An unlikely populist

While the Lib Dems and the Conservatives build day-by-day consensus to see if they can indeed work together on the business of Britain's government, I'm going to focus for a bit on three other elections that are coming between late May and mid June. I'm going to spend the next few days blogging about the Colombian presidential election on May 30, the Dutch general election on June 9, and the Belgian general election set for June 13. Of course, you can count on me updating about the tenuous situation in Great Britain in the meantime.

I teach at a bilingual primary school here in Colombia, so I've had a lot of personal insight on the coming election here.

Colombia's presidential election has gone from a dull coronation procession to a dynamic fight to the finish. Everyone, me included, felt certain that Alvaro Uribe, the two-term small-c conservative who made Colombia safe again by chasing the guerilla movements far into the forests and away from influence in the cities, was on his way to securing a constitutional change allowing him to run for a third term, much as he had done four years ago when he successfully changed the constitution so that he could run for a second term. On February 26, 2010, the Supreme Court of Colombia, in a brave and possibly dangerous decision, struck down the attempt at a third term as unconstitutional. Uribe would not be the next president. The shock hadn't worn off yet when Uribe's former defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, declared his intention of being Colombia's next president. This is a man who was responsible for sending a strike force over Colombia's border with Ecuador in 2008 to ambush a FARC camp there. He was successful in "Operation Checkmate" but both Ecuador's president and regional loudmouth Hugo Chavez got pretty pissed off. Santos is the man who formed a new political party called the Party of the U to support the president's policies, the "U" supposedly standing for "Unity" but which everyone assumes means "Uribe." Santos is the man who introduced the action of "false positives," which involves a military raid of a farm or peasant village and killing campesinos who they promise were actually communist narcotrafficking guerillas. The centerpiece of Santos' campaign is "Advancement through Security." It gives me the willies.

Enter the Green Party of Colombia. Three former mayors of Bogota, Penalosa, Garzon, and Mockus, formed Partido Verde late last year as a more centrist alternative to the many right wing parties (Party of the U, the Conservative Party, and Radical Change) as well as the corrupt center-left Liberal Party and the largely forgotten leftist Democratic Pole. They called themselves post-uribists. Nobody took them seriously.

On the same day as the congressional elections here that fell on March 14, the Green Party held its presidential primary. Antanas Mockus won it. It wasn't the first time that Mockus had run for president. In 2006 he ran as an independent and got no more than two percent in the first round of voting. Everybody knew Mockus was an eccentric figure. Mockus is a second generation Lithuanian who speaks Spanish and Lithuanian natively and French and English as second languages. He studied in the United States and France. He was a math professor. He had been fired from his post as head of the National University back in 1993 due to an incident in which he mooned a disrespectful group of students in the university theatre when no one and nothing could get them to stop heckling and shouting. He was Bogota's mayor in the nineties and early two-thousands and gained a rapt audience when he paraded about in red and gold tights as Supercitizen, ripping down posters and painting over graffiti in a city beautifying attempt. He hired mimes to humiliate Bogota's notoriously bad drivers who weren't concerned about police presence or fines when it came to driving. He appeared in a commercial taking a shower to promote water conservation. And he's turned Colombia's electorate, jaded by decades of corruption and empty promises, into a group of interested hopefuls again.

People started noticing Mockus when Sergio Fajardo, a popular Medellin mayor and former mathematics professor as well, chose to end his own populist campaign for president to join Mockus as his running mate. Since that point, opinion polling has seen support for Mockus rise every single week following April 5, and within a couple weeks he had surpassed Santos for first round voting. Datexco's May 7 poll shows him at 37.7% compared to 25.2% for Santos. And for the runoff round, to be held, if necessary, on June 20, the poll has Mockus on 52% compared to 30.5% for Santos. Mockus appears to have won this election.

But, if I've learned anything from my predictions concerning the UK election, it's not to overestimate support by simply referencing a poll. Colombia is one of Latin America's longest-lived democracies, but the democracy is still fragile. Buying votes is of coures illegal, but when Mockus campaigns on educating the populace and creating a new culture of legality, it's because he knows that the rule of law in this country is weak. And Santos is already playing ugly with a huge smear campaign attempting to prove the naivite of the "atheist" "ideologue" that Mockus is.

Hopefully, the Lithuanian-Colombian's support is so overwhelming that even with the inclusion of all the illegal votes, Mockus will still come out on top. He would be the world's first Green Party head of state. I feel as though the positive development of this country depends on a succession of selfless politicians who will work tirelessly to improve Colombia's rule of law and the societal wisdom of the common person. And I think Mockus is the man who can start this country on the path to positive growth.

As an American, however, I'm not allowed to vote. But I am allowed to buy his t-shirt!