Presidential elections in Colombia 2022 in the international media: the Francia Márquez phenomenon and its impact on the news construction of the campaign

Abstract

In 2022 Colombia elected a leftist president for the first time in history. The campaign was marked by the presence of candidates and speeches that were relatively different from the country's political tradition. This attracted the attention of the international media that put their eyes on the electoral process providing a look that contrasted with that of the national media and the digital conversation of the campaign.

Within the framework of the Democracy Observatory of the Electoral Observation Mission, international media were monitored to analyze the construction of the thematic agenda, the informative biases, and the construction of the political image of the international digital media in the social network Facebook and its news portals.

A corpus of 274 Facebook posts and the news developed on the web pages of eleven international media in the period from February 12, one month before the first round of elections, and May 29, the day of the second round, were analyzed. A thematic agenda with a positive bias for most of the candidates and a strong and interesting predominance of Gustavo Petro's pre-candidate and later vice-presidential candidate, Francia Márquez, was identified. This allows inferring the interest of these media in the racial and gender perspective, as novel aspects that mark differences with the national coverage characterized by a negative and critical view of these aspects, and a digital conversation marked by scandals, racist messages, and stigmatization of Márquez.