Left-wing candidate Petro continues to lead in Colombian polls, conservatives make strong gains

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Gustavo Petro, the presidential candidate of the leftist Historical Pact, has 32% of the electoral votes for the May 29 elections in Colombia, according to a poll released Sunday, while the conservative Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez has 23% and 13% of voters are undecided.

The Centro Nacional de Consultoría poll, the first after last Sunday’s general election and commissioned by Semana magazine, shows Petro nine points ahead of Gutiérrez of the conservative coalition Equipo por Colombia.

However, the magazine specifically highlights that “Federico Gutiérrez gained 19 percentage points from a low, from 4% in February to 23% in March, and became the main rival of Gustavo Petro,” who “gained five percentage points in the same period.”

Behind the two candidates is populist Rodolfo Hernández, former mayor of Bucaramanga, with 10% of the vote, the same percentage as the Centro Esperanza coalition candidate, Sergio Fajardo.

The list is completed by Íngrid Betancourt of the Green Party Oxygen (3%), Enrique Gómez of the National Salvation Movement (1%) and the former governor of Antioquia, Luis Pérez, who receives less than 0.5% of the vote.

The poll comes just a week after last Sunday’s general election, which also elected the presidential candidates of the Pacto Histórico, Equipo por Colombia and Centro Esperanza coalitions. Petro received nearly 4.5 million votes in the intra-coalition poll, Gutiérrez received more than 2.1 million votes and Fajardo received just over 720,000 votes.

The poll was conducted between March 18 and 19 among 2,143 people in 45 municipalities in different regions of the country and has a margin of error of 2.1 percent.