{"id":22594,"date":"2026-05-13T11:48:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T11:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/22594\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T11:48:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T11:48:08","slug":"electoral-clout-of-sexist-attitudes-tests-its-weight-in-the-contest-between-paloma-valencia-and-abelardo-de-la-espriella-international","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/22594\/","title":{"rendered":"Electoral clout of sexist attitudes tests its weight in the contest between Paloma Valencia and Abelardo de la Espriella | International"},"content":{"rendered":"

The far-right candidate is navigating treacherous ground to reach the second round of the Colombian presidential election. Abelardo de la Espriella, who is vying for second place in the polls with Uribista candidate Paloma Valencia<\/a>, gave two interviews \u2014 one on radio and one on television \u2014 that have dominated the debate due to his misogynistic remarks. On the radio program Piso 8, he claimed that he gained many female votes because of the size of his genitals and asked the reporter present to zoom in on a photo that highlighted them. On television, he called a veteran journalist ignorant when she asked him about a comment the criminal lawyer had made years earlier: \u201cEthics has nothing to do with the law.\u201d Journalists and politicians came out in defense of women and criticized the lawyer, making sexism a central issue in the electoral arena. This presents an opportunity for Valencia to gain ground, but De la Espriella also has a path to maintain his lead in the polls.<\/p>\n

The electoral opportunity was first recognized by Juan Daniel Oviedo, Valencia\u2019s vice-presidential running mate, who shared a video of De La Espriella\u2019s radio program appearance on social media. \u201cTo say that he won the female vote \u2018because of how big he is\u2019 only speaks to his own small-mindedness,\u201d he wrote. The far-right candidate\u2019s misstep resonated particularly with Ovideo, an economist, who had been the target of homophobic comments from De La Espriella just days after the presidential primary in which Oviedo faced Valencia and other right-wing candidates. Rather than damaging his campaign, these comments ended up giving the former Bogot\u00e1 councilman more visibility: he garnered the second-highest number of votes, second only to Valencia, and thus became her running mate for president.<\/p>\n

But Oviedo capitalized at that moment on votes from the political center, which his running mate, Valencia, now faces the difficult challenge of winning over without losing the support of her traditional base on the established right. That\u2019s why, when the senator speaks about gender, she always does so from a conservative perspective: she doesn\u2019t consider abortion a right, she says feminism is left-wing, and she talks about defending children who are adopted by diverse families (like that of her vice-presidential candidate).<\/p>\n

This Tuesday, Valencia also saw an electoral opportunity and rejected the comments of her right-wing opponent. But she did so discreetly, without mentioning his name or speaking of sexism. Instead, she suggested an apology. \u201cWomen journalists shouldn\u2019t have to put up with sexual jokes, offensive insinuations, or personal attacks for daring to ask questions,\u201d she said on her social media, adding: \u201cWhoever is wrong in their treatment of women should acknowledge it and apologize.\u201d A middle ground in which she points out her opponent\u2019s obvious sexism without calling him a misogynist. A stark contrast to the reaction of the left-wing candidate, Iv\u00e1n Cepeda<\/a>: \u201cWe must defeat the patriarchy in Colombian society.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, those surrounding Valencia on the campaign trail were less discreet. \u201cSexist attitudes cannot continue to be normalized or disguised as humor, nonsense, or vulgarity. That is neither charisma nor authenticity. It is a lack of respect,\u201d said former senator David Luna, who is campaigning for Valencia.<\/p>\n

Although the Uribista candidate has much to gain if De la Espriella\u2019s comments backfire, she could also lose a great deal if the far-right campaign portrays her as the \u201cwoke\u201d candidate, the one who espouses political correctness. This is demonstrated by the reaction of Senator-elect and influencer Alejandro Bermeo, who is close to De la Espriella\u2019s campaign communications team and a member of the party that endorsed him, National Salvation. \u201cThe establishment, with the direct backing of Paloma Valencia, is fabricating a #MeToo movement against Abelardo de la Espriella,\u201d he said on social media. \u201cLike desperate \u2018progressives,\u2019 they\u2019re using gender issues as a weapon to eliminate anyone who doesn\u2019t belong to the \u2018yes we can\u2019 club of watered-down progressivism,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Valencia\u2019s campaign has already struggled to attract a segment of the right-wing electorate, who are drawn to De la Espreilla not only for his \u201coutsider\u201d rhetoric but also because they perceive him as \u201cstronger.\u201d \u201cI have the balls to do what Colombia needs done,\u201d the candidate declared at an event in Bogot\u00e1 last week, in another instance where he elected to allude to his genitals to emphasize his gender. He has also stated that he does fight against violence against women, having represented, as a lawyer, the family of Rosa Elvira Cely<\/a>, a woman brutally raped and murdered in Bogot\u00e1 in 2012, and Natalia Ponce de Le\u00f3n, a woman attacked with acid by her partner in 2014.<\/p>\n

What remains to be seen is whether a sexist incident will deflate a candidacy or simply prove ineffective among right-wing voters. Engineer Rodolfo Hern\u00e1ndez, who ran against Petro four years ago as an outsider to the political establishment and a right-wing candidate, was hit hard by a video published by journalist Daniel Coronell two days before the election, in which he appears on a yacht in Miami dancing with several women in swimsuits. The former mayor of Bucaramanga had also previously stated that \u201cideally, women should dedicate themselves to raising children,\u201d but that comment did not prevent him from advancing to the second round.<\/p>\n

Another example of this lack of impact was provided by Donald Trump in 2016, when he was the Republican candidate. A month before the election, an audio recording surfaced<\/a> in which the businessman spoke about grabbing women\u2019s genitals whenever he felt like it: \u201cWhen you\u2019re a star, they let you do anything to them.\u201d Despite the scandal the audio generated, he defeated Hillary Clinton, who represented \u201cold politics\u201d for a large part of the electorate. The anti-establishment vote can carry more weight than the rejection of sexism.<\/p>\n

That has been precisely De La Espriella\u2019s strategy. His AI-generated videos repeatedly claim that Valencia represents \u201cthe usual suspects,\u201d a term that includes not only traditional Uribismo but also the senator\u2019s old political rivals: former president Juan Manuel Santos<\/a>, presidential candidate Claudia L\u00f3pez, and Interior Minister Armando Benedetti. None of the three are even remotely involved in the Uribista campaign, but the far-right candidate\u2019s campaign has sought to establish this narrative. Valencia has defended herself by arguing that she is \u201cone of the usual suspects,\u201d but in the sense that she has always worked for Colombia, while he has lived abroad for many years. This second narrative has not been as successful.<\/p>\n

Valencia and De La Espriella know that any misstep between now and May 31 will determine who wins among right-wing voters and advances to a virtually certain runoff against left-wing Senator Cepeda. They also know that sexism played a role in the campaign, but it\u2019s still unclear whether it worked in favor of or against the candidate who boasted about his genitals to a reporter.<\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The far-right candidate is navigating treacherous ground to reach the second round of the Colombian presidential election. Abelardo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22595,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[359,12052,389,194,363,4619,364,12051,365,12050,95],"class_list":["post-22594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-valencia","tag-abelardo-de-la-espriella","tag-armando-benedetti","tag-colombia","tag-donald-trump","tag-gustavo-petro","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-ivan-cepeda","tag-juan-manuel-santos-calderon","tag-paloma-valencia","tag-rodolfo-hernandez","tag-valencia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}