The interparty consultations held this Sunday in Colombia have confirmed Senator Paloma Valencia, the candidate of former President Álvaro Uribe, as a candidate in the presidential race. With more than three million votes, he threatens the leadership of the far-right Abelardo de la Espriella to remove the left from power. “I thank President Uribe,” she said to the crowd that cheered her at the party headquarters. While Valencia was counting cards by a thousand, the consultations of the left and the center – in which Claudia López and won – have been decaffeinated with a meager participation that barely exceeded a million votes.
The results change the script of a campaign, which will be reactivated this Monday with new strategies. The center-right gains momentum and opens the match on a flank until now led by the Barranquilla ultra. And the surprising success of the economist Juan Daniel Oviedo, who has condemned the genocide in Gaza and avoided furious criticism against Gustavo Petro, opens a door for the traditional right to seek the center, which ends up deciding the election.
On the left, Roy crashes with just over 200,000 votes and for having discouraged Colombians from voting in his consultation. But progressivism reaches the first round on May 31, leading the largest group in the Senate and less divided than expected. Their voters have made it clear that the person who should represent them is Iván Cepeda, leader in the polls, but with a clear ceiling. Gone is Roy’s dream of challenging the senator for prominence and even imposing conditions on him if he achieved the three million votes he aspired to. “The Petro boycott won,” his team says. “Roy is going to the first round in the name of change.”
The center, meanwhile, is diminished. Its survival will depend on the former mayor of Medellín, Sergio Fajardo, overcoming the fall he has suffered in the latest polls. The weakness of the center once again raises a question that is repeated in every election: whether there really is a viable political space between the left and the right. Fajardo has tried for years to build that path without much success, and the figures from the consultation suggest that this electorate ends up leaning towards one of the two poles that dominate politics in Colombia and in the rest of the world.
The result in Valencia alters the board. Its result – with more than three million votes out of a total of almost six – breaks the scenario that favored the ultra-elected Abelardo de la Espriella as the only strong leader of the opposition to the Government. For Uribismo, which came from several defeats and evident wear and tear after the Government of Iván Duque, the vote represents a demonstration of strength that was not guaranteed at the beginning of the campaign.
Just a couple of weeks ago, in fact, these results from Valencia were just a dream of their strategists. His team made optimistic projections and they all came true: Valencia surpassed the three million votes of the October consultation in which Cepeda was elected, it far surpassed the numbers of the left-wing consultations and it alone almost reached the four million of the right-wing consultation four years ago. The 5.5 million achieved by all the participants in the consultation would catapult it, according to its collaborators, into a second round. The first Colombian woman to achieve it.
The right that looks to the center
The second surprise of the day, the unexpected success of Oviedo, which came second behind Valencia with more than a million votes, has opened the game even further. His last-minute push, curiously, has been thanks to a political enemy: De la Espriella. which caused a chain of messages of support against the homophobic comment and a surprising rebound in the economist’s popularity.
His results – which have exceeded the expectations of his start to the campaign – reveal a change in the right-wing electorate. His speech, focused on a more technical and less ideological discourse, has attracted urban voters who distrust both Petrism and the more aggressive opposition rhetoric. That space — diffuse but decisive — usually tilts presidential elections in Colombia. It remains to be seen how Valencia decides to take advantage of it. A turn to the center can help him beat De la Espriella, although it risks the support of the toughest wing on the right.
A blow to De la Espriella
The takeoff of these new candidacies such as Valencia and Oviedo ultimately complicates the scenario that best suited the three favorites in the polls: the direct duel between Cepeda and De la Espriella not only gave them both an advantage, but also served as a campaign motto for Fajardo, who bet everything on fleeing from the extremes.
But it is no longer so clear that it will be the two extreme candidates who reach the second round, which will force strategies to be reformulated. Perhaps the most affected is De la Espriella. This Sunday, the criminal lawyer verified the mobilization of the Uribista machinery; his party, National Salvation, and it is no longer so easy to sell that he is the only one capable of concentrating the anti-Petrist vote. Now the right is forced to first resolve its own internal competition before facing the Government at the polls.
That rearrangement can also change the tone of the campaign. While De la Espriella has built his popularity with a discourse of permanent confrontation against Petro, Valencia represents a more classic version of the Colombian right, more linked to the apparatus of Uribism and its regional structures. The dispute between the two will probably mark a good part of the opposition debate in the coming months: De la Espriella will try to maintain his capital, while Valencia will try to collect the votes of all those who reject Petro’s left, but would not vote for a candidate who grows radical.
The campaign that starts again this Monday looks less like the one that existed just a few days ago. Cepeda is still the favorite, but the opposition no longer has a single candidate and is coming strong to face him. Valencia has shown that Uribismo – in low hours – Almost three months before May 31, and in an election that will be decided in two rounds, the race towards the Casa de Nariño is once again completely open.
