Trump-Backed Outsider Claims Colombia Runoff as His Rival Disputes Count

Colombia woke on Monday to the strong likelihood of its sharpest political turn in a generation, and to an argument over whether the turn is real yet. Abelardo de la Espriella, a 47-year-old lawyer who has never held elected office, won the preliminary count of Sunday's presidential runoff, edging the left-wing senator Iván Cepeda by less than a percentage point.

With 99.91% of ballots counted, de la Espriella had 49.65% to Cepeda's 47.81%, according to the preliminary tally reported by CNN, a gap of fewer than 250,000 votes. He claimed victory before a crowd in the coastal city of Barranquilla, calling the result one that would "change the course of Colombia's history forever." His opponent did not concede.

That last fact is the one a reader far from Bogotá should hold onto. The official, legally binding count is not finished, and both Cepeda and the outgoing president, Gustavo Petro, are contesting the result. Cepeda told supporters the count was "not yet official or legally binding" and said his lawyers and poll watchers were challenging 33,000 polling stations. Petro went further on X: "no one can yet be declared president." So while the arithmetic points one way, the formal handover does not exist on paper.

Assume the count holds. What Colombia would then have is a president unlike any in its recent history. De la Espriella, known as "El Tigre," is a dual Colombian-US citizen and a former criminal defense lawyer who built a movement called Defenders of the Homeland on spectacle. He records music, sells his own rum, and qualified for the ballot through citizen signatures rather than a party. He ran on an "iron fist": mega-prisons modeled on El Salvador's, a harder military campaign against armed groups he calls "Plan Colombia 2.0," lower taxes, expanded oil drilling, and a culture-war platform built around the "traditional family."

Why Washington is watching

The result reads, in part, as a story about the United States. President Donald Trump endorsed de la Espriella earlier this month and posted "He Won, Big!" on Truth Social. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had congratulated him and looked forward to working with the "incoming administration" on security cooperation and immigration. After four years of friction between Trump and the leftist Petro, a de la Espriella government would swing Colombia, long Washington's closest partner in South America, firmly back toward the US, which is part of why the race drew such unusual American attention.

Cepeda represents the road not taken, at least for now. The son of a senator assassinated in the 1980s, he spent years in exile in Europe as a human rights advocate before entering the Senate. He won more first-round votes than Petro did in 2022 but could not grow his coalition beyond the government's base. He has cast his rival's movement as a "return to the past."

Behind the personalities sits a country exhausted by violence. Petro's "Total Peace" policy was meant to wind down a conflict that, since the landmark 2016 accord with the FARC, has splintered among more armed groups rather than fewer. The International Committee of the Red Cross called 2025 the worst year for civilians in a decade, with more than 900 people killed or wounded by explosive devices. The assassination of the center-right candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay at a Bogotá rally last August hardened the sense that the state was losing control. Half the country voted for a crackdown; the other half voted for reform. Whoever is finally certified inherits both halves, and a count that one of them refuses to accept.