Sings the loser of love, José Luis Perales, And what is he like? Where did he fall in love with you? Where is it from? What do you spend your free time doing? Ask him why has he stolen a piece of my life? Many people are thinking something like this, especially Latin American analysts about Colombia’s libertarian candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, after he won the first round of the presidential elections last Sunday. This is also asked by candidate Iván Cepeda, who will go to the second round against him, and Paloma Valencia, Uribe’s candidate, the establishment and the media, who were the big losers.
Is it any surprise that De la Espriella has won the first round of the elections in Colombia 2026? It is called surprise because we say “not understand.” And we haven’t understood for a while. Is it any surprise that Trump won in 2016? Is it any surprise that Bolsonaro won in 2018? Surprise that Bukele won in 2019? Surprise that Milei won in 2023? We always say surprise. And there isn’t any. We do not know how to read society, we are full of senses of modernity and moral superiority and far from common senses and the triumph of yopitalism.
In Colombia everything is a matter of style
Colombia is a conservative, modest country, where everything is done gently, killing but with good education and everything in goodness (crime with good writing). And in those we have been with the fact that the rural elite governed us with Uribe (they killed themselves but for a good cause), the bourgeois elite of the past with Santos (making peace but not fulfilling it), the new money of Power Point with Duque (social explosion, 84 dead but moving on now). But the popular ones arrived, zambos and blacks and Indians with Petro, and everything bothered: the tone, the style, the taste. And there, everything changed: the tone, the manner, the style of the President, provoking, picking fights with the elites, the journalists, the media, the women, the institutions, the politicians, the judges. He despaired and exasperated the goodness Colombian Then, modesty was lost and to those who are guevón, faggot.
And we arrived at 2026 and Don Petro, the moral and aesthetic provocateur of Colombia, came up with a more provocative, ignominious and desperate one. One that also attracts media, journalists, upstart middle classes, evangelicals, new money and attacks with lawsuits anyone who dares to disbelieve in its capitalist success. Petro says that he does it to defend the people because he is the people; De la Espriella does not love the people, he does not give a damn, but he entertains them and invites them to follow him to achieve freedom, yopitalism and get rid of Petro. Two tones in combat: the bombastic bombastic discursive with courses on social justice and revolutionary morality from Petro (his models would be Lula, Mujica, Cristina, Correa, Evo, López Obrador) and De la Espriella who has digital rhetoric of insults, jokes, provocations, entertainment, bullying (his models would be Milei, Bukele, Trump and Bolsonaro).
In this context in which “the people” are far from the media and information, close to networks and having a good time, attached to their beliefs and needs, realities, government works, or ideologies do not matter. (By the way, Petro has been a great ruler for the poor, the military, peasants and common people to whom he increased their capitalism, he has had the lowest possible unemployment, the dollar has been strong, more than half of the foreign public debt and many more capitalist loves have been paid. And the rich did very well. Only the middle class we carry the package. Nothing matters, everything is a matter of style, in the battle of provocations in the networks as a playing field and journalists as replicating fools. Journalists hate them, but they publish them with erotic insistence: they report hating Petro because he screws them up a lot… praising De la Espriella, even though he is the bully against freedom of expression.
Cepeda, the ghost
And why don’t we talk about Cepeda? That is the question of the campaign. Little is said about him, Petro is the show, the candidate, the eternal media and digital one. Cepeda is a good guy. A classic leftist. A brave senator who has assumed the fight against Uribe as his mission on earth. A progressive friend says that it is “pure good sense and good sense. None of Petro’s narcissistic ego. Of course, good sense and good sense are not show-offs.”
In what we see and they let us see. Cepeda speaks while reading, he is always serious and solemn (and that is very bad in Colombia, he must be hiding something, we think; better that he be extroverted and “recochero”), he seems to make sense, but we don’t know, it is difficult for us to understand it. It is also true that Cepeda does not fight digitally because he considers that it betrays his essence, his authenticity and enters into the false game of right-wing dilemmas (his followers do fight him!).
His candidacy has been built by Petro, who is loved and hated equally, feared and praised equally; by his political rivals, Uribe’s political daughter, that carrion pigeon, or the extroverted false tiger in the land of jaguars; by the media and journalists who, since they do not understand him, hate him (remember that Bourdieu already About television He said it: journalists judge what seems extraordinary based on their structural ignorance: better a vulgar adjective or De la Espriella’s dance than Cepeda-like sense).
Thus, Cepeda is like a ghost, a stranger whom the bourgeoisie, the wannabes of the showbiz and the new moneythe aspirational middle class, are afraid of him. Those same people love their rival for that reason: anti-Petrism. While De la Espriella claims to be a brave tiger, the other is a Carrion Pigeon, Cepeda looks like a sloth bear.
