Colombia's Front-Runner Is No Populist

On the morning of August 9, 1994, Senator Manuel Cepeda Vargas was shot dead in his car on his way to the Colombian Congress. He was one of the last surviving leaders of the Unión Patriótica, the left-wing party born of a peace process and then systematically destroyed. Thousands of its members were killed, disappeared, or driven into exile while the state looked on, at times taking part.

Thirty-two years later, his son, Senator Iván Cepeda, stands in a presidential runoff against Abelardo de la Espriella, a celebrity lawyer tied to the murky worlds of drug trafficking and paramilitarism. De la Espriella has promised to "disembowel the left," and now, on the back of a fireworks spectacle of a campaign, he leads the polls for the second round. On a single ballot, Colombia has staged a confrontation between the survivor of a political extermination and a political descendant of the forces that carried it out.

Commentators have reached, almost in unison, for one word to explain de la Espriella's meteoric rise: populism.

His ascent has indeed been astonishing. In a matter of months, he has gone from occasional television provocateur to presidential front-runner, carried by a persona assembled, piece by piece, from the international hard right. He has borrowed Nayib Bukele's groomed strongman aesthetic, Javier Milei's leonine bravado (he calls himself El Tigre), and the Trumpian rhetoric of transgressive obscenity. He vows to jail and annihilate his opponents; he pressures a young female journalist, live on air, to comment on his "package." Distilling aporophobia and misogyny into spectacle, the most expensive campaign in the country's history has also proved the most effective.

The question is why, and the answer is not the one the commentariat has settled on.

Populism has become the reflex description for every disruptive political figure, on the right and the left alike, and de la Espriella is no exception. Pundits the world over point to his Manichaean rhetoric, his transgressive style, his strongman charisma, to the way he splits the world into a pure us and an evil them and calls, without euphemism, for the opposition to be butchered.

Yet none of this is peculiar to populism. The us-them frontier animates almost every passionate attachment, from religion to football; charisma and anti-institutional posturing belong to many political traditions; and politicians never called populist spread disinformation no less eagerly than those who are. Two decades of research have shown the futility of defining populism by content. So where does that leave the concept?

If it holds at all, it holds as a matter of form. "Populism" names a way of building a political subject. It appeals to "the people" as the underdog and draws a line that sets an excluded majority, the 99 percent, against an entrenched establishment, the 1 percent. Populism constructs a vertical antagonism: it stitches scattered grievances into a common people and turns that people against those above. And yet, for all its combative anti-elitism, "the people" it builds can always widen to take in yesterday's adversary.

De la Espriella does nothing of the sort. He does not assemble a majority out of the excluded and the oppressed; he is himself a creature of the establishment, a lawyer to the powerful and the corrupt, bankrolling his own campaign, the most lavish Colombia has ever seen. His antagonism does not run vertically, from below against the top, but horizontally, against the neighbor: the poor, the queer, the peasant, the leftist, recast as internal enemies to be removed. Where the great inclusionary populisms of Latin American history — that of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán among them — kept "the people" wide enough to take in the excluded, his operation runs in reverse. It narrows the demos, marking parts of it for elimination.

There is a reason the misnomer sticks, and it flatters him. The far right is usually content to be called populist because the word absolves it of harsher names and makes it sound almost congenial; even neo-Nazis have angled for this gentler label. To call de la Espriella a populist is to do his work for him: to translate a politics of elimination into the milder grammar of antiestablishment complaint.

To call de la Espriella a fascist is not to evaluate his remarks. It is to name the kind of attachment he organizes, and to ask what makes that attachment possible in Colombia now. In the tradition that runs from the Frankfurt School's Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to the Brazilian philosopher Vladimir Safatle, fascism is best understood not as a doctrine but as an affective regime: a way of binding fear, authority, and enjoyment into a structure that becomes fashionable and hospitable.

Its founding gesture is to turn difference from a condition of shared life into a threat to be contained and, in the end, eliminated. The leftist or the queer, in de la Espriella's speech, stop being members of a common world and become containers for anxieties whose real sources lie elsewhere: in loneliness, in the hunger for recognition, in a future that promises less to almost everyone. The contradiction is real; the trick is to lift it off the structure that produces it and pin it to a face, often already repressed, that can be further punished. Jean-Paul Sartre's overused line still cuts: If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.

What makes the attachment hold is that it is not, at bottom, irrational. It comforts us to picture the fascist sympathizer as duped, short on facts or on conscience. Safatle's more disturbing proposition is that the attachment rests on a wager that is, in its own terms, lucid: there is no longer enough society to go around, no longer room for everyone, so someone will have to be cast out for someone else to stay, and better that the one who stays be me!

