Hard-right, pro-Trump political outsider Abelardo de la Espriella secured an upset victory in Colombia’s presidential first round held on Sunday, 31 May. With nearly all ballots counted, De la Espriella secured 43.7 per cent of the vote, while left-wing senator Iván Cepeda Castro, widely seen as the political heir to President Gustavo Petro, finished second with 40.9 per cent.
The two will now face each other in a run-off on 21 June.
Shortly after the results were announced, President Gustavo Petro questioned the count, alleging irregularities in the electoral system and claiming inconsistencies in voter registration data. He argued that only the final judicial scrutiny process should be considered definitive.
Cepeda likewise raised concerns about the vote count and stopped short of immediately accepting the result. Colombian electoral authorities rejected suggestions of widespread fraud.
Major polls had consistently underestimated De la Espriella’s support during the final weeks of the campaign, with several surveys showing a narrower gap or even a slight lead for Cepeda heading into election day.
The result, therefore, marks a major breakthrough for De la Espriella, a lawyer and media personality nicknamed ‘The Tiger’. Amid Colombia’s increasingly unsustainable security crisis, he campaigned on promises of mega-prisons, a military-backed anti-cartel crackdown, expanded security powers, and a break with Petro’s ‘Total Peace’ strategy, which sought negotiations with guerrilla groups, criminal organizations, and armed factions.
Many voters increasingly viewed security, rather than economic policy, as the country’s most pressing concern. De la Espriella successfully capitalized on those fears by presenting himself as a strongman candidate capable of restoring order, similarly to what Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele achieved in El Salvador.
The election is also increasingly being framed as a broader ideological contest between Petro’s leftist legacy and the emerging nationalist, Trump-aligned new right in Latin America. In recent months, Petro and Trump repeatedly clashed over migration, drug trafficking, and the Venezuelan crisis, with Washington even threatening Colombia with a military intervention similar to the one seen in Venezuela at the beginning of 2026.
During the campaign, De la Espriella repeatedly praised Trump’s policies and called for stronger pressure on Petro’s government.
Addressing supporters after his first-round victory, De la Espriella rejected the allegations of fraud and vowed to defend the result. He declared that Colombians had voted for change and warned that the democratic will of voters must be respected.
‘Let’s defeat tyranny and absolutism!’ he wrote in the caption of a video posted on X after the results were announced. ‘We’ve made it to the run-off thanks to the more than 10 million Colombians who answered the call,’ De la Espriella continued, adding that ‘in 21 days, we’ll make history’.
The Colombian vote fits into a wider regional trend of right-wing realignment. Argentina is already governed by libertarian President Javier Milei, while José Antonio Kast secured a historic victory in Chile last year on a platform centred on security, migration, and conservative social values. Peru heads to a presidential run-off this week, where conservative candidate Keiko Fujimori currently holds a narrow lead in most polls over left-wing rival Roberto Sánchez. Brazil will follow in October with a highly competitive election between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and conservative challenger Flávio Bolsonaro.
With much of the traditional centre-right likely to consolidate behind De la Espriella, momentum currently appears to favour the hard-right frontrunner ahead of the run-off. Prediction markets reacted swiftly to the first-round result, with Polymarket showing a sharp post-election surge in De la Espriella’s odds of winning the presidency, reflecting growing expectations among investors and observers that Colombia may be heading towards a major political shift to the right.
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