For a candidate facing a tight vote, Juan Manuel Santos seemed unusually calm on the eve of Colombia's presidential election on May 30th. A former defence minister, Mr Santos is the preferred candidate of Alvaro Uribe, the popular outgoing president. Yet his seemingly lacklustre campaign had allowed a race that might have been easy to become a struggle. The last published opinion polls, taken a week or more before the vote, had him tied with Antanas Mockus, a former mayor of Bogota whose talk of a new, clean politics captured the imagination of middle-class Colombians. The polls also suggested that, in a run-off between the two, Mr Mockus would win.
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