On Sunday, May 30 Colombians went to the polls and expressed their contempt for Kossacks, prominent academics the world over, and Facebook by favoring Juan Manuel Santos over Antanas Mockus and four other candidates in the first round of Colombia's presidential elections.
Past Colombian election diaries by me and by Flitedocnm.
What happened to Mockus and his Green power? Is Santos a done deal, or might we still get President Moonbeam? This and other questions answered, if by "answered" you're content with "semi-informed speculation," after the jump.
Short version of the pre-May 30 story (see either or both diaries above for more): Alvaro Uribe, security-obsessed president of Colombia for eight years, was thwarted in his desire to run for a third term by the courts. After a brief scrum, Juan Manuel Santos emerged as his designated successor, although by law a sitting president isn't allowed to say that kind of thing. Everything was looking great for Santos until early April, when the former mayor of Bogota Antanas Mockus emerged as a credible contender, packing in crowds in the most unlikely places (like Barranquilla, known for old-fashioned political clientelism, and Sincelejo and Monteria, known for Rightist paramilitary control of political life) and even topping Santos in credible national polls. By early May Santos was reshuffling his campaign staff--never a good sign--and Mockus was talking about winning in the first round and saving the country enough money to build some nice schools. Meanwhile, four other perfectly serviceable candidates (or three, if you share my belief that Noemi Sanin is a mannequin) bemoaned their lousy fate and tried to keep enough support (4%) that they wouldn't have to return their public campaign financing.
The last polls, before the polling went quiet eight days before the election (a great law, unfortunately unconstitutional in our country), showed Santos and Mockus in the mid-30s and I thought I was being appropriately cynical about Mockus's urban-skewed appeal and the rural/small town "silent majority" for Uribe/Santos when I commented a few days ago in Flitedocnm's diary that my best guess was Santos 38% and Mockus 30%. I was only halfway there, as it turns out: Santos ended up with a remarkable 46.6% of the vote, while Mockus was way down at 21.5%...so while Mockus could put on a brave face yesterday and say the goal was to get to a runoff, the results are about as good for Santos and bad for Mockus as could be imagined. The whopper is that Santos, not Mockus, ended up expanding the electorate: he got 6,760,000 votes, a huge number in a country of 40,000,000 people and a history of high abstention.
Santos is probably better off not getting to 50% because that would have raised doubts about the integrity of the voting, and because he'll now have the opportunity to pound Mockus 60-40 or even worse in a second round, and use that figure as his mandate to govern rather than being Mr. 51%. And since he's so close to his goal, he will likely get a few weeks (the runoff is June 20) without Uribe shooting off his mouth in frustration, which will let Santos make his own mark...to the extent that he wants to, which isn't clear since his sycophancy about Uribe makes Dmitri Medvedev look like Oedipus.
Of course, the notion of a second round is premised on the idea that if someone doesn't get to 50% they might not get there in a runoff, so we might as well look at the possibilities of Santos not winning on June 20. In my pre-election guess I thought a Santos margin of 8% (38 to 30) would preserve an even-money shot for Mockus in the second round, given how the supporters of other candidates could be expected to break (with or without the guidance of their candidates). But Santos is so close to 50% that it almost doesn't matter: if Mockus gets every single Rafael Pardo vote (Liberal, a huge though amply foretold disappointment at 4%) and every Gustavo Petro vote (leftist Polo Democratico, a modest and slightly surprising disappointment at 9%), he barely gets back to where polls thought he'd be in the first place. Meanwhile, Noemi Sanin's votes (Conservative, a measly and well-deserved 6% though if there were any justice she would have come in well behind the very admirable Pardo) all go to Santos, and German Vargas Lleras (Cambio Radical, uribismo without the histrionics and rationalizations, thus without Uribe) with his 10% isn't even necessary.
It's possible, remotely, that Mockus underperformed because many of his voters stayed home--they knew he'd get to the second round and the numbers didn't matter. But it's almost impossible to imagine that he can find, oh, three million such people, especially since turnout in Bogota (the easiest place to find Mockus voters and the Mockus demographic) was pretty high.
