The Colombian presidential campaign, a race between different ideas and coincidences

Bogotá.- The campaign for the first round of the presidential elections next Sunday in Colombia has been marked by a deep division between left and right, but the main candidates have coincidences in some aspects that go beyond politics. Of the eleven candidates still in the presidential race, attention is focused on the leftist Iván Cepeda, from the Historic Pact, party of the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro; the far-right Abelardo de la Espriella, from the Defensores de la Patria movement, and the right-wing Paloma Valencia, from the Uribista Democratic Center, due to their position in the voting intention polls. Cepeda, leader of the polls, is a philosopher from the University of St. Clement of Ohrid of Sofia (Bulgaria), while Valencia obtained the same degree from the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá), founded by his maternal grandfather, Mario Laserna. There she also graduated as a lawyer, the same profession as De la Espriella. President Petro, alluding to Cepeda, said this week on X that "Colombia has had candidates who wanted to be philosopher presidents like Plato, the Greek, wanted" and added that he believes this "is a non-Platonic but real opportunity." "Better yet: a woman philosopher president. That would be historic," Valencia replied. We recommend reading: Cepeda and Valencia are also sitting senators, both since 2014, and given the former's refusal to attend debates of the current campaign, they have used the rostrum of the Upper House to criticize each other.

Links from the Past

Both Cepeda and Valencia come from families with a political tradition but situated on very distant shores. Cepeda comes from a family of left-wing militants in which his father, the senator of the Patriotic Union Manuel Cepeda Vargas, was assassinated in 1994 by state agents in complicity with paramilitaries, and his mother, the activist Yira Castro Chadid, a communist leader who was a councilwoman of Bogotá, with whom, as a child, he lived for a few years in Cuba and in the former Czechoslovakia. Valencia, for his part, comes from an aristocratic family in the department of Cauca (southwest), and his paternal grandfather, the conservative Guillermo León Valencia, was president of Colombia between 1962 and 1966. Her maternal grandfather, Mario Laserna, was a prestigious academic who, in addition to founding the Universidad de los Andes, was rector of the Universidad Nacional - the two most important in the country -, as well as ambassador to France and Austria and professor at the universities of Munich (Germany) and Vienna. In the 1950s, Iván Cepeda's father studied law at the University of Cauca, in Popayán, where he had Álvaro Pío Valencia among his professors, great-uncle of Paloma Valencia, who, despite his conservative origin, was a Marxist intellectual and militant of the Colombian Communist Party who influenced the ideological formation of the father of the current presidential candidate.

Other Matches

Cauca is the Colombian department most affected in recent years by the armed conflict and Cepeda's running mate, Senator Aída Quilcué, also comes from there, a leader of the Nasa people, the largest indigenous community in the country, who in the current campaign has had her squabbles with her compatriot Valencia. In a presidential election as polarized as the current one and in a country with a conservative tendency like Colombia, another coincidence is the participation of two members of the LGBTIQ+ community, also on different sides. On the one hand, there is Claudia López, former senator and former mayor of Bogotá, candidate for the Presidency by the center movement Imparables, and on the other, the economist Juan Daniel Oviedo, running mate of Paloma Valencia, to try to bring the votes from the center to the campaign of the moderate right.