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The right-wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella won the second round of the presidential election in Colombia this Sunday, according to the preliminary count from the National Registry, and will take office on August 7, 2026, ending four years of government under Gustavo Petro.
With 99.58% of the ballots counted, De la Espriella obtained 49.66% of the votes —approximately 12,914,381 ballots— compared to 48.69% of the Historic Pact candidate, Iván Cepeda Castro, who received 12,663,687 votes, a difference of just around 250,000 ballots.
The result was much closer than the polls had anticipated, which gave the winner a lead of between five and seven percentage points over his rival.
A criminal lawyer with no prior experience in public office, De la Espriella is a politician who emerged from nowhere, building his campaign on a tough-on-crime discourse, free-market principles, and a staunch rejection of regional socialism, which earned him comparisons to figures like Javier Milei, Nayib Bukele, and Donald Trump.
Precisely, Trump expressed his "total and absolute support" on June 2nd on Truth Social, describing him as a "smart, strong, and determined" leader.
In foreign policy, the elected president proposes a bilateral military agreement with the United States, a "second Plan Colombia" supported by drones and artificial intelligence, and the isolation of the regimes in Venezuela and Cuba, marking a radical shift from Petro's foreign policy, which maintained relations with Havana and Caracas.
Outgoing President Gustavo Petro refused to acknowledge the preliminary count and reported on social media platform X "many irregularities," questioning E-14 forms that lacked signatures from the election officials. "It cannot yet be determined who the president is, and there are many irregularities. The tables without signatures from the election officials must be challenged immediately," he wrote.
This is not the first time Petro has disputed an electoral result: he already rejected the pre-count of the first round on May 31, an unprecedented action in Colombian democratic history, using arguments that international observers dismissed.
Cepeda's campaign also announced that it will not recognize the results until the official tallies are known and that it will request challenges to polling stations where votes are believed to have been bought on the Caribbean coast.
The Interior Minister, Armando Benedetti, reported the presence of "marked ballots, with stripes or dots" in 14 departments of the country.
The political tension caused alarm among analysts and lawmakers. Green Party Congressman Juan Carlos Lozada warned that if Petro continues his attitude, "the country will be set ablaze," and added that disregarding the results "could seriously jeopardize the institutional stability of Colombia."
Elected senator Andrés Forero was more direct: "The arsonist continues to create an atmosphere of ignorance around the electoral results and the consequent coup d'état."
In contrast, the OAS Electoral Observation Mission stated that the day went "without public order disturbances", and its head, Albert Ramdin, urged leaders to "act responsibly and accept the results peacefully" "so that governance can continue."
De la Espriella, for his part, responded calmly: "We will accept the results; we are democrats, even though we could not go to several regions of the country and with a president and ministers campaigning."
The official counting, which will begin this Monday in the counting commissions and proceed through various levels up to the National Electoral Council, will determine whether the preliminary results are confirmed or if the challenges from the ruling party will alter the outcome of an election that has practically divided Colombia in two.
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