The election victory of independent candidate Álvaro Uribe in 2002 put an end to dominance of two party politics in Colombia.

Mariano Ospina Rodríguez, a prominent member of Alcántara's government, supported the return of the Jesuits to the country and reformed the education system.

[9] Alcántara was succeeded in office by General Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, whose supporters created the Liberal Party in 1848.

One year later, Mosquera's detractors Ospina Rodríguez and José Eusebio Caro formed the Conservative Party, which grouped the ministerial liberals, most of the authorities of the Catholic Church and important landowners.

In the newspaper La Civilización of October 4, 1849, Ospina and Caro published the conservative program that became the ideological platform for the new party.

The country began an unstable period of economic decay and multiple short civil wars between states and parties.

Núñez was re-elected in 1884 with the support of the Conservative Party, and began the process known as the Regeneration (Spanish: La Regeneración), in which a new constitution was written.

The modern Republic of Colombia was founded with a centralized and protectionist government, and an education system managed by the Catholic Church.

The overt partisanship and the use of the state power exacerbated old tensions, which would ultimately lead from small scale conflicts like the war of 1895 to historical periods such as "La Violence".

However, the emerging working class felt irritated with the consecutive conservative governments and began supporting the Liberal Party, winning the presidency with Enrique Olaya Herrera in 1930.

Fearing a possible dictatorship, members of the Conservative and Liberal parties created an alliance called the National Front (Spanish: Frente Nacional) that prevented Rojas from being re-elected.

During this historical period conservative dissidents led by Jorge Leyva Urdaneta opposed the pact, and presented him as presidential candidate in 1958 and 1962.

Restrepo was close to the government of Andres Pastrana and was criticized by members of his party who supported different candidates like Uribe and Noemí Sanín.

In 2010, the Conservative Party won the second-greatest number of votes of any political force in Colombia, and joined Santos' coalition.

[23] His comments generated a dispute with the party president, José Darío Salazar,[24] who was being investigated by the Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes at the time.

[27] Despite attempts from President Santos to be inclusive and allow input from the opposition in the final agreement,[28] the party's anti-peace stance did not permit them to collaborate.

The party's primary focus was on the 2018 presidential election, in which former President Uribe's appointed candidate Iván Duque Márquez advocated reversing the peace process.

Commentators believe his complaints are aimed at running independently in coalition with the ruling party, the Democratic Center, and receiving favors.

[30][31] The party's current program includes several objectives: to continue the search for peace in Colombia (following the examples of former presidents Guillermo León Valencia, Belisario Betancur and Andrés Pastrana, as members of the party), to preserve national unity and the continuing belief in God held by the majority of Colombians, the need for a reform of the 1991 constitution in order to correct some of its flaws to promote the modernization of the state, to fight unemployment, poverty, and lack of security and to extend and defend property rights.