What Paloma Valencia’s loss signals about the future of ‘Uribismo’ in Colombia

Manuela Peña Giraldo co-authored this article with Angie Acosta M.

Medellín and Bogotá, Colombia – Álvaro Uribe Vélez, one of only a handful of Colombians who’ve served two terms as president, has been something of a political kingmaker since leaving the presidency in 2010. 

His one-time defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, would go on to serve two terms of his own, and Iván Duque, his handpicked candidate, won the elections in 2018.

This in addition to Uribe’s political party, the Centro Democratico (Democratic Center), averaging about 21 congressional seats and 17 senate seats in the past four elections, with a bump in 2018 riding on a wave of discontent following Santo’s 2016 peace agreement with the FARC rebels. 

So when the Centro Democratico held its primary elections in March and Senator Paloma Valencia, who had once said, “I am uribista, and I’ll die uribista”, burst into the race, it looked like she could provide a real challenge for hard-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, who had been running on a tough-on-crime platform fueled by social media savvy.

But that was not the case. Heading into the elections last Sunday, polls had predicted that Valencia would secure around 20% of the vote. She fell far short of this, reaching just 7%. 

With that loss, she joined another Uribe-backed candidate, Federico Gutiérrez, who lost in the first round of the 2022 elections to another political outsider and firebrand, former Bucaramanga mayor Rodolfo Hernández. Hernández would later lose to current President Gustavo Petro. 

Could these consecutive defeats in major elections signal the end of the 73-year-old Uribe’s political dominance? 

A series of miscalculations 

During inter-party presidential primaries in March, Valencia secured over 3 million votes, defeating other center-right coalition allies. As her running mate, she chose economist Juan Daniel Oviedo, who secured over 1 million votes in the primaries. 

The selection was seen as an attempt to court more moderate voters, a move which some analysts say may have alienated her rightwing base. 

“Paloma’s campaign made a tactical miscalculation by attempting to capture centrist voters through Oviedo,” said Gabriel Clavijo, a political scientist and international relations expert at Bogotá’s Javeriana University. “This ultimately alienated her traditional right-wing base, who did not view that alliance favorably.” 

The selection of Oviedo, a gay man, upset some of the more conservative block of the Centro Democratico. 

After the first round of elections on May 31, Valencia endorsed de la Espriella, who had publicly mocked Oviedo about his sexuality. 

Oviedo did not, saying: “It’s unbelievable that Colombia is arguing about its future based on homophobia and sexism.” 

Valencia’s campaign made other errors as well. Rodrigo Pombo Cajiao, a constitutional law professor at Javeriana University, told Latin America Reports that unlike de la Espriella’s campaign, Valencia’s lacked crucial components. 

“[Valencia’s campaign] didn’t have a logo. By contrast, Abelardo had the tiger. It had no slogan, whereas the opponent claimed ‘firmes por la patria’ [‘firm for the homeland]. And most importantly, the banner of security was seized by Abelardo’s campaign.”

Some see Valencia’s more traditional campaign style as a weakness amid a wave of populist outsider rhetoric. 

“The Colombian right is moving away from Uribe and aligning with a new global trend,” said Clavijo. “Uribe’s votes could not capture the entire electorate, as many voters were drawn to more direct, anti-establishment, and reactionary proposals, the kind perfectly represented by the ‘outsider’ phenomenon.”

Uribe’s fading political caché

Uribe was elected president in 2002 during one of the bloodiest periods in Colombia’s half-century of internal armed conflict involving left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and state security forces. 

He is credited with hard-nosed tactics that beat back the FARC and other rebel groups, improving security for ordinary Colombians, especially in urban areas like Medellín. In 2013, he was voted the ‘Greatest Colombian of All Time’ in a poll organized by the History Channel. 

Since then, however, his legacy has been scarred as revelations of illegal spying on judges and journalists, human rights abuses, links to paramilitary death squads and drug cartels, and so-called false-positives – in which civilians were murdered and dressed as guerrillas to inflate kill counts — have come to light. 

Last year, Uribe was convicted of bribing a witness and procedural fraud in a case that involved de la Espriella’s opponent in the June 21 runoff elections, leftwing Senator Iván Cepeda. The courts later overturned his convictions. 

Read more: Former President Álvaro Uribe found guilty of bribery, procedural fraud in Colombia’s “trial of the century” 

At 73, the aging politician is regularly yelled at in the street by his opponents and days before elections, videos circulating on social media showed a brouhaha outside his rural estate in Antioquia where local graffiti artists painted messages about false-positives on a nearby wall. 

All of this has contributed to the politician’s fading star, even amongst his base. 

“What we saw was a sort of grassroots rebellion by ‘uribista’ voters against Uribe himself,” said Bladimir Ramírez, a sociology professor and analyst at the University of Antioquia. “Faced with his explicit backing of Paloma Valencia, many supporters were unhappy with the way political decisions were being made by Uribe.”

Álvaro Uribe and Abelardo de la Espriella. Image credit: delaespriellastyle.com

Uribe certainly doesn’t have an enemy in Abelardo de la Espriella 

Uribe’s candidate’s loss doesn’t necessarily mean that he won’t have an ally in the presidency should de la Espriella win on June 21. 

De la Espriella, who comes from a cattle ranching family in Cordoba, on Colombia’s northern coast, said that he’s known Uribe (who also has a massive cattle ranch in the area), “since he was a kid.”

A lawyer by trade, de la Espriella has said that he advises the former president and represented him in a lawsuit against journalist and lawyer Daniel Mendoza for a miniseries he made about Uribe’s alleged ties to narcoparamilitaries. 

Upon de la Espriella’s victory, Uribe said, “Abelardo has won. We keep our word: we will vote for him, and we ask that you vote for him and for Colombia. We cannot allow our country to continue on the path of becoming a satellite of chavismo,” referring to the political ideology of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. 

Given the bitter hatred between Uribe and Cepeda, the former president has set his sights on defeating the leftist in the runoff, even if it means ceding some of his political dominance. 

“Uribe is no longer the central figure who unites the entire Colombian right. He is now fighting for political survival, which forces him to align with de la Espriella’s project rather than leading it,” professor Clavijo said. 

“This alliance will not be easy or harmonious. Both are dominant figures with authoritarian styles, both used to setting the rules in their own parties. It will be interesting to see how they adapt to working together.”

Featured image: Paloma Valencia and Álvaro Uribe on the campaign trail in 2026.

Image credit: Álvaro Uribe via Facebook.

This article originally appeared on The Bogotá Post and was re-published with permission.