Galán ve en elecciones de marzo la 'primera vuelta presidencial' y propone consulta para candidato del centro

Juan Manuel Galán is betting everything on March. The presidential hopeful and leader of the Nuevo Liberalismo party sat down recently to explain why the congressional elections scheduled for that month matter more than most people realize—and why they could reshape the entire presidential race before May ever arrives.

Galán carries his father's legacy. Luis Carlos Galán Sarmiento, the elder statesman assassinated in 1989, left behind a political movement and a set of principles that his son has spent decades stewarding. When asked if he has ever regretted handing those banners to César Gaviria in the aftermath of his father's death, Galán paused. It was intuition, he said. The country was drowning in narcoterrorism and violence. Gaviria's path seemed to offer a way forward—and it did. The 1991 Constitution emerged from that moment, carrying with it the Nuevo Liberalismo's imprint on human rights protections. His mother, Gloria Pachón de Galán, was surprised by the decision, but Galán consulted mentally with his father and made the call himself. He does not regret it.

The party's recent history has been rougher. After losing its legal standing, the Nuevo Liberalismo regained its personería in 2022—but only a month before the registration deadline closed. Then came a technical disaster: the ballot design buried the party's symbol beneath the Pacto Histórico, making it nearly invisible to poll workers. Voters confused the Nuevo Liberalismo's logo with the larger Liberal Party. Galán estimates they lost roughly 50,000 votes to that confusion alone. In half the voting tables across the country, they registered zero votes—a statistical anomaly that told the real story of institutional neglect.

Now Galán is thinking bigger. He is working to build strong legislative slates for Senate and Chamber seats, in coalition with smaller parties. More importantly, he has registered 1,100 candidates across all 32 departments for youth council elections—a deliberate investment in cultivating the next generation of party leadership. But his real focus is on what happens in March. The congressional elections, he insists, will function as the true first round of the presidential race. That is where the interparty consultations will take shape. Galán is proposing a mechanism: once polling restrictions lift, select six major surveys and use them to narrow the field to five presidential candidates. Those five would then compete in a formal interparty consultation on March 8, allowing for debates, forums, and national campaigning. The goal is to offer the center a unified option, a way to escape the extremes that he believes would make the country ungovernable for the next four years.

When the conversation turned to his brother, Bogotá's mayor, Galán was clear: they operate independently. Each has built his own political space. They respect each other but do not interfere. As the old saying goes about two famous Liberal brothers from the last century, Abdón is Abdón and Augusto is Augusto.

On intelligence and security, Galán's critique sharpens. He authored the state intelligence law, and he sees it being violated daily. Intelligence has become completely politicized, he said, serving a political regime rather than targeting criminal organizations as the law demands. It should be politically neutral—a principle honored worldwide—so that decision-makers receive unbiased information. Instead, the state is using intelligence to pursue judges, human rights defenders, journalists, and union leaders. To recover territorial control, Galán argues, Colombia needs a strategy that combines military force with state-building, infrastructure, and population protection. Critically, it needs financial intelligence. The Financial Information and Analysis Unit operates on a budget of 32 billion pesos while the Ministry of Equality receives 2 trillion. How can the country fight organizations like the Gulf Clan or the ELN—groups moving hundreds of millions of dollars through asset laundering and contraband—without financial intelligence capacity? Modern warfare is not just bullets, he said. It is financial intelligence.

On health, Galán wants to restore the public-private partnership model that worked for more than thirty years, guaranteeing near-universal coverage and protecting vulnerable families. He authored the law on orphan diseases, giving patients access to treatments that were once impossibly expensive. Today, people wait in lines unable to get their medications. On the economy, he rejects the annual tax reform treadmill. Instead, he envisions long-term state projects reaching toward 2050—transforming Colombia into an energy hub through renewable hydrogen, geothermal power, and offshore gas development. The altillanura and Orinoquía could become a global food factory, as Mato Grosso did in Brazil, transforming from the poorest state into the richest. He proposes that companies finance military engineering battalion projects for communities rather than pay additional taxes, and that the government make radical cuts to unproductive spending and ideologically-driven employment that has eroded institutional capacity.

Galán's mother, Gloria Pachón, remains vital—still practicing journalism at an age when most would have retired. That vitality, Galán suggested, says something about the family's commitment to the work ahead.