In a country that’s had very little choice at the voting booth come presidential election time, a country whose latest president has been in power almost a decade and has massive popular and political support, it’s fitting that an open,  democratic election is going to take place in the coming months as a direct result of the sitting president’s power grab. Uribe’s attempt at running for an unprecedented third term, and all of the drama that arose from the situation, has left the country in its current situation: an upcoming presidential election with half a dozen candidates vying for votes and notoriety, whose alliances might be what makes or breaks them in both the first and second rounds, since clearly no one’s about to win 51% of the vote like Uribe did twice in the past eight years.

The direction of the country in the next four years will be determined in a flash. A longer election campaign with consolidated political party machines would have been a different story. Had Uribe tried to translate his popularity into a leading role for his political party, Partido de la U, they would have surely remained in power. Instead, by trying to remain in power personally, he alienated some of his natural successors, and as a result there isn’t a clear Uribe-approved presidential candidate, with Juan Manuel Santos being the closest after notorious Uribe lapdog Andrés Felipe Arias failed to obtain the Conservative Party nomination.

Santos, Uribe’s former Minister of Defense, is the only candidate in the running that can take credit for the current government’s actions. For a vast number of people, this is unquestionably positive: he’s tough on the guerrillas, he’s associated with some popular actions taken by the military, and he’s been on every television screen for the past four years. For many others, it’s unquestionably negative: the military escapades in Ecuador created international tensions and led to that country’s attempt to capture him via Interpol. Perhaps more gravely, at least inside the country, the military infamously killed hundreds, maybe thousands of civilians from poor neighborhoods, dressed them up as guerrillas, and received monetary compensation for the kills, part of a program that gave rewards to the military based on body count. It remains to be seen how much colombians actually care about it; these “social cleansing” programs, when executed by paramilitary groups, are not always seen negatively.

Visible as he may be, Santos is not a charismatic man. I never really thought Uribe had much charisma either, but he had an image that a lot of people identified with, as the rural leader who liked the fields and was intellectually modest. Which isn’t to say that Uribe was not a well-educated, wealthy man, but the perception is that he’s not part of the political class that colombians have been hating on for quite a while. Santos, on the other hand, is very much a part of them. He’s one of those stuck-up bogotanos from the political world there, who’s changed his politics and hopped in with whoever’s presently popular so many times it’s stunning, even for a country where political convenience is the norm. Santos can wear a hat on commercials all he wants, but it will never be credible the way it was with Uribe. Nothing about the man really communicates anything positive. Shallow as it may be, I’ll say he looks downright creepy.

The rest of the candidates have a history in politics too, many of them having made runs for president before. The number of candidates, the state of the political parties (the Liberal Party in particular at a very weak point), and the redundancy (many of these candidates share the same voting bases) has made most of them weak throughout the admittedly short campaign.

Lately, though, things have been taking a strange turn, one that’s actually exciting and would lead one to think that the country has a reasonable shot at changing course over the next few months. Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá, eccentric academic who’s widely respected but who’s never managed to make a dent in his various presidential campaigns, is gaining strenght at the polls. The latest results showed him taking 24% of the vote, to Santos’ 29%, taking over the number two spot from Noemí Sanin (another old politician who’s ran a few times). Mockus is about as different from Santos as you could realistically conceive a candidate to be. The clearest thing about Mockus is that he’s honest. His administrations in Bogotá were remarkably honest, he did his best to steer clear from traditional political tit-for-tat, managed the city’s budget well, and engaged citizens by making them appreciate and respect their city more. His stunts were famous: dressing up as SuperCitizen, having mimes harass errant drivers, sponsoring ladies’ nights out, and more.¹. He’s never been able to present himself as presidential, though. In fact, the last few mayors of Bogotá, though popular there, have a style to them (informal, intellectual, sophisticated yet down-to-earth) that’s hard to reconcile with the more traditional President.

The recent boost in Mockus’ polling numbers likely corresponds to his union with another former mayor, Sergio Fajardo. For a little while people saw Fajardo as a possible Colombian Obama, a guy who the youth could rally around, whose message might resonate as he was an ‘outsider’ rather than a well-known political figure. His administration as mayor of Medellín was widely respected, and he embarked on a slow but steady campaign around the country, in order to put himself out there and gain some notoriety outside of Medellín. Beyond that, though, he ran into problems. He was too cryptic in his positions, seemingly never coming down strongly for anything (much like Obama, funnily enough). He made an ill-fated attempt at translating his own popularity to a political movement, but lack of identification meant that people weren’t really sure who the Fajardo-approved candidates for Congress were, and they didn’t have much success. His polling numbers were low, too, and it didn’t really seem like people knew who he was. His presidential campaign was as good as dead.

Since it was clear that he wasn’t going to get anywhere, his supporters started indicating that he should ally himself with Mockus², which he’s done. This week they announced their union. Mockus will run for the presidency, and Fajardo will be his vice-president.

Even though Fajardo himself wasn’t polling well, and Mockus’ numbers were not amazing, the union has given new life to the campaign. While vice-presidential choices usually mean almost nothing in Colombia, in this case the union gives them an air of cohesion; instead of seeming like the usual Mockus run, now they appear as a genuine political project, which most of the other candidates can’t say.

There’s no indication that a Mockus presidency would be an unqualified success. One could argue that the country’s massive corruption would overwhelm him. It’s one thing to solve a city’s problems, and another to deal with an entire country where there’s all sorts of different attitudes. It’s one thing to deal with a few strong local institutions and another thing to deal with massively corrupt national ones. It’s one thing to get bogotanos to like their city and respect it, and another to get costeños to do the same. But I don’t really care though. I’d rather he try and fail than to have some dubious power-grabber or perennial bootlicker there.

With Mockus as 2nd in the polls, the elections actually have some meaning, because there might actually be repercussions beyond ‘level in which we’re fucked’. When the race was between Juan Manuel Santos and Noemí Sanin, it was reasonable to assume that a vast number of colombians, those who support the more center-left candidates, wouldn’t have cared  much for the runoff. But if it comes to a Mockus vs. Santos duel, it would be a fight between the more traditional political groups and the more independent members of society.

And there is Mockus’ main weakness: the country is still very old-fashioned politically; the same political families buy votes, the same party machines move voters under the promise of a few dollars per vote, and the idea of an opinion vote is a longshot for many. Mockus is the anti-politician in that sense; some focus was given to his plea that, if one were to vote for him, one should do so because of one’s conscience, not because of an order given by anyone else. Whoever remains from the old guard after the first vote (Santos, most likely) will have the support of many of the political machines, the big families, the networks. Mockus and Fajardo would need to mobilize a vast majority of the opinion voters, those who might be more apathetic as they have no material reward. Though the Green Party, of which Mockus is the candidate, isn’t usually strong, the results of its internal primaries, the ones that gave Mockus the nomination over Peñalosa and Garzón, were promising.

Can Mockus win over the truly ‘popular’ vote and take the presidency?

Well… maybe if I register to vote…