Grant the premise, and cruelty becomes prudence. The governing affect, beyond mere hatred, is indifference — the trained inability to feel that another's fate has anything to do with one's own.

Fascism asks its adherents to cut, one strand at a time, the solidarities that would let them read another's suffering as a shared wound, and it offers in return the security of a place. Here lies its deepest cunning. As Étienne de la Boétie saw over four centuries ago, in his essay on voluntary servitude, tyranny is held together not from above but from below: each man reconciled to his own subjection by the promise of someone he, in turn, may subjugate. Fascism summons the second-to-last to strike down the last.

This is why de la Espriella does not need to persuade. He does not so much make an argument as grant permission. He names the object of a vague dread and licenses its removal, until what was once unsayable comes to feel like common sense. He no longer treats his rivals as adversaries to be bested in debate but as enemies to be destroyed, and in doing so he collapses the very thing on which democracy depends: a shared space in which conflict can be waged without anyone being marked for elimination.

While many of the extravagant features of de la Espriella's campaign are clearly foreign, the sentiment it channels is homegrown. It rises from a long history of violence that Álvaro Uribe Vélez, the hard-line president who governed Colombia from 2002 to 2010, shrewdly honed over his two terms in office. Uribismo, the movement he built, was never merely a party or a program. It was a structure of feeling, a counterinsurgent common sense in which difference itself became suspect, and inequality was sold as the price of order. Students, trade unionists, peasant organizers, and human rights defenders learned to appear not as participants in democratic life but as fronts for an internal enemy, their exposure to violence made first thinkable, then ordinary.

Uribe himself has run his course. His movement is hollowed out, his rallies thinner, his authority no longer filling the room as it once did. But a structure of feeling does not retire. What Uribismo produced has outlived Uribe and overflowed Uribismo, detaching from its author into a free-floating reserve of fear and resentment available to anyone fluent enough to tap into it. That reserve is the affective energy de la Espriella has so efficiently drawn from.

What released it into open circulation was, of all things, an attempt at democratic rechanneling. First, the 2016 peace accords between Juan Manuel Santos's government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) dissolved the internal enemy around which Uribismo had been built. Second, the government of Gustavo Petro, the first progressive administration in Colombia's history, presided over a real fall in poverty and inequality and, with it, the entry into public life of subjects long shut out: the poor, the racialized, the displaced, the sexually dissident — suddenly visible as bearers of legitimate claims.

For many this was justice long overdue. For others it must have felt like dispossession, the loss of a hierarchy they had mistaken for the natural order. Inclusion, experienced from above as encroachment, turns dormant anxiety into active reaction. De la Espriella's punitive spectacle, with its promise of force, of mega-prisons, of a left finally gutted, is the vehicle through which that reaction is gathered up, given a name, and discharged.

Importantly, however, these transformations also unfolded alongside mounting frustrations with the Petro administration. The promise of "Total Peace" from the progressive government raised expectations that Colombia might finally move beyond decades of armed conflict, but the persistence of violence in several regions, the fragmentation of armed groups, and the expansion of criminal economies have left many Colombians with the sense that the state is losing control. De la Espriella's promises of force and restored authority are indeed articulated around real issues.

Yet his capacity to mobilize such a violent affective force against the Left pulls from a cumulative historical reservoir. The falsos positivos of the Uribe years, when the army murdered civilians and dressed them as guerrillas to inflate its body count, proved that even the state's own citizens could be turned into enemy dead as a matter of administrative routine: the transitional justice tribunal counts more than six thousand such killings, revised this year to nearly eight thousand, more than Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship killed in Chile.

But the horror reaches back further. The extermination of the Unión Patriótica, thousands of its militants killed across the late 1980s and 1990s, Manuel Cepeda Vargas among them, was among the cruelest chapters of a long and violent history, proof that a whole political community could be erased without the order it threatened so much as trembling. What such episodes leave behind is the quiet conviction that some lives are disposable, and that disposing of them is less a scandal than a service to be rewarded.

A de la Espriella victory would be a leap into a void from which there may be no easy return. The progressive forces gathered behind Iván Cepeda have limited time, between now and Sunday, to regain momentum and reignite a campaign that effectively mobilizes sentiments of popular solidarity beyond its electoral coalition. But the reactionary anxieties against equality and insecurity will outlast the election. They will have to be engaged, not merely denounced, and absorbed into a different affective form, a labor of long breath.

If the past decade has taught us anything, it is that neither moral condemnation nor reasoned argument, on their own, are enough to stop fascism.