The 2022 Presidential Elections in Colombia: The Rise of an Anti-Political Right Wing

The main argument of this paper is that in the 2022 presidential elections in Colombia an anti-politics right, represented by Rodolfo Hernandez. It was a new right that combined a neoliberal ideology with an anti-politics discourse. This new right differed from the traditional right in Colombia represented by the Conservative Party and el uribismo in two important aspects; it did not enjoy a clear conservative dimension and it articulated a strong criticism of the Colombian political class. The emergence of this new right was ignored by the majority of academics and the Colombian media, who did not take seriously the political project represented by Rodolfo Hernandez in 2022, classifying it as an ephemeral and personalistic populism that lacked ideological and programmatic coherence. Our analysis, however, shows that the electoral discourse of Rodolfo Hernandez was not populist even though it did have a strong anti-politics dimension. Far from being ideologically incoherent, Hernandez articulated a clear right-wing ideology in opposition to the left-wing populism represented by Gustavo Petro.