On 31 May, more than 41 million Colombians are called upon to choose between three visions of the country that, presented in different rhetorical packaging, ultimately reduce to two elementary questions. Who pays and who benefits. Everything else, the speeches on security, the economy, healthcare, territory, is ornament. The next government will inherit more than 27,000 members of organised armed groups operating in nearly 600 municipalities, a fiscal deficit that no campaign quantifies honestly, and a healthcare system whose accumulated debt nobody knows exactly how to settle. It is worth, then, examining the three programmes calmly. Not to establish a winner, but to understand what each one proposes when the campaign varnish is stripped away.
The Lawyer and the Catalogue
Abelardo de la Espriella entered this race without a published government programme. La Silla Vacía documented it. When analysts began reviewing his proposals, they had to rely on interviews and social media posts because the candidate had produced no formal document. What eventually appeared was a text of a few pages, in bullet-point format, that his own campaign team described as the beginning of a programme that would expand over time. It did not expand substantially. What did expand was the catalogue of references. Milei’s chainsaw, Bukele’s mega-prisons, Uribe’s Democratic Security, all assembled with the promise of signing 90 decrees in the first days of government. The project’s name is “País Milagro”, borrowed directly from Bukele’s discourse in El Salvador.
The programme’s central contradiction appears on its first page. The candidate promises “absolute respect for the Constitution and legitimate authority” and, in the same breath, announces that he will govern his first months essentially by decree, making broad use of executive power to implement reforms that, in several cases, would require constitutional amendment. Life imprisonment for rapists and child murderers, for example, is prohibited by Article 34 of the Constitution. Enabling it would require a constitutional reform. The programme proposes it anyway, as though the distance between the announcement and legal reality were a minor detail.
On security, the flagship proposal is to recover territorial control within ninety days through military offensive, resume aerial fumigation with glyphosate, build ten maximum-security mega-prisons and capture or neutralise ten heads of criminal organisations within that same initial period. The Fundación Ideas para la Paz notes that none of these measures comes with a coherent theory of change. More prisons do not necessarily reduce crime, more security forces do not automatically guarantee more security, and the next government will face a high deficit that makes it impossible to simultaneously finance military expansion, new prisons and social provision. For Bogotá specifically, De la Espriella promises to deploy 82,000 veterans in neighbourhoods under the scheme he called “Primera Línea de Seguridad”. La Silla Vacía noted the obvious. There are no details on what powers these groups will have, how a national government will grant them or how they will be controlled, with the ghost of the Convivir still present in the country’s memory.
“Colombia tiene todo para ser una gran nación y aquí estamos nosotros para hacerlo porque nosotros no somos mercaderes de ilusiones somos empresarios de realidades”, says De la Espriella’s programme.
The mechanism is simple, as are all programmes designed to win elections rather than to govern. A promise of spectacle on security, a promise of austerity that falls on the State but not on those who benefit from its contracts, and an economy that activates itself once the market recovers confidence. Nobody explains with what resources. Nobody needs to before 31 May.
The Senator and the Manual
Paloma Valencia’s programme is called Colombia Más Grande 2026. It is more elaborate than De la Espriella’s, more presentable, with ordered chapters and numbered proposals. But on closer examination, a pattern emerges. A good part of her bets are slightly updated versions of instruments that have already circulated in Colombia under other names, or measures that transfer public money to the private sector presented as benefits for workers.
Take employment. Valencia proposes subsidising 30 per cent of the minimum wage for twelve months to companies that hire young people aged 18 to 28. The logic is direct. The State pays companies to do what they should be doing anyway. When the subsidy ends, the young person remains in the same structural precarity or is replaced by another beneficiary in the next twelve-month cycle. It is a measure with a track record in Colombia and the region, and impact studies rate it, at best, as having a transitory effect on formal employment. There is no evidence that it modifies the underlying cycle.
On economics, Valencia shares with De la Espriella the pro-market orientation. She reduces the tax burden on SMEs, promotes regional free zones and expands free trade agreements with an emphasis on Asia. Her most revealing proposal in this area is to convert the Foreign Ministry into a Ministry of Foreign Trade, that is, to replace political diplomacy with commercial management, to treat foreign policy as an extension of the export agenda. An analysis published in Vanguardia put it plainly. It is a proposal that would strip Colombia of room for manoeuvre at a moment when major powers are reconfiguring their alliances and the margin for strategic autonomy is narrowing.
On security, Valencia would increase spending by 20 trillion pesos over the four-year term, equivalent to around 4 per cent of GDP. She proposes ending Petro’s total peace policy, returning military logic as the central axis and restoring the link with Washington along the lines of Plan Colombia. The problem is that context no longer exists. According to the FIP analysis, this reading ignores the shift in the international context and current conditions of cooperation, which make it almost impossible to receive the support of the Plan Colombia era. Valencia knows this or should know it. She proposes it anyway.