So what went right for Santos, wrong for Mockus, and very wrong for the pollsters? Credit where credit is due: Santos had one message--that he was Uribe--and he never wavered. It's an easy-sounding strategy but it must be hard to do if you're a politician and therefore full of yourself rather than of someone else. It was probably easier for Santos because he's never run for anything before--he's tailor made to be someone's clone. And if your biggest asset is an image of inevitability, you have to hold on to that at all costs and Santos did, albeit with a bit of tactical wavering a month ago when Mockus was at his peak.
Some might argue that Uribe's repeated and arguably illegal outbursts in the weeks leading up to the election, warning voters not to throw away the achievements of the last eight years, were a significant factor. (There's a law, as noted above, forbidding executive-branch employees including presidents/mayors/governors from participating in politics. It's an archaic law but it's still got some teeth and one governor was removed from office for violating it.) My own view is that Uribe's participation was probably meaningless in the end: anyone who didn't know by May that Uribe wanted a Santos victory had to be living in a cave and not a Colombian cave. Besides, hearing Uribe on the radio should have been an effective GOTV tool for at least three and possibly four anti-Santos candidacies.
Mockus's lousy result is the bigger mystery, especially given that no recent poll had him under 30%. The polling firms, eager to fend off further restrictions on their pre-election activities (the lower tier of candidates were already furious at how polling relegated them to that status, and you can imagine what Santos thinks of polling now), insist that there was a genuine last-minute shift during the final eight days from Mockus to Santos. That's certainly possible, since there's no overstating how exotic a figure Mockus is in the Colombian political landscape: he had a lot of the same issues "going national" that Jerry Brown did in 1980. And Colombians have much better reasons for a law-and-order bias than Americans did, or do. But the polls were probably always flawed, just like Santos's campaign said they were: they undercounted rural people and the urban poor, who against every progressive fantasy have been the electoral basis of Uribe's success.
Given that Mockus is completely his own person (ironically, for someone who celebrates working as a team with his VP pick and with his fellow former Bogota mayors) it seems misguided to consider his strategic errors, since at the time they almost certainly weren't strategy: they were what he wanted to do or say, and nothing was going to shake him from that. With that proviso, Mockus probably would have been better off going after Santos and Uribe more pointedly, with examples rather than in general terms; and he had some bizarre need to pick on Petro and the Polo Democratico because their program understands guerrilla violence as a function of socioeconomic exclusion. Besides being bad politics--those are votes he would certainly need in a second round and it's not clear he will get them now (they'll just stay home)--his critique only pointed out how exotic his own analysis of violence is. Santos says guerrillas are just another modality of organized crime fueled by drug trafficking, and the Left says they exist because of deep-rooted inequalities, but Mockus sees them as the maximum expression of Colombians' rejection of law and social norms, which he proposes to address. Love him or hate him, Mockus is the only candidate who draws a connection between your jaywalking or tax evasion and the FARC's attacking small towns with propane cylinders.
From Mockus's speech to supporters after the results came in, it looks like he intends to sharpen the attacks on Santos but he's got a huge mountain to climb and there's a real risk that if he starts attacking like a typical politician he'll lose the "antipolitics" voters who liked him precisely because he campaigned with allegories and high-concept propositions rather than with attacks or even promises.
Assuming he can't square that circle and come up with 4-5 million additional votes while he's at it (3.6 million to get to where Santos is already, plus some more to overcome new Santos voters), we can look forward to four and possibly eight years of neo-Uribe. So you don't go away mad, assuming you're in the anti-Uribe majority of Daily Kos readers (as evidenced by comments whenever Uribe's name comes up), I'll tell you three ways in which Santos is preferable to a literal re-election of Uribe. (1) He's not as markedly anti-intellectual as Uribe, who liked visiting universities to argue with students and faculty (and he usually won those arguments, by the way) but was otherwise uninterested in the life of the mind, and who proudly declared that he hadn't watched TV in years; (2) he's a more even-keel personality than Uribe and doesn't seem to have Uribe's Bush-like aversion to ever admitting error; and (3) for crazy reasons known only to him, Santos has a leftist former union leader, albeit neutered by years as governor and Cabinet minister, as his running mate. That's the best deal I can offer you, I'm afraid. Oh, that and the fact that Colombia's having the most open, clean, and peaceful election season in decades and if Santos wins it's because more Colombians wanted him than the other guy. Which is what it's supposed to be about.