As most of Colombia was preparing to head out for the last long weekend before the first round of the presidential election on May 31, one of the most influential politicians of this century made a shift in his strategy. On the morning of this Friday, former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez posted a video on his social media. The man who has dominated the Colombian right since winning the presidency in 2002 not only reiterated what was obvious — that Senator Paloma Valencia is the candidate of his party, the Democratic Center — but also accused the far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella of having tried to join the party a few months ago, only to later publicly claim he never did. “He asked to join; statutorily it was no longer possible. Weeks later he said he never wanted to be part of the Democratic Center.” This information, which at another time would be a minor clarification, goes to the heart of one of De la Espriella’s campaign banners: his distance from the political establishment he calls “the usual ones,” and his claim of not even wanting the support of the parties.
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Why is Paloma our only candidate? pic.twitter.com/NqgTc1dihD
— Álvaro Uribe Vélez (@AlvaroUribeVel) May 15, 2026
The statement did not come out of nowhere. The tension is rising. Last Thursday, Valencia dropped a phrase that unleashed a storm that has not ceased. Vicky Dávila, the failed presidential hopeful who has resumed her role as a journalist with interviews with other candidates in the magazine Semana, asked her in an interview if she would support De la Espriella in a possible second round. “I don’t carry suitcases because it tires me a lot,” replied the Uribista senator. Weeks earlier, the criminal lawyer had said he would carry Valencia’s suitcases if she made it to a second round. Valencia, on the other hand, was thus rejecting a support agreement between the two right-wing candidates to face Iván Cepeda, a leftist continuist who, according to all polls, has his spot in the runoff secured. It was another step in the escalation. “You with the usual ones; me with the never,” the outsider had snapped at the senator two days earlier. “You’re right, I am the usual one defending Colombia, and ‘never’ suits you very well,” the congresswoman responded, reminding him that she opposed the leftist president Gustavo Petro in the legislature “while you lived in Italy.”
The tension has only increased since then. This very Friday, Valencia sent a message to De la Espriella on X asking him to keep his daughter Amapola out of the political debate. She did so in response to a message from a supporter of the far-right candidate who sought to reinforce the rumor that the Uribista senator had allied with former Bogotá mayor Claudia López, a center-left candidate. The rumor stemmed from a chance meeting between the two at an event this Wednesday and had been gaining strength in hard-right circles, fueled by the falsehood that Senator Angélica Lozano, López’s wife and a notable figure in the Colombian center, would be Amapola’s godmother. The false detail reinforced a widespread doubt among sectors of the right, after Paloma campaigned seeking centrist sectors and talking about uniting across differences, but excluding a López who has been a fierce critic of Uribe.
De la Espriella replied to Valencia. He said he rejected any attempt to instrumentalize children in the political battle but added: “Don’t let indignation cloud your judgment.” A little later, the senator responded: “Your campaign, of course, has warehouses and precise instructions against President Uribe, his family, and mine. I have been patient not to open the way for those who destroy Colombia, but you are starting to dangerously resemble them.”
The clash between Valencia and De la Espriella is not new, but a new direct exchange after a week of truce and Uribe’s intervention shows how central this confrontation is to the campaign. One that is also fought in a landscape of few polls, as rising costs and the demands of a recent polling law have reduced the number of available surveys, giving each poll greater impact.
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This is the case with the poll by the Brazilian firm Atlas Intel, published precisely by Semana, which shows a significant drop in voting intention for Valencia. The outlet, which recently has given space for figures close to De la Espriella to publish columns and has dedicated covers to pointing out Valencia as being surrounded by traditional politicians without noting the same about the outsider, brings an editorial bias against the senator’s campaign. Regarding this, Valencia wrote on her social media: “In the AtlasIntel poll for Semana magazine on the eve of the March 8 elections and consultations, we got double the votes they predicted for us and the so-called Tiger List got half.”
There is one week left of campaigning in public squares — the closings will be next weekend, after which the ban on publishing polls in the final stretch comes into effect. In that time, the two candidates have sought to enter each other’s spaces: De la Espriella trying to woo Valencia’s voters in the coffee region and Bogotá; she trying to compete with him in the Caribbean. All this without presidential debates, as De la Espriella has refused to attend them, and although he said he would with Valencia, they never agreed.
The result on May 31 will not only decide who goes to the second round. It will probably also decide whether the Colombian right remains under Uribe’s aegis or if a post-Uribism that was already hinted at four years ago, when the former president had no candidate of his own in the first round, has definitively arrived — a verdict that would be sealed if a far-right candidate wins, one whom Uribe turned his back on this Friday. It would also leave open the question of what will happen with anti-Uribism, one of the most powerful fuels of the left: how to mobilize it against a lawyer who was not part of Uribe’s governments, did not belong to his party, and with whom he is now publicly at odds. Uribe went into the long weekend not knowing if his intervention changed anything. Like all of Colombia, he will only know on the afternoon of May 31.
