It is a country divided in two, with an extreme left fueling the division at all times in social networks and a right that strikes back in the virtual universe with a similar pugnacity. But the aggressiveness in this electoral campaign has overcome all barriers and on Gustavo Petro’s sides they have not limited themselves to lashing out at his main rival, Fico Gutiérrez, a moderate independent who is accused of being Álvaro Uribe’s underdog. His darts have also reached the centrist candidate, Sergio Fajardo, doctor of Mathematics, former mayor of Medellin and former governor of Antioquia, whom they dismissively call “lukewarm” and who never goes up to the ring to distribute or defend himself from left-handers.
“Fajardo hates that one does not believe that he is a being of light and rather reminds him that he is a tremendous son of a bitch! Go eat a jar of shit, bastard!”, trilled this weekend Levy Rincón, one one of the most popular tweeters who supports Gustavo Petro. And all because the candidate of the Coalition of Hope unraveled the inconsistencies of the economic promises of the candidate of the Historical Pact.
In the last presidential debate, held on Friday of this week, Sergio Fajardo demonstrated, with figures prepared by his prestigious economic team, that if Petro fulfilled what it says, it would need to double the fiscal reform it plans and even with it it could not finance its promises. campaign.
“The presidential elections in my country are the final chapter in a battle for the collective imagination in Latin America that, unfortunately for all of us, the radical left has managed to win,” Francisco Santos, who was Álvaro Uribe’s vice president, tells this newspaper. , ambassador to Washington with the current government of Iván Duque and current political analyst. “The fact that Pedro Castillo and, in Chile, Gabriel Boric prevailed in Peru, to name just two, is due to a strategy of many years, with the social networks as amplifiers. They have managed to impose a destructive narrative for democracy and authority, as well as for business and press freedom. They say that all officials are corrupt except them; that the media only obeys commercial and fascist interests, and that health and education are only for the rich, despite the enormous progress in recent decades.
And the fact is that the degree of confrontation has made the atmosphere unbreathable and has sown a climate of distrust towards the electoral authorities like never before. A blanket of doubt covers the National Registry, responsible for organizing the elections, since the Historical Pact denounced fraud in the legislative elections last March and said entity was forced to review the data. In the end, and without offering explanations that would satisfy all the parties, he ended up awarding more than half a million votes to Petro’s movement to the detriment of other political forces.
“The polarization that we are experiencing in Colombia will continue regardless of who wins the lessons. Whoever loses is going to shout fraud because what is happening is a crisis, not only in terms of democracy, but also in terms of institutions, and that worries me a lot,” analyzes for this newspaper Katherine Miranda, deputy of the Green Party and one of the most voted in the country, who left Sergio Fajardo to join Gustavo Petro’s team as head of debate, a key position in the campaigns.
“The next few weeks are going to be worse, there is no time to review anything, only to modify the ballot with the two that remain and send all the material to the regions, which creates a climate of uncertainty regarding the results. Additionally, there are a serious problem. The pre-count is what is going to count because the votes cannot be counted again, but we did not have the opportunity to review their software. And we do not even know for sure if an audit was contracted. It does not generate confidence in none”.
He also finds it disturbing that over the weekend, without time to look for new names, the National Registry, under the direction of the questioned Alexander Vega, eliminated eight thousand electoral witnesses from the Historical Pact who were already accredited in the elections for Congress and Senate in March. . “We are going to vote blindfolded. We will never be able to verify whether or not there was fraud and we cannot be irresponsible and point the finger at anyone, because where is the institutionality? It is time to accept the results as it is,” adds Miranda.
“Democracy is being violated by the Registrar’s Office,” he added in another of his writings on Twitter,” Armando Benedetti, a former Santista senator and now a key player in Petro’s campaign, assured in a trill.
“There are eight electoral observation missions and 27 electoral organizations,” on top of the entire process, answered Alexander Vega, who has had to work hard to clear up the questions about his entity.
At the bottom of all the controversy lies the polarization that has made it impossible to seal government and opposition agreements on any important issue for the nation. Petro calls the Duque Government a murderer and some of his closest collaborators launch the lie that Fico Gutiérrez has been a file of the shadowy Office of Envigado, belonging to the mafia, without any proof. On the opposite bank, they remind the candidate of the extreme left of his guerrilla past. “Petro may have handed over his weapons, but he never demobilized his spirit. He maintains that bandit soul and will have it until the end,” Gutiérrez said on one occasion, in response to the type of attacks he receives.
Given the degree of confrontation, many analysts predicted that it would be the time for Colombia to set its sights on the center alternative, oblivious to polarization. However, Sergio Fajardo, who was the one who won the primaries of his group, never took off. After all, in a campaign dominated by social networks, at the end of the day it was better for Petro, who set the agenda with his incendiary diatribes, or the one who releases the most original phrases.
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