LatinNews Daily Report - 25 February 2014

POLITICS | Santos plumps for Vargas Lleras as his running mate. On 24 February Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos named Germán Vargas Lleras as his vice-presidential running mate for the upcoming 25 May presidential elections. While expected, the nomination of Vargas Lleras is still highly significant. The popular Vargas Lleras may help Santos on the way to winning re-election in the first round (for which they will need to secure 50%+ of the valid vote) thereby avoiding the need for a second round run-off in June. According to a poll by Centro Nacional de Consultoría, the nomination of Vargas Lleras for the vice-presidency had 56% support. Last week pollster Cifras & Conceptos put support for Santos in the presidential race at 26%, followed at considerable distance by Óscar Iván Zuluaga  of Centro Democrático, the party of former president Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010), on 7% and the Alianza Verde pre-candidate, Enrique Peñalosa, on 6%. The biggest portion of the electorate – 30% of respondents – still say they intend to cast blank ballots, and it is perhaps to this disenchanted group that the Santos-Vargas Lleras formula will now seek to tailor its appeal. The leader of the Cambio Radical party (a member of the ruling Unidad Nacional coalition), Vargas Lleras stood against Santos in the 2010 presidential elections but later joined the government and served under Santos as interior and then housing minister. Like Santos he is a onetime Uribe supporter that has broken with Uribismo but is still associated with its right of centre ideology. Vargas Lleras has in the past described himself as ‘sceptical’ over the peace negotiations the Santos government is currently engaged in with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) guerrillas, but says he will commit to seeing the process through. However, not all members of the ruling coalition, in particular many within Santos’s own the Partido de U, accept his pro-peace credentials. Partido de la U Senator Armando Beneditti tweeted that “Juan Manuel Santos likes peace, Vargas likes war”. This has sparked questions about whether the Santos-Vargas Lleras slate will receive the full support of Unidad Nacional.

End of preview - This article contains approximately 348 words.

Subscribers: Log in now to read the full article

Not a Subscriber?

Choose from one of the following options

• Subscribe
• Sign up for a one-time, 14-day trial