Colombia elections: Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández will head to a run-off

Instead, he will face off in a second round on June 19 with an outsider candidate who catapulted in the polls at the last minute: Rodolfo Hernández, a brash, 77-year-old engineer and wealthy businessman who pledges to root out corruption and has drawn comparisons to former U.S. president Donald Trump. Hernández, a former mayor of the midsize city of Bucaramanga, won about 28 percent of the votes.

Hernández claimed a four-point lead over Federico Gutiérrez, the center-right candidate and former Medellín mayor seen by many as a continuation of incumbent President Iván Duque. Until recently, Gutiérrez was widely expected to compete against Petro in a second round.

Now, in a country historically led by the political elite, Colombians will choose between two candidates who are far from it. One is a leftist former rebel long reviled by the establishment in a conservative country still reeling from armed conflict. The other is a wild card businessman who was once suspended as mayor for slapping a city councilman in the face. Gutiérrez announced Sunday night that he will support Hernández in the runoff. It could prove to be a tight race, analysts say, a contest between two very different visions of change for the country.

Speaking before a crowd of supporters Sunday night, Petro said the results proved that the “political project” of the Duque administration “has been defeated.”

“It is the end of an era,” Petro said, standing onstage beside his running mate, Francia Márquez, who could become Colombia’s first Black vice president. “From this moment on, we must define what kind of change we want.”

Hernández, speaking in a video address, said the results reflected a country “that doesn’t want to keep going for one more day with the same people, the same people who have led us to the painful situation we’re in today.”

It will be a kind of presidential election unheard of in Colombia. But it follows a pattern across a region ravaged by the economic assault during the pandemic: Voters are fed up with incumbent governments they feel have failed to meet the needs of the people. They are desperate for something different, and they are getting it.

In Peru, a surge in poverty helped propel Marxist rural schoolteacher and political neophyte Pedro Castillo to the presidency last year. In Chile, the free-market model of the region, voters this year chose 36-year-old former…