COLOMBIA: Teaching a New Kind of Politics

Sergio Fajardo is trying to practice a new kind of politics in Colombia, mounting a challenge to the established system.

In Colombia’s 2018 presidential elections, a 62-year-old math professor transformed the race. He was in the running to become the country’s first new head of state since the 2016 peace accord that sought to end more than half a century of traumatic civil conflict. It seemed a logical next step. After all, Sergio Fajardo had already served his country as the mayor of Medellín, the third-most populous city in Colombia after Bogotá and Cali, and as the governor of Antioquia, the second-richest department in the country in terms of its GDP.