Maybe that’s his problem, looking like a sloth bear. He doesn’t really know who or what he is, nor does he like to play in cool and digital pop fields. He does not want to betray himself in his coherence with his left-wing thoughts. It’s kind of boring there. And that he is always talking about Uribe, it is his cause, his karma, his reason for being. And Petro always explains it.
Faced with a ghost of Cepeda, De la Espriella is euphoric
A guy without ideas or political verisimilitude creates a euphoric characterdaring, extroverted, designed with 40% Milei (the advertising, the phrases, the destructive adjective, what was put out as a show, the creation of events as if they were recitals, the AI stories and how it cannot be the Lion claims to be the Tiger when in Colombia we are jaguars, even in that it is false). 30% Bukele, from whom he copies making meaningless megaprisons and without knowing for whom, copies the hygienic style of neat beard, impeccable clothes of new moneydivine inspiration to govern, beautiful woman and family of God). 20% Trump, that’s it iammillionairethat thing about how to make $$$, I am capitalism. 10% Bolsonaro, by converting from sin to the miracle of being God’s faithful and wearing the shirt of the Colombian soccer team as an emblem of national love at the time of the World Cup. De la Espriella’s edible formula is, then, that it is an egg arepa with Milei choripan, Bukele pupusa and Trump barbiquiu sauce.
And what is he like? The digital analyst Andres Carvajal He says that Abelardo is “pure farce, AI and pyrotechnics. An effective toupee campaign. A strident silicone manipulation that has managed to move the emotions and causes of many.” The diary The Country He counts it as “a lifestyle” that is “his campaign style. When he is on stage, he lights gunpowder, flies drones, dances to videos of tigers – the animal with which he identifies – made with AI.” The representative of bourgeois journalism, Felipe Lopezwrites that “he is an eccentric lawyer, surrounded by uncomfortable clients and the excesses of a tropical millionaire.”
Where did he fall in love with you? In the networks, where he insults and sings, in the media where he provokes and dances, on the stages where he does shows, in the interviews where they don’t ask him if they don’t let him exhibit his vulgarity, in your show new era euphoric and hallucinated, in its transgression. Since, as the artist says Lucas Ospinait is transgression “that allows one to stand out in the electoral arena (…) Transgression as a political weapon capable of reaching varied and dispersed groups and unifying them on the basis of discontent, through univocal slogans and under the quasi-religious illusion of an immediate staging that foresees a change from one day to the next (…) This transgressive attitude has a crucial political dimension: it allows followers to enjoy the illusion of being able to do the same in their own life and with his own voice.”
Where is it from? It is from the Caribbean to inhabit the exaggeration, it is called Italian to have the good taste of wine, it is from Miami where its brilliance is authentic.
What do you spend your free time doing? To talk about himself, to defend criminals those who do not free from anything but charge them a lot, to insult women, homosexuals, indigenous people, black people, leftists, the journalists. not to ethics nor to democracy because “that” has nothing to do with it. He dedicates his free and paid time to insulting.
Why has he stolen a piece of my life? Out of vanity, out of boredom with his self, out of his yopitalism, out of screwing with Uribism and Petrism, for giving himself the pleasure of being president.
The result: The filth won, the solemnity lost.
And now?
The map of electoral results shows that urban Colombia wants capitalism and show. And that is why Rodolfo Hernández in 2022 and De la Espriella in 2026 in the first round added 51%, while the progressives Petro in 2026 and now Cepeda 40%. At the time, Petro won in the second round, convincing those with blank votes, those who were undecided, and more voters. Therein lies the challenge for Cepeda.
Until now, it has been the musical concert, football and boardwalk show (very digital, very media, very fun) vs classroom rhetorical show, ideological event, moral solemnity to which people and militancy It has given him a party, enjoyment, self-confidence… being a cool bore.
The key for both candidates will be to move away from the past called Uribe and Petro, to focus on the future, for De la Espriella to show that he can govern and not continue being the eccentric clown and for Cepeda to be himself, play in the cool and popular, enter the cooltural battle to promote the celebration of the common, mobilize young people, create his political epic and not Petro’s.
For now, my right-wing friend says that with De la Espriella “at least there is more hope. And a happy, congregated and abundant people move forward.”
We Colombians like it soft, but we are betting on the strident.
And my analyst friend Lucas Ospina He believes that “perhaps a triumph of De la Espriella’s electoral enterprise will cure us, finally, of believing we are better than other countries, just for boasting of having ‘the oldest democracy in the region’. The distance between the Colombian exception and the rest of the Latin American map is only a margin, a deviation of a degree that, under a government of this tendency, marks a firm return to the historical pattern of imperial submission and to the writer Antonio Caballero’s maxim that in Colombia “each president has been worse than the previous one.”
The brutal realism of Milei, Bukele, Trump and Bolsonaro stalks Colombia, and it is not a metaphor, it is our nightmare in real time.
*This article was originally published in Amphibia Magazine.
