- Lead. Abelardo de la Espriella, a criminal defense lawyer who had never held elected office, finished first in Colombia’s May 31 presidential vote with 43.74%, more than doubling what polls had predicted for him.
- Fact. He leads Iván Cepeda — President Gustavo Petro’s chosen successor — by more than 670,000 votes. A runoff is set for June 21.
- Stake. De la Espriella has modelled himself on Donald Trump and Javier Milei and promised to reverse Petro’s guerrilla peace talks, restore extradition deals with Washington, and shrink the federal government.
Colombia’s first-round presidential ballot on May 31 produced its biggest polling miss in years. De la Espriella, founder of the “Defenders of the Homeland” movement, secured 43.74% of the national vote, far ahead of Cepeda’s 40.90%, according to electoral authorities in Bogotá, with neither candidate reaching the 50% threshold required for an outright win. A second-round vote will be held on June 21, according to Al Jazeera’s reporting from Bogotá.
A result that wrong-footed the pollsters
Pre-election surveys had broadly expected Cepeda, a veteran human-rights senator and standard-bearer for Petro’s Historic Pact coalition, to finish ahead in the first round. The margin of de la Espriella’s lead — more than 670,000 votes — left analysts recalibrating their models. A Cepeda voter in the capital captured the sentiment: “Everyone is a little surprised. These results don’t match the polls.”
De la Espriella won 16 of Colombia’s 32 departments, carrying interior urban strongholds where anxiety about crime dominates voter priorities. Cepeda held coastal and border departments where poverty and cross-border trade concerns outweigh law-and-order messaging. Former President Álvaro Uribe’s preferred candidate, conservative Senator Paloma Valencia, took less than 7% and is now eliminated. Her roughly three million first-round supporters are the most coveted swing bloc going into the runoff.
Two contrasting visions for Colombia
De la Espriella’s campaign positioned itself as a clash between “Los Nunca” — the perennially excluded — and “Los Siempre” — the entrenched establishment. He has pledged to end Petro’s “total peace” negotiations with the ELN guerrilla group, restore extradition of narco-traffickers to the United States, and cut social spending he describes as clientelism. His tone and aesthetic are deliberately Milei-esque: irreverent, social-media-native, and openly hostile to the political class.
Cepeda represents continuity with Petro’s four years in office — expanded social programmes, a push for drug decriminalisation, and a more arm’s-length posture toward Washington. He carries the incumbent’s record as both credential and liability: Petro’s approval has hovered around 30% in recent surveys. Should de la Espriella consolidate Uribe-aligned conservative votes and attract disaffected centre voters, he enters the runoff as favourite.
Broader regional echoes
The Colombia race is the latest test of a pattern reshaping Latin American politics: law-and-order outsiders without traditional party machinery overperforming poll expectations. The continent is watching Bogotá closely, not least because Peru is simultaneously navigating its own high-stakes presidential runoff that pits competing ideological traditions against a similarly restless electorate. With three weeks until the June 21 vote, Colombia’s political calculus now turns on which candidate can best absorb the displaced Uribe vote.