In Colombia, De la Espriella and Cepeda head to a runoff as Petro questions the results

Colombia will hold a presidential runoff between two candidates who embody irreconcilable visions for the country. Abelardo de la Espriella, the ultraconservative lawyer who ran as the outsider promising to break with everything, won the first round with 43.7% of the vote, with 99% of polling stations counted. Iván Cepeda, the candidate of the governing left, received 40.9%.

Shortly after the publication of the preliminary tally — the preconteo, which confirmed a tight second round — Colombian President Gustavo Petro said he rejected the results and denounced the inclusion of phantom voters in the electoral roll.

Petro announced barely two hours after polls closed that he would recognize only the final official count conducted by the nation’s judges, claiming — without evidence — that more than 800,000 people had been added to the electoral roll at the last minute. In his own statement, Cepeda also rejected the provisional results and demanded clarification. He said there was “information about a specific number of polling stations” they were reviewing where “atypical voting patterns” had appeared.

De la Espriella, far from calling for calm, went on the offensive against the president and his candidate. “Do not dare to disregard the results,” he snapped at Petro and Cepeda. “I call on the security forces, on the army of this nation, to activate the constitutional mechanism if this criminal, drug addict and miserable man intends to ignore the will of the Colombian people,” he said, referring to Petro. Democracy, he insisted, must be upheld “by reason or by force.”

The results laid bare a country split in two, and the presidency will now hinge on the three million people who did not vote for either of the candidates heading to the runoff.

Paloma Valencia, the candidate backed by former president Álvaro Uribe, took 6.9% of the tally (1.6 million votes) — a dramatic collapse that underscores the waning influence of Uribe, who dominated Colombian politics for two decades. Sergio Fajardo, the centrist candidate, surpassed 4% with more than a million votes. It is the share of these two candidates — and of the rest who remained on the margins — that will ultimately tip the balance in the second round.

De la Espriella’s first‑place finish came as a surprise: polls had placed him second, with Cepeda leading the race from the start. No one expected him to surpass 10.3 million votes by such a wide margin. The 47‑year‑old far-right lawyer turned the campaign into a spectacle that paid off: although he is as much a part of the system as any other contender, he managed to capitalize on public rejection of the establishment and traditional politics.

An avowed admirer of Donald Trump in the United States, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Javier Milei in Argentina, the criminal lawyer who once defended paramilitary groups and advocated negotiating their demobilization now calls for a hard‑line approach against armed organizations. He promises to solve in 90 days what no one has achieved in more than 60 years: a magic formula mixing air strikes, support from Israel and the United States, the destruction of coca crops, and 10 mega‑prisons. While Cepeda speaks of structural causes, De la Espriella speaks of force.

Cepeda is his antithesis. A 63-year-old left-wing senator and long-time defender of victims of paramilitary violence, Cepeda was for years one of Uribe’s most tenacious opponents, securing a first-instance conviction for witness tampering against the former president, although Uribe was later acquitted on appeal. With 9,649,081 votes, Cepeda represents the continuity of Gustavo Petro’s project: more social spending, dialogue with armed groups and greater opportunities for the forgotten in one of the world’s most unequal countries. He is the candidate feared by capital and idolized by those who have benefited most from Petro’s social policies: a program that has looked more than ever toward the base of the pyramid.

De la Espriella’s rise places Colombia squarely within a broader Latin American trend that has been gaining strength for years. Far‑right outsiders inspired by Trump have advanced election after election: Milei’s surge in Argentina, Bukele’s success in El Salvador, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Daniel Noboa in Ecuador. Colombia — which seemed to be moving in the opposite direction after Petro’s historic 2022 victory — has now opened the door to a radical right that has dethroned the traditional one and is one step away from governing the country.

The country also appears divided by territory. The coasts vote left, the interior votes right, and Bogotá follows its own logic. That electoral map repeated itself once again, despite every campaign’s efforts to break into rival strongholds. In places where Óscar Iván Zuluaga won in 2014, where the “no” prevailed in the 2016 referendum on a peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), or where Rodolfo Hernández triumphed in 2022, De la Espriella won this time. And where former president Juan Manuel Santos, the “yes” to peace, and Petro prevailed, Cepeda won. The biggest surprise usually comes from the capital, Bogotá, where Cepeda won this time with 41% of the vote, against 37% for the far‑right candidate and 9% for Valencia.

Paloma Valencia, who finished third, took only minutes to announce her “personal” support for De la Espriella — the same candidate she had attacked fiercely just days earlier in a last‑minute attempt to avoid her electoral collapse. “I want to congratulate him on his victory. It means Colombia will not fall into the hands of Cepeda and Petro’s communism,” she said. Her running mate, Juan Daniel Oviedo, said he will announce his position on June 3. “My loyalty is to Bogotá,” he said — a remark widely interpreted as a distancing from Valencia.

Former president Uribe also moved quickly, posting on X: “Colombians, we have lost. I humbly accept my responsibilities.” He added: “Dr. Abelardo De La Espriella has won. We keep our word: we will vote for him and ask others to vote for him and for Colombia, for the defense of the Constitution, of freedoms, of individual creativity, of social cohesion, of a fraternal economy, of a small and austere state.”

Sergio Fajardo celebrated his fourth‑place finish, with one million votes, and avoided taking a position on the runoff. “We’re going to reflect; we represent many people. And what we say will be crucial. We’ll be in conversations, but we’ll be here, fighting for our country,” he said.

Both candidates enter the runoff with weaknesses. Cepeda carries the weight of Petro’s four years in office: the perception of spiraling insecurity, the collapse of the health‑care system, corruption scandals that hit the administration, and anxiety over his economic approach to reducing the fiscal deficit. His profile is that of a senator who has spent most of his career in opposition, a defender of causes against the state — not that of a seasoned administrator. Nor is his running mate, Indigenous leader Aida Quilcué. And the Constituent Assembly Petro continues to champion hangs over his campaign like a specter, stirring distrust among a significant share of the electorate.

De la Espriella suffers from the same lack of experience in public administration, and his most extreme, hard‑right positions — his homophobic remarks, his iron‑fist approach unconcerned with human rights, his social conservatism — may energize his base but repel more moderate voters. And if he ends up embracing Uribe, the candidate who promised to break with everything will have broken his most important promise first.

That does not seem likely, however, to discourage his most fervent supporters. As has happened around the world — from Bolsonaro in Brazil to Vox in Spain — De la Espriella’s belligerent, radical tone has become extraordinarily normalized in recent weeks. And the vote that the left believes is a “shame vote” is beginning to turn into a vote that is increasingly proud.

Starting Monday, mobilizing the center vote — and the undecided — will be crucial. On Sunday, 23.3 million Colombians went to the polls, but in 21 days it will likely be the voters who do not identify with either extreme who decide who governs Colombia. Analysts seem to agree on one point: whoever takes office on August 7, the country faces four years of political hostility, mobilizations, and tensions that will once again split Colombia in two.

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