Leftist presidential candidate Senator Iván Cepeda conceded defeat to far-right lawyer and billionaire Abelardo de la Espriella, an admirer of former US President Donald Trump.
Preliminary vote counts from Sunday night showed de la Espriella winning by a razor-thin margin of less than 1% of the vote. However, his opponent Senator Iván Cepeda and incumbent President Gustavo Petro initially refused to accept the results, vowing to wait for the official count.
After the official audit confirmed a 99.997% match with preliminary results, Cepeda called a press conference in Bogotá and formally conceded.
“At this stage of the vote count, I decide to accept the result, confirming Abelardo de la Espriella as the new president of the country. I do this as an act of democratic responsibility, to contribute to coexistence, peace, and dialogue among Colombians,” Cepeda said.
The leftist candidate, who received 12.7 million votes—just 250,000 fewer than de la Espriella’s 12.96 million—stressed that “accepting the election outcome does not mean abandoning the truth or staying silent about serious events that occurred during this campaign.”
Referencing Donald Trump’s posts that backed de la Espriella while describing Cepeda as “a far-left Marxist,” the senator said: “We denounce open and inappropriate foreign interference in Colombia’s internal affairs, especially by the US government and President Donald Trump to support candidate Abelardo de la Espriella.”
On Tuesday night, in a 4,500-word social media post, President Gustavo Petro announced he would begin the transition of power with the president-elect.
Petro wrote that he felt as if he were handing the sword of Simón Bolívar—a relic belonging to the military leader who led South America’s fight for independence from Spain, kept at the Colombian presidential palace—“to a viceroy,” alluding to Trump’s backing of de la Espriella.
The president-elect declared that Colombia would join the “American Shield,” a Trump-backed initiative uniting far-right governments across the region, which now holds overwhelming dominance in Latin America. When de la Espriella takes office on August 7, only four countries in the region will remain under leftist leadership.
“Colombia will NO longer be governed by an administration soft on drug traffickers. We will fight them the way it must be fought,” de la Espriella wrote, vowing to restore a full-scale military offensive to address the country’s decades-long armed conflict.
