He hasn't said it openly, but President Juan Manuel Santos seems concerned that the ideological center he champions isn't achieving its goal: stirring the emotions among the electorate that the candidates from both the right and the left are generating. Or"the extremes," as he calls them.
That's why the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who spends his life between Anapoima, Cundinamarca, Bogotá and several cities around the world giving lectures, escaped his silence and threw himself into the 2026 presidential campaign.
“Extremes only serve to divide,” he stated in a video he recorded and posted on his social media accounts on the afternoon of Thursday, October 16. He considered that moderation and the center “are the way forward” in the coming year.
“Today we have a left-wing extremist,” he commented.
“If a right-wing extremist arrives, all we end up with is an ungovernable country. And the likelihood of social unrest and blockades will increase. And so, amid shouting, the country doesn't move forward,” Santos said.
Comments against him were immediate. Vicky Dávila, for example, wrote on social media: “Juan Manuel Santos has thrown himself into the presidential campaign. He has a candidate, who is it?” she asked.
While Abelardo de la Espriella also asked him another question: “Fear?”
"A man who deceived Colombia can't be the one to preach: the people know that you don't take advice from the enemy. What you're starting to promote, Juan Manuel, is having another servile puppet in the presidency who will continue to cover up what you negotiated in the Odebrecht process. That's your real fear. The paths you've led the country down are like you: crooked.
Santos revealed his secrets and openly leaned towards the political center, which today has several candidates in line with him.
Although the Nobel Prize winner does not mention him, one of them is Sergio Fajardo, the Antioquian mathematician close to former Foreign Minister María Ángela Holguín, who was part of the Santos government.
Fajardo, who is now critical of the Petro government and its total peace policy, supported the agreements between the Santos administration and the FARC.
The former president actually has several loose cannons who now have presidential aspirations in 2026, several politicians close to the former head of state told SEMANA. Among them, Roy Barreras, who has never hidden his closeness to the Nobel Prize winner.
The former Colombian ambassador to the United Kingdom has not officially announced his presidential candidacy, but it's no secret that his moves point to the Casa de Nariño.
A figure like him could eventually bring Petro and Santos closer together again in 2026, and revive the Petrosantismo movement, which former President Álvaro Uribe has referred to several times, albeit not in a critical tone.
Santos also has sympathies for former Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo, although he did not hide his annoyance with the former diplomat's role in the Nicolás Maduro regime.
Murillo's candidacy is currently frozen, and no further news has emerged because he remains in the United States trying to regain the U.S. residency he lost when he became Gustavo Petro's foreign minister.
Juan Manuel Santos is also a friend of Juan Fernando Cristo, who was his Minister of the Interior, and of the former mayor of Bogotá, Claudia López.
