Fajardo accepts coffee with Valencia but demands public setting, fueling alliance speculation

Sergio Fajardo said yes to coffee with Paloma Valencia, but not in the way she had imagined. When the senator and fellow centrist candidate extended the invitation—a move widely read as a bid to pull Fajardo into her coalition before the first round of voting—Fajardo accepted with conditions that turned a private meeting into political theater. He wanted it public. He wanted it in Barranquilla, at the Hotel El Prado, at 7:30 in the morning. He wanted all of Colombia listening.

The timing mattered. Valencia had made her move just after new polling data from Invamer and Guarumo suggested that Abelardo de la Espriella, not Fajardo, would advance to a runoff against Iván Cepeda. The numbers were stark: Cepeda led with 44.6 percent, de la Espriella had climbed to 31.6 percent, and Valencia herself had slipped to 14 percent. That decline had accelerated since she selected Juan Daniel Oviedo as her running mate—a choice designed to consolidate centrist voters but one that seemed to be cannibalizing support from other moderate candidates. Fajardo and fellow centrist Claudia López were both now polling below 3 percent.

When Fajardo announced his acceptance, he did so with a flourish. "Yes, let's have coffee," he said. "Tomorrow morning here in Barranquilla at the Hotel El Prado. Let it be a public conversation so all of Colombia can hear." Then he pivoted to his campaign message: he would listen to her arguments and explain why the country needed serious, secure change—language that pointedly excluded the polarizing names of Gustavo Petro and Álvaro Uribe. He was ready, he said.

Valencia tried twice to call him to confirm, both times with reporters present, hoping to nail down the details. She had obligations in Antioquia that Saturday and wanted to move the meeting up. But when she dialed, Fajardo didn't answer. The meeting eventually happened on the morning of March 23 at the Hotel El Prado, starting at 7:30 a.m., and observers were already parsing what it might mean. María Isabel Nieto, the campaign director for Oviedo, posted cryptically on social media: "Something's coming."

The ghost of another coffee hung over this one. In 2018, Fajardo had met with Humberto de la Calle, the Liberal Party's presidential candidate. De la Calle had finished with roughly 400,000 votes. Fajardo had fallen short by about 250,000 votes in his bid to overtake Petro for the second round—a loss that many of his supporters believed a formal alliance with De la Calle could have prevented. The two candidates together would have commanded enough votes to reshape the runoff entirely, potentially delivering Fajardo to a head-to-head matchup he might have won. Instead, the coffee never became a coalition. De la Calle was constrained by Liberal Party leadership; Fajardo's camp said he hadn't opened the door wide enough. The versions diverged, but the result was the same: a missed opportunity that haunted Fajardo's political trajectory.

Now, eight years later, the question was whether this coffee would be different. Dora Ramírez Vallejo, a professor of political discourse analysis at Eafit and Bolivariana universities, saw Fajardo's acceptance as a calculated move. By saying yes, she argued, Fajardo was performing the role he had built his brand around: the democratic politician, the listener, the man willing to engage across ideological lines. But he was doing it on his own terms. The insistence on a public venue, on transparency, on his right to explain and persuade—these were not concessions. They were assertions of control. "He accepts the meeting with Paloma," Ramírez Vallejo said, "but keeps intact the symbolic hierarchy from which he speaks: the idea that he explains, he argues, he guides, while the other listens or debates."

The framing was everything. When Fajardo tweeted that he would listen with humility and conviction, he was not positioning himself as a supplicant seeking a home in Valencia's campaign. He was positioning himself as a teacher in a conversation with a student. The public setting transformed what might have been a backroom negotiation into a performance of reasonableness and civility—a chance to show voters that he was the adult in the room, the one willing to talk while others shouted. Whether that performance would translate into votes, or into an actual alliance, remained to be seen. But Fajardo had made clear that if he was going to move, it would be on his own terms, in front of everyone, with his message intact.