The Colombian right graduates a new leader today: the ultra-conservative Abelardo de la Espriella, who achieved the highest vote count in the first round of the presidential elections, with more than ten million votes, and will now face the left-wing candidate, Iván Cepeda, in a second round. He is a man who draws from global trends: he promises to cut the State like the Argentine Javier Milei, build mega-prisons like the Salvadoran Nayib Bukele, speaks against philanthropist George Soros and in favor of billionaire Elon Musk. His common points with Donald Trump are also many, from presenting himself as a rich and successful businessman (even though the figures do not always support it), to his obsession with making politics a show: the candidate dances on stage, hires fireworks, flies drones, floods social media with Artificial Intelligence videos, and has a threatening attitude towards the press that questions him. He is emerging as a leader against who was for two decades the holy grail of the right, former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez.
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Throughout the campaign, the right walked divided. On one side was Uribe, who managed to promote several right-wing presidential candidates since he left office in 2010, but this time he came in third place with one of his most loyal followers, Senator Paloma Valencia, for whom he campaigned on social media and dozens of stages. The candidate failed to mobilize even 10% of the vote, far from Cepeda’s second place. Álvaro Uribe’s power is no longer the same. A huge majority of the votes that usually went to his party were taken by the novelty of this election, De la Espriella. Even some of those who were his loyal party companions, like Senators María Fernanda Cabal and Paola Holguín, or rancher José Felix Lafaurie, decided not to support Valencia and gave their nod to De la Espriella.
“Abelardo de la Espriella is post-Uribism,” said Luis Trejos, a Political Science professor at Universidad del Norte, a week ago. “It is the right without Uribe, but without disregarding Uribe’s legacy. And it is a more modern right in its forms: its show, its staging of the platforms, its use of AI and social media. In that sense, it is a more Milei, more Bukele, more Trump right.”
De la Espriella also draws from a clear trend in Colombia: the thirst to vote for the anti-political candidate. Abelardo de la Espriella managed to paint himself as an ‘outsider’ who does not support what he calls ‘the usual politicians’. It was a wave that four years ago also caught the strongest right-wing candidate, engineer Rodolfo Hernández, who did not talk much about Bukele and Milei but did say he was free of political parties. He did not have Uribe’s support, but in that election, the former president did not back any candidate as he does now with Paloma Valencia. Hernández lost to Gustavo Petro who, like him, also represented a change for the traditional establishment, as a left-wing politician had never reached the presidency before. De la Espriella now takes on both the ‘outsider’ role of Rodolfo and the anti-Petro sentiment of the last four years of government.
Paloma Valencia, on the other hand, failed to shake off the label of being the ‘establishment’ candidate. She went to the stages not only with Álvaro Uribe but with a long list of well-known politicians, former mayors, and former congressmen. She sought to explain that she was interested in uniting different groups, that it was important to value experience. But the discourse did not resonate as well as the ‘anti-establishment’ one. Uribismo, with this election, graduates to a traditional party, and Álvaro Uribe’s leadership is in doubt. Although he managed to organize the second largest caucus in the March legislative elections, his party was far from reaching the presidency with one of their own. Abelardo de la Espriella, on the other hand, opens an unknown path: the ultra candidate has never held an elected office, as he dedicated the last two decades to his law firm.
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The division of the right for the first presidential round does not imply that there will be no union between Uribismo and Aberladismo for the second round, which will take place next June 21. For Álvaro Uribe, in particular, there is no option: if De la Espriella does not win, then Iván Cepeda would win, the Petro senator who put him on trial in a long criminal process for procedural fraud and witness bribery. De la Espriella, for his part, will also need Uribe, as he only has four senators and one representative in the legislature. If he wants to pass a bill, he will need Uribismo, which has the second largest caucus.
Uribe, who bet everything on Paloma Valencia, is also not distant from the De la Espriella family. He is a personal friend of the candidate’s father, Abelardo de la Espriella Juris, to whom he assigned two notary offices during his government, first in Cartagena and then in Bogotá. Uribe met with the candidate at the beginning of the campaign last year, and for a time promoted an opposition coalition that would go from “De la Espriella to Fajardo.”
The decision will be more tense for Paloma Valencia, the candidate, who this week went into a frontal combat against De la Espriella over the attacks made by the ultra’s campaign by labeling her as part of ‘the usual ones’. Also for members of her right-wing coalition, such as Juan Manuel Galán, Mauricio Cárdenas, and David Luna, who campaigned against the ultra. And it will be much more unlikely that Juan Daniel Oviedo, Paloma Valencia’s vice-presidential running mate, who is openly gay and received homophobic insults from the ultra’s campaign, will join De la Espriella’s campaign. But they, right-wing candidates, have a new leader whether they want it or not: the lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella.
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