Rodolfo Hernández, Colombia’s populist surprise

The global rise of outsider populist candidates has been a persistent challenge for analysts and reporters in recent years, and Colombia’s Rodolfo Hernández is no exception.

Mr. Hernández has been compared to Donald Trump in the U.S. and Franco Parisi in Chile, although the contemporary leaders he seems to admire the most are Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — both of whom come from different ends of the political spectrum, only adding to the confusion.

His status as an outsider has been partially cemented by his biography, which shows him rising from a middle-class family background to become a local construction magnate. Crucially, he controls his own business and fortune, which amounts to USD 100 million, and has used it to finance his political career.

This, Mr. Hernández claims, gives him the leverage that Colombian politicians lack, as his money would protect him from the need of courting campaign donors to financially back his presidential run, and free him from returning the favor when reaching office.

Herein lies the central talking point of Mr. Hernández’s campaign: corruption.

Mr. Hernández’s view of contemporary Colombia is one of collusion between business elites, politicians, and public contractors, connivance which he sees as the reason for the deterioration of public finances, the country’s structural inequality, and the general public discontent.

And after 20 years of almost total political control from the country’s right, those anti-collusion cries initially placed Hernández in opposition to Álvaro Uribe — a former president also seen as the mastermind of the country’s right — as well as the uribista elites that benefited from his dominance, and which have been steadily losing popularity.

But faced with a potential fall from power, that same Colombian establishment has now been trying to jump on the Hernández bandwagon — some of them even before he outvoted the Uribe-backed candidate, Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, in the race for a spot in...