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Colombia remains in the hands of the undecided in an atypical electoral campaign

Bogotá, Jun 13 (EFE).- With the two presidential candidates out of sight, the atypical Colombian electoral campaign enters its final week with a focus on the undecided, who will be key to breaking the tie between the leftist Gustavo Petro and populist Rodolfo Hernández. Neither Petro nor Hernández made a public appearance on Monday, preferring to remain entrenched in their social networks as they have been for much of the campaign and as they plan to continue in the final week of the competition electoral. “6 days away from dismissing all these corrupt politicians who have been part of the government for years”, simply declared “the engineer” on his Twitter account, as Hernández, a construction businessman likes to be called. . billionaire. While former Bogotá mayor and first-round winner Petro, who today spent the day recording promotional content for the home stretch, according to his campaign team, shared a family photo with his wife, Verónica Alcocer, and two of his daughters and in which his vice-presidential candidate, Francia Márquez, is also present. It is in the “intimate” line in which the former mayor of Bogotá has decided to carry out this last phase of the campaign and, after having filled public squares throughout the country with tens of thousands of people before the May 29, he has now taken private acts with families and communities and on Sunday launched a “spot” campaign talking one-on-one with the mother who “worries every day about feeding her children” or the working woman : “You give yourself to your family but you live in fear” . UNDECIDED AND BLANK VOTE Virtually all polls agree to give a technical tie between Petro and Hernández in voting intention, with differences in some cases of 0.3%, and a trend that shows how the former mayor of Bucaramanga lost supporters, having risen like scum in the final weeks of the first round, and Petro managed to consolidate and even progress slightly. “What emerges from the daily monitoring of RCN, which it does with the firm GAD3 (one of the pollsters who published almost daily polls), is that the majority, not all, of those who thought of a given moment to vote for Rodolfo, they will vote blank or not vote”, summed up to Efe Andres Segura, consultant in public affairs, political communication and public opinion. Polls last week also showed, depending on the samples, between 2.4% and 13% blank votes and many of them did not contain undecided people, who will be decisive in the vote and whose vote is generally decided. this week and not be measured in polls, the publication of which is already prohibited. Petro “has risen very little”, believes Segura, a consistent element in his career in the polls, but who can play tricks on him on Sunday, since “his 2018 vote in the second round, he managed to consolidate it first in 2022 and He doesn’t have to grow anymore.” Thus, the “white vote is going to be fundamental”, according to the consultant, who pointed out that Petro “plays it to encourage the white vote” among voters who have already seen that they could leave the “rodolfoneta” due to the inappropriateness of the candidate and the lack of precision of his proposals, whose populist tone served him for the first round but we do not know if the attraction will hold in a second. OBJECTIVES IN OWN DOOR Precisely, Petro’s campaign expects certain comments such as sending women to the kitchen or outbursts with the press and the aggressive tone he adopts when contradicted to serve to increase this blank vote, especially among the more than 4 million voters. that the center brought together, in the figure of Sergio Fajardo, in the 2018 elections. This figure dropped considerably to less than 900,000 in the first round and Petro has already channeled a good part of those who went to vote for him, therefore in order to win and make sure that on his third attempt he’s the charm, he has to make sure that some of the 5.9 million people who voted for Hernández don’t make it to second place and that the 5 million votes are not added to him either of rights that went to Federico Gutiérrez on May 29. On the other hand, there is the leaking of videos last week by the press of meetings of members of the left-wing campaign where they were talking about financing and how to attack rivals, which is not illegal, but highlights Petro companies surround themselves, such as Senator Roy Barreras or former Senator Armando Benedetti, two very controversial personalities criticized by potential voters in the second round. The influence of the undecided and the white vote will be felt this Sunday during the ballot, in elections already underway in Colombian consulates abroad. EFE ime/lmg/eat (photo)(audio) (c) EFE Agency