Colombia’s far-right presidential candidate Espriella wins first round of vote ahead of runoff | Colombia
Far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella won the first round of Colombia’s presidential elections on Sunday and will face senator Iván Cepeda, the candidate supported by left-wing president Gustavo Petro, in the second round.
With 99.9% of the votes counted, Espriella, a foreigner and Donald Trump fan, won 43.7% of the votes (just over 10.3 million), while Cepeda, a philosopher and human rights advocate who has served as a senator since 2014, received 40.9% (about 9.6 million votes).
The two will face each other in the second round on June 21.
Although polls in recent weeks had already identified Espriella’s meteoric rise, most polls showed her still trailing Cepeda, who looked like a solid leader for months.
Espriella appears to have consolidated most of the votes that previously went to right-wing senator Paloma Valencia, who had received over 20 percent of the vote and placed second but finished Sunday with just 6.9 percent.
Espriella calling herself El Tigre (Kaplan) celebrated the result as follows: “Citizens, defenders of the homeland, more than 10 million Colombians, El Tigre and we joined the group… In 21 days, we will change the history of Colombia forever,” he said. in a video Along with his wife and children, he wears the jerseys of the Colombian national football team.
Following a wave of victories by far-right candidates in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia and Honduras in recent years, Colombia remains one of the few countries in Latin America still governed by the left, alongside Mexico and Brazil, which will hold their own presidential elections in October.
Espriella is an outspoken admirer of many right-wing leaders in the region, including US President Donald Trump, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Argentina’s Javier Milei.
Espriella, a criminal lawyer and millionaire businessman who has never held public office, built his campaign around a promise to return to a policy of all-out conflict in response to Colombia’s worsening security crisis; this crisis is now considered the worst since the landmark peace agreement signed in 2016 between the government and most of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).
Espriella advocates ending Petro’s policy of “total peace” based on negotiations to dismantle the criminal groups of which Cepeda is widely regarded as the architect, and replacing it with a new policy. mano dura The (iron fist) strategy was inspired above all by El Salvador’s populist dictator Bukele, who imprisoned at least 2% of his country’s adult population as part of a controversial crackdown on gangs. Even the lawyer’s neatly trimmed beard and habit of wearing a baseball cap have drawn comparisons to Bukele’s style.
Espriella incorporated the animal into much of her campaign branding. it exists sparked controversy By attacking journalists and at one point telling a radio host that he won over female voters because of the size of his genitals.
He first gained national recognition through years of legal work for figures such as Colombian businessman Álex Saab, who is considered the primary financial leader of Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela and was recently deported to the United States by acting president Delcy Rodríguez.
Valencia accepted the result in his speech on Sunday night and backed Espriella in the second round.
On the eve of the vote, Espriella had already made headlines after a video call on Friday evening with Ecuador’s far-right president Daniel Noboa, whose relations with Petro have been severed for months.
The conversation resembled a meeting where the two heads of state discussed issues such as border security and extradition. Espriella asked Noboa to remove Ecuador’s 75% additional tariff on Colombian imports; The president agreed and said the measure would go into effect Monday, immediately after the vote.
Colombia’s foreign ministry issued a statement describing Noboa’s gesture as “a deliberate interference in the electoral process” and added: “Such interference by a foreign head of state in the democratic affairs of another country constitutes a clear violation of the principle of non-interference in internal affairs, a threat to national sovereignty and an attack on the democratic system.”
Despite widespread concerns about security, election day passed peacefully.
The past few months have been marked by an increase in guerrilla attacks, killings, kidnappings, forced displacements and massacres, and last year right-wing senator and presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot by an opposition group in the Farc during a campaign event and later died.