“Su discurso parte de la crítica a políticas recientes del Gobierno Petro y propone un giro hacia un modelo que priorice la autoridad del Estado, la inversión privada y la estabilidad jurídica.”
On healthcare, her position amounts to not dismantling existing mechanisms abruptly, improving quality and coverage without transforming the system’s architecture. It is, in other words, defending the EPS model with different vocabulary. On education, she proposes bilingualism from preschool, training half a million people in technology and the “Ruta 3E” (estudiar, emplearse o emprender). These are objectives oriented towards training labour for the market rather than building citizenship. Bilingualism from preschool, in a country where the gaps between urban and rural public schools are abysmal, functions in practice as an elite policy. Families with access to good education benefit; those without receive the announcement.
The Senator and the Programme
Iván Cepeda is the Pacto Histórico candidate. He is, in other words, the continuity candidate. This carries political costs in a country where a significant part of the population evaluates Gustavo Petro’s management negatively. But he also has something the other two do not. A 433-page programme with coherent internal architecture, where one can trace the relationship between the diagnosis, the measure and the expected outcome.
On economics, the central proposal is the Ley de Austeridad Republicana, whose premise requires little elaboration.
“Los miembros de mi gobierno vivirán como vive la mayoría del pueblo colombiano.”
Cepeda proposes reducing the president’s and ministers’ salaries from day one, eliminating luxury expenditures from the executive, not creating new institutions but purging the existing ones. In parallel, broadening the tax base, taxing large fortunes and reducing corporate exemptions. Additional resources would go to social programmes and expansion of public services. He also proposes strengthening Colpensiones as the backbone of the pension system, in direct contrast to Valencia, who bets on a model of individual savings and seed capital from birth, that is, transferring pension responsibility to each individual and removing it from any collective guarantee.
The difference between the two models is not technical. It is a decision about what kind of society one wants. Colpensiones is a solidarity-based pay-as-you-go system. Those who work support those who retire. Individual savings is a market system. Each person accumulates what they can, and if they cannot, they have nothing. In a country where 60 per cent of workers are informal, the bet on individual savings is, in practice, a bet on leaving the majority without protection in old age.
On security, Cepeda’s proposal starts from a diagnosis that the FIP qualifies as the closest to the current nature of the problem. The Colombian conflict is historically tied to territorial and economic exclusion, and cannot be resolved through state coercion as a sole instrument. He proposes advancing implementation of the Peace Agreement, protecting communities and transforming territory. This does not make him immune to criticism. The mechanisms of territorial transformation are fragile, implementation of the Agreement is progressing slowly, and the country will inherit armed groups present in 14 active conflict zones. The question of timelines and resources is legitimate. But at least it is a question that the programme acknowledges rather than promising that everything resolves in ninety days.
On healthcare, Cepeda proposes moving towards a universal system without EPS intermediation, with the public hospital network as the backbone. It is the most difficult proposal to implement, the one that encounters the greatest resistance from sectors with interests in the current model, and also the most coherent with the diagnosis that all candidates share in private. That the Colombian system has a structural flaw that cosmetic adjustments do not correct.
What the Programmes Do Not Say
There is something that television debates do not show and that programmes do not say in so many words. Behind each proposal lies a decision about who bears the cost of the State and who receives its benefits. When De la Espriella promises to cut company taxes and build mega-prisons, he is proposing that social spending compress so that security expands, and that the fiscal burden continue to be borne by those who already bear it. When Valencia proposes subsidising private hiring with public money and transforming the Foreign Ministry into a trade promotion agency, she is proposing that the State finance entrepreneurs’ decisions without guaranteeing anything structural in return. When Cepeda proposes taxing large fortunes and strengthening collective protection systems, he is proposing that those who have more pay more. That generates opposition. It always does, in Colombia and everywhere else it has been tried.
The next government will face a high fiscal deficit and severe budgetary constraints that no campaign quantifies honestly. That is the figure that promises prefer to ignore. Because if taken seriously, many of them collapse on their own. The mega-prisons cost. Militarising the roads costs. The minimum wage subsidy costs. Bilingualism from preschool costs. The question is who pays. And that question, in this campaign, almost nobody answers honestly…
G.S.
Sources
Fundación Ideas para la Paz. “The gaps and questions in the security proposals of presidential candidates”. El Espectador, 25 May 2026.
Razón Pública. “Elections 2026: Comparative analysis of presidential candidates’ proposals”. May 2026.
La Silla Vacía. “The landmark proposals in Abelardo De La Espriella’s programme”. May 2026.
La Silla Vacía. “The landmark proposals in Paloma Valencia’s programme”. May 2026.
Semana. “Iván Cepeda, Abelardo de la Espriella, Paloma Valencia and Sergio Fajardo: how they plan to defuse three economic time bombs”. April 2026.
Valora Analitik. “Iván Cepeda’s plan to cut his own salary as president”. May 2026.
Vanguardia. “The foreign policy of Cepeda, De la Espriella and Valencia”. April 2026.
