The campaign to choose the next president of Colombia heats up. Several dozen candidates continue in that long race to choose Gustavo Petro’s successor in the May 2026 elections, which have been held blindly for several months. There is no clear favorite. With the arrival of November, the controversial (and unprecedented) ban on voting intention surveys that had been in force since July ended. The long-awaited return of opinion studies should help clear the outlook for the remainder of this year, while waiting for the blocs and alliances to be decided. Predictably, some candidates will take off in the coming weeks, and a few others will throw in the towel once and for all.
Faced with such a crowded and fragmented party, the early polls published before the ban failed to show a solid leader, decisively detached from the pack. Sergio Fajardo, the former mayor of Medellín who led the centrist coalition in 2022, used to appear among the best positioned. Vicky Dávila, former director of the magazine, also came out well placed. Week, or the former mayor of Bogotá, Claudia López. Even, from the ruling party, former senator Gustavo Bolívar, who has already dropped out of the race. Since then, however, the political map has changed. The campaign is played on several boards.
To begin with, the left already has its own presidential candidate, after Iván Cepeda emerged as the winner of the eventful popular consultation of the Historical Pact, the coalition that supports the Petro Government. The senator obtained more than one and a half million votes, of the 2.7 million people who participated. In the absence of surveys, Cepeda has already let himself be counted. Their numbers are difficult to reach. The progressivism plan now involves measuring itself in another consultation that will be held on the same day as the legislative elections, March 8, that of the so-called Broad Front, to have a single candidate that brings together various sectors of the center-left. If the proposal comes to fruition, former ministers Roy Barreras and Juan Fernando Cristo, Senator Clara López or even the former mayor of Medellín Daniel Quintero could compete there – despite legal doubts about an alleged inability after he gave up participating in the Pact consultation on the time.
In addition to the definitions of the left, which anticipated the other blocks, there are some candidates who already have the endorsement of a party, such as Fajardo (Dignidad y Compromiso), Juan Manuel Galán (New Liberalism) or Juan Carlos Pinzón (Oxígeno, Ingrid Betancourt’s party). Candidacies for signatures on behalf of a citizen movement, rather than a political party, also abound. That long list includes Claudia López, who has promised that she will continue on her own until the end, to face the candidates of both Petro and former president Álvaro Uribe, the great reference of the right. Or Luis Gilberto Murillo, chancellor until the beginning of the year, who is also running as an antidote to polarization and offers his diplomatic experience to recover the battered relations with the United States of Donald Trump.
Among the many applicants for signatures is also the economist Mauricio Cárdenas, a former minister of several portfolios of conservative origin; David Luna, who resigned as a senator from Cambio Radical to run as an independent; or Dávila herself, among others. To the former director of Weekrepresentative of the sectors most furiously opposed to Petro, has been overshadowed in recent weeks by an even more strident campaign. The far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella has been noted for his aggressiveness on social networks, videos with artificial intelligence that show him as a tiger and all kinds of high-sounding comments. Four former local leaders are also in the running, led by the two-time governor of Antioquia Aníbal Gaviria, who are seeking to define a single candidate via survey.
Aspirants who opted for the signature route must present the equivalent of 3% of the total valid votes in the 2022 presidential elections, some 630,000 signatures, before December 17. The Registry has until January 21, 2026 to verify its validity. To guarantee their enrollment, they usually make plans to collect at least twice the required rubrics. Several of the campaigns claim that they have already exceeded what is necessary.
On the right, activity is also frenetic. The Democratic Center, the party founded and led by former President Uribe, who is seeking to return to the Senate, will announce its candidate on November 28. The mechanism will be a survey that will measure Paloma Valencia, María Fernanda Cabal, Paola Holguín, Andrés Guerra and Miguel Uribe Londoño – the father of the murdered senator Miguel Uribe Turbay. Beyond this own candidate, the former president, recently acquitted in a long process for witness manipulation, seeks to gather around him the most conservative sectors and seal a broad anti-Petrist coalition both with Cambio Radical, the party of former vice president Germán Vargas Lleras, who still has not defined whether he will be a candidate, and with former president César Gaviria, director of the Liberal Party.
With that messy backdrop, and in the midst of the swarm of names, Colombia anxiously awaits the return of the polls as a necessary filter to gauge the real possibilities of each candidate. The ban ended last weekend. But the same law that restricted them – and that is being sued before the Constitutional Court – imposes some sample conditions, among others, about which pollsters have insistently complained, as they allege that they increase costs. When in doubt, none of the main firms are currently announcing the release of any electoral study. “We await the decision of the Constitutional Court to continue informing you,” the Invamer company warned in a brief message. Even blindly, the campaign must continue.
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