelical preacher and senator John Milton Rodríguez of Colombia Justa Libres, and conservative lawyer Enrique Gómez Martínez of Salvación Nacional.

After counting 99.16% of the votes, Petro received 8,479,095 votes in his third presidential bid, equivalent to 40.31%, but not enough to win the presidency in the first round, which was the goal of his coalition on Sunday.

His opponent in three weeks is Hernández, a 77-year-old engineer and former mayor of Bucaramanga, the country’s fifth-largest city. He ran as an independent for the League of Anti-Corruption Government, a movement he founded himself and with which he received 5,931,722 votes today, or 28.20%.

Hernández ousted the right-wing “Fico” Gutiérrez from second place, the big loser who failed to gather the votes of the right-wing that has always ruled the country around his name.

According to the assessment of the Minister of Defense, Diego Molano, shortly before the conclusion of the elections, the day was also typical in cybernetic terms, “without incidents that could affect the course of the