When John Claro, an opposition councillor in the Colombian city of Bucaramanga, had a disagreement with the local mayor over a colleague’s misconduct, he was left with a red face and a ringing in his ear.
In a video of the incident, the mayor can be seen quickly losing his temper, rising to his feet and unleashing a stream of profanities. Then, he steps forward, and slaps Claro hard in the face.
That mayor was Rodolfo Hernández, and on Sunday he could be elected president of Colombia.
“It seems to me that he is not mentally well,” Claro told the Guardian. “I consider him to be a sociopath.”
Hernández, a 77-year-old businessman, likes to offend. He routinely releases foul-mouthed diatribes on social media, has admitted to not knowing much of Colombia, and once described Adolf Hitler as “a great German thinker”.
He has claimed that “the ideal would be for women to dedicate themselves to raising their children,” and called Venezuelan women “factories of poor children”.
He was initially written off as an oddball outsider, but last month shocked the country by making it through to Sunday’s run-off election, where he will face Gustavo Petro, a former urban guerrilla, and what has been portrayed as a battle of outsiders.
Hernández shares traits with the region’s growing gallery of personalist populists: like El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, he has used social media (in his case, TikTok) to reach undecided voters; like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro he revels in crass political incorrectness; like Donald Trump, he has a history in business, a dubious comb-over and a platform that is strong on emotion but lacking in detail.
“You can compare Hernández to Louis XIV, the French king who said ‘the state is me’,” said Claro, who is supporting Petro’s campaign. “He says what people want to hear, he is erratic, he is a demagogue, he is tongue-in-cheek, he is rude, he is a mythomaniac.”
Should Petro win, he would become the first leftist president in a country where for most of the last century, political power has involved power-sharing pacts between the right and the centre-right.
But Petro, a former mayor of Bogotá, has also been accused of highhandedness, and his personal history alienates many in a conservative country where the left has long been tarred by association with the many guerrilla groups that have battled state forces and their paramilitary allies for decades.
While Petro was the frontrunner for most the campaign – and took 40% in the first round – many of his opponents are now expected to line up behind Hernández, giving the septuagenarian self-declared “king of TikTok” a strong chance of winning. Recent polling has found the two virtually tied.
Hernández was practically unknown when he won 28% of the vote, after a campaign on social media that was heavy on bashing “elites” but light on policies.
One of Hernández’s proposals on the campaign trail was to take any Colombian that had not been to either of its two coastlines to see the sea. He posted videos in which he posed shirtless with models brandishing a Catholic cross, or sprinkled salt over steak in the style of the internet sensation Salt Bae.
He has flip-flopped on a host of issues, walked out of interviews when they go where he doesn’t like, and promised an austere and protectionist state. He decamped to Miami at the height of the campaign, claiming he could be killed if he stayed in Colombia. And he is under investigation for corruption while campaigning on an anti-corruption platform.
But more than any particular policy, what may win the support of the Colombian establishment is the fact that he is not Petro.
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