Far-right billionaire Abelardo de la Espriella wins Colombia's presidency

Far-right billionaire candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, a self-styled 'outsider' lawyer, won Colombia's presidential runoff, defeating leftist Senator Iván Cepeda.

With 99.65% of ballots counted in the preliminary tally, De la Espriella received 12.91 million votes (49.65%), just 248,310 votes ahead of Cepeda's 12.67 million (48.7%). About 1.6% of votes were blank.

The margin was narrower than in the first round three weeks earlier, when De la Espriella led by 673,000 votes. His victory marks a sharp swing to the right after four years under Colombia's first and only leftist president, Gustavo Petro.

Petro was barred by the constitution from seeking re-election and had endorsed Cepeda as his successor. The result is also seen as evidence of a far-right wave sweeping Latin American presidential elections, following recent wins for Nasry Asfura in Honduras and José Antonio Kast in Chile, while Keiko Fujimori leads the count in Peru.

Like them, De la Espriella also received backing from U.S. President Donald Trump, though only after winning the first round. With Petro leaving office in about six weeks, only Mexico, Brazil (which holds elections in October), Uruguay and Guatemala will remain under leftist governments in the region.

On social media, President Petro denounced irregularities in the preliminary count released by the National Registry of Civil Status, the independent agency responsible for organizing Colombian elections. He accused the agency of 'uploading forms… without voter supervisor signatures' and said 'those polling stations must be challenged immediately.'

Petro also wrote that he would only recognise the result of the official scrutiny, expected to take about two more days. 'No president can be declared at this moment. It is the scrutiny that determines who is the president,' he said. In the first round, the president also alleged fraud in the preliminary tally without providing evidence, drawing widespread criticism from election experts. Historically, the difference between preliminary counts and official scrutiny in Colombian elections has been less than 1%.

In a campaign dominated by the violence once again engulfing the country, De la Espriella won on a promise of 'iron fist' policies against criminal groups. Although security indicators remain far below the extremely high levels recorded for decades before the 2016 peace deal between the government and most of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the past year was the most violent since then.

The president-elect, who will take office on August 7, has pledged to build 10 'super-max' prisons and exterminate criminals 'like rats and cockroaches.' He also promised to 'gut' the left, a comment he later said was only rhetorical. Calling himself 'El Tigre' (The Tiger) and never having held public office, De la Espriella vows to completely dismantle Petro's 'total peace' plan of negotiating the disarmament of all criminal groups.

After four years of shaky starts and finishes, in which armed groups exploited temporary ceasefires to continue expanding, the government only disarmed its first criminal group last Thursday — a 99-member outfit — while experts estimate more than 27,000 people belong to Colombia's many criminal organizations. In contrast, the new president promises a return to full-scale military confrontation, a tactic that has historically done little to curb violence, and says he will seek U.S. support for airstrikes on coca plantations. Colombia is the world's largest cocaine producer, and drug trafficking is the main driver of violence.

Born in the capital Bogotá but raised on Colombia's Caribbean coast, De la Espriella rose to prominence as a criminal lawyer representing leaders of one group central to the decades-long armed conflict: paramilitaries, private armies raised by right-wing landowners to fight leftist guerrilla groups. He later expanded his business into liquor, real estate and menswear, and enjoys flaunting a lavish lifestyle on social media. He declared his presidential candidacy last July, a month after right-wing senator and presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot at a campaign event; he died two months after the attack.

Despite his links to Colombia's right-wing political establishment through his legal career, De la Espriella presents himself as an 'anti-establishment' candidate, following the example of many other far-right leaders who have come to power across the region in recent years. His vice president will be economist José Manuel Restrepo, who served as finance minister under Petro's conservative predecessor, Iván Duque. The president-elect said Restrepo would be responsible for implementing a plan to shrink the state by 40%.

They will take office as a minority in Congress and, according to many analysts, in a deeply divided country after the most polarizing election in years, when the two candidates could not agree to hold a single debate and instead kept throwing insults at each other.