Bogota, Colombia – If there’s such a thing as a safe bet in politics, it’s that President Alvaro Uribe will win Colombia’s presidential election Sunday.
Leading his closest rival by 30 points in the latest polls, the U.S. ally appeared headed toward a landslide win that would eliminate the need for a runoff.
The reasons are clear: security and the economy. Colombians are safer and the country feels wealthier than it did four years ago when Uribe, a law-and-order president, was first elected.
Even as leftist governments sprout across South America, the conservative 53-year-old has turned Colombia’s election into an expected vote of confidence.
His boosting of the armed forces has helped slash Colombia’s notorious kidnapping and homicide rates to a two-decade low. This has been gratefully noted in a country where it seems every family has been touched by violence.
“People now know they can travel around the country in safety, something that was impossible four years ago,” said Carlos Trujillo, a sales manager who intends to vote for Uribe.
A final poll published in the national newspaper, El Tiempo, a week before the election put support for Uribe at 54.7 percent.
Carlos Gaviria of the leftist Alternative Democratic Pole party trailed a distant second, with 24 percent.
The survey of 1,200 people was carried out by the polling firm Datexco Co. and had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
The May 28 election winner must have more than 50 percent of the ballot to avoid a two-way runoff. No opinion polling is allowed during the final week before the election.
The campaign of the 69-year-old senator and former head of Colombia’s esteemed Constitutional Court – who once was Uribe’s law professor – has gained lately, mostly from the collapse of the once-mighty Liberal party, whose candidate was polling just 10 percent.
Security analysts who initially predicted a massive offensive by leftist rebels as a means of defying Uribe’s security policies have called this the most peaceful election campaign in a decade.
Colombians also have fatter wallets, as the economy grew more than 5 percent last year. Multinational companies such as Philip Morris International and Exxon Mobil Corp., which once shunned this war-ravaged economy, are sniffing for investment opportunities.
Unemployment has fallen by a third since Uribe took office, and inflation in this $135 billion economy was at its lowest rate last year in a half-century.
But Uribe remains a polarizing figure, frequently criticized as authoritarian and intolerant of criticism. Opponents accuse him of weakening Colombia’s institutions and concentrating power in the presidency.
“He thinks he’s always right, so everything he does is the right thing, the methods can never be wrong. … That’s dangerous,” said Maria Juliana Martinez, 26, a university professor who says she’s voting for Gaviria partly as a protest against Uribe.
Despite coming from a wealthy landowning family and serving for decades in public office, Uribe has presented himself to Colombians as an outsider, demanding answers from the government on behalf of the common man.
Rivals have sought to play up their plans for social spending, tapping a common criticism that Uribe has focused too much on security issues in a country rife with poverty.
Opposition candidates also have tried to capitalize on scandals afflicting the administration, ranging from accusations of voter fraud in the previous election to allegations that a close Uribe ally ran the secret police at the behest of drug-trafficking far-right paramilitaries, an accusation Uribe denies.
Cartoonists have presented the bespectacled Uribe with a tarnished halo and a black eye, mocking the image of ethical purity on which he campaigned.
But the allegations seem to have had little effect. More than 80 percent of Colombians said they would not affect their vote.
“I think this is the press manipulating things here, bringing out these stories to hurt the president before the elections,” said Max-Steven Grossman, an artist planning to vote for Uribe.
“These scandals are really far from my day-to-day life.”
