Sanin wins Colombian conservative candidacy

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombia's former foreign minister Noemi Sanin won the country's Conservative Party candidacy for May's presidential election in a decision that risks splitting President Alvaro Uribe's political coalition.

Sanin, the only female presidential candidate, will challenge front-runner Juan Manuel Santos in the election and try to leverage her party's strong results in Sunday's legislative vote as capital for her run at the top job.

Uribe, popular for his U.S.-backed security campaign against leftist guerrillas, must step aside after two terms. He leaves six serious candidates competing to replace him as president of the world's No. 3 coffee exporter.

"I call on my party to unite," Sanin said in a victory speech at her Bogota headquarters.

"Now there is only one team."

In power since 2002, Uribe took the fight to the FARC or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, smashing Latin America's oldest insurgency to its weakest in decades. Violence has ebbed and investment soared and any candidate who replaces Uribe is unlikely to steer too far from his basic policies.

Santos, leader of Uribe's U Party which is in a coalition with the Conservatives, claims to be the heir to the president's security and pro-investment ideas.

He is leading in opinion polls but does not have enough support to avoid a run-off in June, polls and analysts say.

CONSERVATIVES EYE VICTORY

Sanin, a former ambassador to Britain, won 1,118,090 votes versus 1,080,313 votes for nearest rival Andres Felipe Arias, according to tallies from more than 99 percent of results.
Arias, a former agriculture minister, had suggested he could strike a deal with Santos to present a single candidate for the Uribe alliance.

But Sanin, who has run for the presidency twice before, said she would "go to the end" for her own party rather than joining with Santos and the U Party.

The results from the internal ballot were delayed since Sunday's vote because of polling station errors and technical glitches in transmitting data.

Sunday's Conservative Party vote took place at the same time as Colombians elected a new Congress in which the U Party and the Conservatives maintained their majority in both houses of the legislature. But the Conservative showing is prompting party chieftains to see their chance to replace Uribe.

Should she make a second round against Santos, Sanin could position herself as a moderate who would maintain Uribe's policies but in alliance with opposition parties against Santos, said Mauricio Romero, political science professor at Bogota's Javeriana University.

"There are two trends in the party. Arias represents Uribe supporters and Sanin the more reformist sector," he said. "The Conservatives now see a better chance at the presidency."

All uribistas now: But which one will succeed the president?

ALTHOUGH he is barred by the constitution from seeking a third term in the presidential election in May, Álvaro Uribe’s influence over Colombia will remain great. As votes were slowly tallied in an election for a new Congress on March 14th, it became clear that parties which formed part of his centre-right coalition will retain a clear majority. Who will command these legislators is less so.

The vote seemed to strengthen the claims of Juan Manuel Santos, a former defence minister who more than anyone else embodies the continuation of Mr Uribe’s “democratic security” policy. Mr Santos’s U Party (that’s U for Uribe) won 25% of the valid votes, and increased its representation in the 102-seat Senate to 28, from 20.

But Mr Santos looks unlikely to win an outright victory, avoiding a run-off vote. He wants a broad coalition with other uribista forces, including the Conservative Party. The Conservatives did well, winning 21% of the vote and raising their total of senators by four, to 22. But their primary, held on the same day, was so close that it was unlikely to produce a result for days. Only then will it be clear whether or not the party offers a strong challenge to Mr Santos.
A less welcome potential ally for Mr Santos is the new National Integration Party (PIN), formed by friends and relatives of former legislators accused by prosecutors of links to right-wing paramilitary militias. This party won nine senate seats and 8% of the valid votes, mainly in the north of the country.

Some of Mr Uribe’s main opponents fared poorly. The left-wing Democratic Pole party lost two senate seats and was outpolled by the PIN. A parliamentary list backing Sergio Fajardo, a former mayor of Medellín running for the presidency as an independent, managed to elect only one senator. Mr Fajardo faces a strong rival for independent-minded voters in Antanas Mockus, who won a presidential primary for the newly formed Green Party, which secured five senate seats.

For most of the past two centuries, Colombian politics was dominated by just two parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives. Mr Uribe, a Liberal who ran as an independent and behaved as a Conservative, upset that pattern. He is bequeathing a politically fractured country, even if many of the splits turn more around personalities than policies.

World Digest: Former defense minister front-runner in Colombia election

With results from congressional elections trickling in Monday, Juan Manuel Santos, a former defense minister who marshaled U.S. aid to thrash Marxist guerrillas, has consolidated his position as the front-runner to succeed Álvaro Uribe as president of Colombia.

His party, the U, won 27 of 102 seats in the Senate, seven more than it had after the 2006 elections. That put Santos, 58, scion of a newspaper dynasty, in the best position to win elections in May.

"Today the U party has won -- the party of President Uribe," Santos said late Sunday after polls closed. "We are newly consolidated as the principal political force in the country."
Santos has declared himself the heir of Uribe's tough military strategies, which in eight years pushed rebel forces away from large urban areas. Polls show Uribe would have easily won a third election, but last month the country's high court turned back his efforts to reform the constitution to permit another term.

Santos is an American-educated politician with ties on Capitol Hill. His main rivals include a former agriculture minister, a former mayor of Medellin and a former operative of a guerrilla group.

Transit strike in Colombia ends

A four-day transit strike that created a traffic nightmare in the Colombian capital and brought protesters into the streets was resolved Thursday, officials said.

The strike, which affected some 8 million passengers, ended after the transportation workers reached an agreement with the city government.

The owners of small- and medium-sized bus companies were protesting because they said a new integrated transportation plan would have left them out in the cold.

Bogota's mayor wants to implement a new transport system that would reduce from 66 to 13 the number of companies that perform public transport duties in the city.

The city's plan to entice drivers to join the new transport system was not generous enough, workers said.

The drivers would not get a big enough cut of the operations, and offers from the city to buy some buses from smaller companies to add to the new fleet were too small, the strikers said.
Journalist Fernando Ramos contributed to this report for CNN.