Magnanimous in defeat

Gustavo Petro, presidential candidate for Colombia Humana, is showered in confetti while he speaks to supporters, after his rival Ivan Duque won the election, in Bogota, Colombia on Sunday. Duque, the young conservative protege of a powerful former president, was elected Colombia’s next leader after promising to roll back a fragile peace accord that has divided the South American nation

Conservative Ivan Duque won Colombia’s presidential election Sunday after a campaign that turned into a referendum on a landmark 2016 peace deal with FARC rebels that he pledged to overhaul.

Duque, 41, polled 54 percent to his leftist rival Gustavo Petro’s 42 percent with almost all the votes counted, electoral authority figures showed.

Petro, a leftist former mayor and ex-guerrilla, supports the deal.

Tensions over the deal became apparent in the immediate aftermath of Duque’s victory, after the president-elect lost no time in pledging “corrections” to the peace deal.

“That peace we long for – that demands corrections – will have corrections, so that the victims are the center of the process, to guarantee truth, justice and reparation,” Duque told supporters in his victory speech at his campaign headquarters.

“The time has come to build real change,” Duque said, promising a future for Colombians “of lawfulness, freedom of enterprise and equity,” after decades of conflict.

His vanquished opponent Petro promised to resist any fundamental changes to the deal.

“Our role is not to be impotent and watch it being destroyed,” he said.

FARC, which disarmed and transformed into a political party after the peace deal but did not contest the election, immediately called on Duque to show “good sense” in dealing with the agreement.

“What the country demands is an integral peace, which will lead us to the hoped-for reconciliation,” the FARC said in a statement after Duque’s presidential win.

The former rebels also called for an early meeting with Duque.

“One of the big questions here is what’s going to happen with the peace process,” analyst Yann Basset of the University of Rosario told AFP.

“He has said he will not end the agreement, but that he will make modifications, and it’s not very clear what these changes will be.”

“These are momentous elections,” President Juan Manuel Santos, who will step down in August, said as he cast his ballot early in the day.