Sunday’s first-round presidential election in Colombia saw a populist leftist outsider former Bogota Mayor Gustavo Petro take a 40 point plurality, setting up a June runoff against former Bucaramanga Mayor Rodolfo Hernandez, who grabbed 28 percent of the vote, AFP reports. Third place Conservative candidate Federico Gutierrez, locked out by Hernandez’s late surge, asked his fans to consolidate support around the inscrutable populist, calling Petro a “a danger for democracy.”
“We do not want to lose the country and we will not put at risk the future of Colombia, of our families, our children,” said Gutierrez, adding he himself would vote for Hernandez in the runoff. Petro, a former Commie guerrilla, would be the first ever left wing president of Colombia, a country long ruled by reactionary Conservative elites. Hernandez is harder to pin down. Though he’s been compared to Trump for some of the shit he talks, Hernandez is on the record as supporting a host of progressive economic policies such as universal health care, basic income for all senior citizens, and student debt forgiveness, so either way MAGA Colombians are in for a rough four years.