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The criminal lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella, a declared admirer of Donald Trump and a donor to the Republican Party, shocked by leading the first round of Colombia's presidential elections held this Sunday, contradicting all polls and forcing a runoff on June 21.
With 95.12% of the ballots counted, De la Espriella obtained 9,791,468 votes (43.62%), followed by the leftist Iván Cepeda, of the Historical Pact —the party of President Gustavo Petro— with 9,231,677 votes (41.13%), according to data from the National Registry.
De la Espriella's connection to the Trump orbit is one of the most defining characteristics of his political profile.
In January 2026, she publicly urged Donald Trump Jr. to have his father's administration "put Petro in his place," and referred to Elon Musk as "compadre," hoping to enlist his technological assistance to transform Colombia into what she calls the "miracle homeland," comparable to South Korea or Ireland.
Analysts indicate that a potential government of yours would mean that "what the United States does, in this case the Trump administration, is what Colombia will do," stated political scientist Camilo González to Infobae Colombia.
This profile stands in stark contrast to that of outgoing President Petro, whose relationship with Washington was marked by increasing hostility: the Trump administration revoked his visa in September 2025, the Treasury imposed financial sanctions in October of that year, and Trump warned in December that Colombia "would be next" following his pressures on other governments in the region.
De la Espriella, 47 years old, is a citizen of Italy and the United States, has never held public office, and built his fortune as a defense attorney for controversial clients, including Colombian-Venezuelan businessman Alex Saab —currently detained in the U.S.— and David Murcia Guzmán, the central figure in Colombia's largest pyramid scheme.
To those who criticize him for his lack of experience in public office, he responds that this "far from being a problem, is an advantage because it frees him from commitments to politicians and economic groups."
He founded the far-right movement Defensores de la Patria with the explicit aim of preventing the continuation of the left in power, and promises to "fight with an iron fist against criminals, the corrupt, the unpunished criminals, and anyone who threatens the existence of Colombia."
He is compared ideologically and physically to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, and his successful entrepreneur rhetoric, along with military greetings and invocations to God, allowed him to attract the right-wing electorate seeking an alternative to petrismo.
His rival in the second round, Iván Cepeda, is the only candidate who promised to continue the "total peace" policy with which Petro began dialogues with illegal armed groups—dissident FARC, the National Liberation Army, and the Gulf Clan cartel—without managing to disarm them, in a country with approximately 27,000 armed insurgents according to the Ideas for Peace Foundation.
The right-wing candidate Paloma Valencia, from the Uribe's Democratic Center, fell far short of expectations with only 6.86% of the votes, making the runoff on June 21 a direct election between De la Espriella's pro-Trump model and the leftist continuity represented by Cepeda.
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