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The far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella and the leftwing senator Iván Cepeda have just under three weeks to compete for the roughly 3.6m votes that did not go to either of them in the first round of Colombia’s presidential election.
That is no insignificant number, given that De la Espriella’s lead over Cepeda amounted to little more than 670,000 votes – 43.7% to 40.9%.
Although polls had shown the wealthy lawyer gaining ground, they had also consistently indicated a solid lead for the senator, who is backed by the leftwing president, Gustavo Petro. This made De la Espriella’s first-round victory on Sunday a surprise to most Colombian analysts and politicians.
An admirer of Donald Trump and other far-right leaders in the region, he campaigned amid a string of controversies and with a promise to end, within 90 days, Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict which has claimed nearly half a million lives.
His lead on Sunday is being interpreted as a sign that the radical right has overtaken Colombia’s traditional conservative forces, reflected in the collapse of the candidacy of the rightwing senator Paloma Valencia.
A loyal follower of the former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who governed from 2002 to 2010, Valencia spent months in second place in the polls but lost momentum in the final weeks and finished with just 6.9% of the vote.
“What really helped De la Espriella was Valencia’s collapse,” said the political scientist Yan Basset. “There was a tactical shift of rightwing voters towards De la Espriella, who appeared to be the safest rightwing candidate to reach the runoff.”
Another political scientist, Nadia Jimena Pérez Guevara, said De la Espriella “managed to consolidate the vote of the dissatisfied citizen, not only those opposed to Petro and leftwing policies, but also people who are simply fed up with politics”.
Both analysts described the lawyer’s first-round victory as “surprising” and said they believed the left faced a difficult, though not impossible, task in overturning the result before the runoff on 21 June. Second-place candidates have come back to win in 1998 and 2014.
De la Espriella and Cepeda offer opposing approaches to dealing with the resurgence of violence, now at its highest levels since the landmark 2016 peace agreement between the government and most of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).
The lawyer advocates military alliances with the US and Israel, total confrontation with criminal groups and the construction of mega-prisons. The senator supports Petro’s “total peace” strategy of negotiating the dismantling of all criminal groups.
On Monday morning, Cepeda challenged De la Espriella to a debate. In his speech on Sunday night, he had described his rival as a “misogynist”, “homophobe” and “lawyer for paramilitaries and drug traffickers”. De la Espriella called his opponent and Petro “a pair of delinquents” and “miserable criminals”, and attacked the president as a “miserable drug addict”.
Petro sparked controversy by refusing to recognise the preliminary results released by the National Civil Registry, the independent public body responsible for organising elections, alleging without evidence that the count included “800,000 additional people”.
Guevara described the allegations, later echoed by Cepeda in his speech, as “not healthy” for Colombian democracy.
She added: “It also seemed misguided that Cepeda’s first reaction was to focus on that issue rather than speaking directly to his supporters and potential supporters about the way forward … it gives ammunition to those who want to equate De la Espriella and Cepeda, when in reality they represent completely different styles of leadership.”
