Abelardo de la Espriella, a right-wing lawyer and political newcomer known as “El Tigre,” won 44% of the vote in Colombia’s first-round presidential election on Sunday, with 99.98% of results counted by the country’s electoral authorities. Iván Cepeda, a progressive senator and ally of outgoing President Gustavo Petro, took 41%. No candidate secured an outright majority, sending the race to a runoff scheduled for June.
The results set up a contest between two sharply divergent visions for Colombia’s future — one rooted in Petro’s progressive agenda and peace negotiations with armed groups, the other in an aggressive security crackdown that echoes the hardline policies of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele.
Cepeda and Petro moved quickly to question the first-round results. Cepeda said he was waiting for electoral authorities to fully scrutinize the count before commenting, and he and Petro claimed without evidence that hundreds of thousands of votes had been manipulated and that foreign actors had interfered. “Only when the vote-counting commissions have fully clarified what happened will we comment on tonight’s results,” Cepeda said, though he acknowledged the vote was likely headed to a second round.
In his victory speech Sunday night, de la Espriella called on the United States to monitor the runoff. “Let the United