Leonardo Huerta, former vice-presidential candidate of former Bogotá mayor Claudia López, has joined the government of Abelardo de la Espriella. This Wednesday it was revealed that the 46-year-old lawyer and professor from Pereira will be the director of the Department of Public Function of the far-right Executive. The appointment is unexpected because during the campaign months he presented himself as a centrist academic, closer to liberalism and even with progressive ideas.
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Huerta ran for president by collecting signatures and later competed with Claudia López in the so-called political center consultation. He only got 8% of the votes in the March election, in which the center deflated, and accepted to be López’s vice-presidential running mate. The candidacy was a resounding failure. They obtained less than 1% of the total in the first round, did not reach the threshold nor achieved the necessary figure for the State to recognize their expenses in the so-called vote replacement. After the defeat, López announced that in the second round she would support the leftist candidate Iván Cepeda. Huerta revealed that he would vote for De la Espriella. That radical difference showed that their union was more due to the situation and by elimination than by shared ideological convictions.
Days after the close election in which De la Espriella defeated Cepeda, Huerta confirmed his support for the winning political project and his criticisms of Gustavo Petro’s government. “The miracle homeland is built from the regions, not from the confrontation between the National Government and the territories. When the relationship with mayors and governors is ideologized, works are halted and those who pay the consequences are the citizens,” he said, questioning the difficult relations of the outgoing Executive with local rulers. “On August 7 a new story will begin: A government that respects territorial autonomy and works with all leaders, regardless of their political color, a government that will turn the regions into the engine of Colombia’s development,” he added.
In his new position, Huerta will be responsible for designing and leading the rules of state employment, directing human talent policies, modernizing the structure of State institutions, and overseeing the Superior School of Public Administration (ESAP).
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Before entering electoral politics, he held various positions in the public sector. Until January 2025 he was, for four years, the Deputy Ombudsman for Health. Before that, he was Secretary of Education of Pereira during the mayoralty of the liberal Carlos Maya. He has been a university professor for almost two decades.
In a previous interview with EL PAÍS, Huerta defined himself ideologically as “ambidextrous”: “I like social reforms, but I also know it is necessary to protect business; so with many things, at a middle point.” He cited the book by Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio called Right and Left as an intellectual reference, and claimed he is capable of reconciling the extremes. “We are not antagonistic, nor enemies; the difference can be a value that should unite us.”
His main campaign proposal was “to make the transition to a federal state,” an idea that coincides with De la Espriella’s government’s decentralization drive. Huerta insists that the problem of centralism is not solved just by transferring more resources from the capital to the regions, but demands a deep restructuring of the State, with different and independent laws for each territory.
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