March 15, 2010
The four main parties that have backed Uribe during the past eight years were projected to win 66 of 102 seats in the Senate, El Tiempo newspaper reported, citing the National Registry. La U, which has pledged to maintain Uribe’s security and economic policies if former defense minister Santos wins the May 30 presidential election, was poised to gain 27 seats with 94 percent of votes counted.
“It’s very likely the next president will emerge from the political parties that support Uribe,” said Alberto Ramos, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economist, in a telephone interview. “If those parties maintain their hold in Congress, the next president will benefit from relatively strong governability conditions.” Colombians chose all 102 senators and 166 representatives in the elections, which officials said went off with little violence after rebels had threatened to disrupt the vote.
Bloomberg Colombia Congress Vote Aids Santos Presidential Bid
March 15, 2010, 5:20 PM EDT
By Helen Murphy and Alexander Cuadros
March 15 (Bloomberg) -- Colombian presidential candidate Juan Manuel Santos’s La U party led in congressional elections held yesterday, consolidating his position as the front-runner to succeed Alvaro Uribe.
The four main parties that backed Uribe over the past eight years were projected to win 66 of 102 seats in the Senate, El Tiempo newspaper reported, citing the National Registry. La U, the biggest among them in the upper house, was poised to gain 27 seats with 94 percent of ballots counted.
“The Colombian people were very clear yesterday, saying, we want these policies to continue,” Santos, who served as a defense minister under Uribe and pledges to follow his security and economic line, told Bogota-based W Radio today.
The congressional vote, a gauge of political sentiment ahead of the May 30 presidential election, went off with little violence after rebels had threatened to disrupt balloting.
“It’s very likely the next president will emerge from the political parties that support Uribe,” said Alberto Ramos, a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economist, in a phone interview. “The next president will benefit from relatively strong governability conditions.”
Colombia’s peso, which has had a world-beating rally this year, gained 0.3 percent to 1,893.60 per dollar. The yield on the country’s 11 percent benchmark bond due July 2020 was little changed at 8.76 percent, according to the nation’s stock exchange.
Conservative Primary
The pro-Uribe Conservative Party was projected to win 23 seats in the upper house, while a primary to choose its presidential candidate remained deadlocked between former Agriculture Minister Felipe Arias and former Ambassador to the U.K. Noemi Sanin. The opposition Liberal Party, which has former Senator Rafael Pardo as its presidential candidate, was set to win 18 seats.
The Alternative Democratic Pole party, whose Senator Gustavo Petro has positioned himself as the anti-Uribe choice with pledges to purge “mafias” from the state, garnered 8 seats.
Two other parties identified with Uribe’s security policies, Radical Change and the National Integration Party, or PIN, are also projected to win 8 seats each.
The results of the congressional vote are positive for investors, said Alberto Bernal, head of emerging-market research at Bulltick Securities Corp. in Miami.
Less Market Uncertainty
“The level of uncertainty in the market right now with respect to a policy shift has been further reduced because the performance of Petro was so abysmal,” Bernal said.
While a national tally for the lower house wasn’t yet available, La U may have secured 44 seats, Santos said today.
Uribe retained a more than 60 percent approval rating throughout his two terms in office by pushing back cocaine- funded Marxist guerrillas and attracting record foreign investment.
The U.S. ally, the recipient of more than $600 million in annual American anti-narcotics aid, was barred last month by the Constitutional Court from seeking a third term, forcing lawmakers and presidential candidates to scramble and jumpstart their campaigns.
Former Bogota Mayor Antanas Mockus won a primary against two other former mayors of the capital, Enrique Penalosa and Luis Eduardo Garzon, to become the Green Party’s candidate. The Greens were projected to win 5 Senate seats.
Former Mayors
Sergio Fajardo, a former mayor of Medellin who is polling third in the presidential race, may have failed to secure a Senate seat after his Citizens’ Movement for Colombia won 1.6 percent of votes, said Monica Pachon, director of Visible Congress, an organization promoting transparency in the legislature.
Gross domestic product has more than doubled to $242 billion during Uribe’s time in office, while the benchmark IGBC stock index has risen more than nine-fold and the peso strengthened more than 40 percent.
Uribe has based his presidency on attracting foreign investment and the so-called “democratic security” policy, which aims to destroy the drug trade and reduce violence through an increased military presence.
Polls show Santos is likely to reach a second round of voting on June 20 if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the ballots cast in the first round.
Nationwide Poll
Santos was favored by 23 percent of those surveyed by Ipsos Napoleon Franco on Feb. 27. Petro had 11 percent support and Fajardo had 9 percent backing, according to the nationwide poll of 1,000 people, which had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
Santos has said he would seek to form a coalition with the Conservative Party and would consider joining forces with Radical Change candidate German Vargas Lleras, who was previously allied with Uribe, should he drop out of the race for president.
The National Registry continued to count votes in the Conservative primary, El Tiempo reported. Results are expected by the end of the week, the newspaper said.
The winner of the presidential vote is unlikely to depart from Uribe’s policies that are credited with bringing in as much as $50 billion in foreign investment since 2002 and cutting the murder rate by 95 percent, said Patrick Esteruelas, a Latin America risk adviser to hedge funds at the Eurasia Group in New York.
“The presidential candidates will all struggle to replicate and sustain Uribe’s phenomenal popularity,” Esteruelas said.
--Editors: Brendan Walsh, Robert Jameson.To contact the reporters on this story: Helen Murphy in Bogota at hmurphy1@bloomberg.net; Alexander Cuadros in Bogota at acuadros@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Joshua Goodman at jgoodman19@bloomberg.net
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