Colombia's presidential race heats up after first round

Colombia celebrated the first round of its presidential elections this Sunday, and the campaign that had been underway for months has just restarted. Abelardo de la Espriella —who represents the most radical right— and Iván Cepeda —a symbol of the most ideological left— have raised the tone just hours after the results were known. But the man setting the pace of this campaign is neither of them. The left-wing president Gustavo Petro refuses to stop being a protagonist.

Monday dawned with a controversy in the air that Petro and Cepeda himself, his candidate, had helped to fuel the night before. Both refused to recognize the preliminary results and alleged irregularities in some polling stations. Their denunciation ignited the debate on election night and marked the hostilities of the campaign that has just restarted. Cepeda ended up toning down the denunciation this Monday morning in a press conference. “We have not found irregularities of sufficient magnitude to speak of fraud,” he acknowledged.

Something later, Petro published a long message on his X account, he did not retract, but he avoided insisting on his idea of fraud. Instead, he went on the attack against his rival. The president compared De la Espriella to historical fascism, evoked European and Latin American holocausts, accused the far-right candidate's campaign of buying votes between 150,000 and 200,000 pesos, and called for an “Alliance for Life” to defeat what he defined as “mafioso fascism.” His intervention complicates Cepeda's board: the senator needs to expand his base beyond petrismo.

The two candidates who will contest the presidency on June 21 are less than 700,000 votes apart, and the tone of the first hours already predicts a more polarized and aggressive contest than ever. De la Espriella and Cepeda have less than 20 days to convince about three million voters who opted for other aspirants and millions more who stayed home to choose sides. The first round revealed a divided country, in which the traditional right and the center have clearly lost.

The results confirmed that this divided Colombia has room for surprise. De la Espriella obtained 43.7% of the votes, almost 10.4 million ballots. Cepeda came second with 40.9%, about 9.7 million. A difference of 673,168 ballots that is not new in the country: Gustavo Petro reached the Casa de Nariño after winning in the runoff with a similar advantage. Behind the two aspirants were Paloma Valencia, the candidate of former president Álvaro Uribe's traditional right, with 6.9%, and Sergio Fajardo with 4.2%. Those votes and those of the rest of the candidates who did not exceed the threshold of 250,000 ballots will decide the outcome of June 21.

The war over the results seems to have been postponed, but the fronts are multiplying. It is a battle of substance and form. De la Espriella is a media lawyer who loves showmanship and provocation and who —as Milei, Bukele, or Bolsonaro have already done with varying degrees of success— promises a firm hand, weapons, and cuts to solve Colombians' main concerns. Cepeda, whose father was murdered by paramilitaries in complicity with the military, is a man who never gets flustered and who, far from magic formulas, speaks of the structural causes that have led Colombia to this point.

The climate has become even more tense in just a few hours. On election night, De la Espriella had called President Petro a drug addict and a miserable person from the stage of his celebration in Barranquilla, where he appeared inside an armored fish tank. “It is not a time for the lukewarm, neutrality is complicity,” he proclaimed. Cepeda, the unalterable candidate, also raised his tone: he challenged his rival to a debate and questioned the far-right candidate's use of the Colombian national team's jersey, a national symbol that is rapidly becoming an ideological emblem, as inevitably happened in Bolsonaro's Brazil.

The debate that both avoided during the campaign now promises to become a new cause for dispute. De la Espriella responded to the challenge with a trap proposal after calling him a “coward”: a debate on the magazine Semana, on Tuesday, June 9, at seven in the evening. The outlet, owned by the Gilinski family, was an editorial ally of the far-right candidate throughout the campaign and a relentless critic of Cepeda. Neither the choice of venue nor the accompanying message was innocent: “All you have to do, Iván Cepeda, is accept the result of democracy that, for no other reason than wanting to deny it, you have refused to accept.” Cepeda rejected it. “He is not going to impose on us the journalistic house to which he has granted the media leadership of his campaign,” he replied. The debate may never happen, but the fight for it is already part of both their strategies.

The two candidates face very different challenges. De la Espriella, whose victory over Cepeda was a surprise that most polls did not predict, has the advantage. The votes of Valencia, the conservatives, the liberals, governors, and mayors who were left without a candidate this Sunday will likely lean towards El Tigre, as De la Espriella calls himself. It is enough for him to continue fueling an emotion that has already proven to be his best fuel: the fear that the left will continue to govern. He will have to deal with the paradox that the entire establishment he denigrated for weeks —including Valencia and Uribe— will now campaign for him, but four years of Petro have left a weariness that he knows how to exploit better than anyone.

Cepeda, who led the polls, is forced into a confrontation he did not want to have in the first round. The senator, who barely held press conferences, has given two statements to journalists in just over 12 hours. His strategy of serious speeches in public squares and low exposure worked for him to reach the second round, but not to win it. The base that should have been his great asset —the Colombia of the peripheries and margins that normally does not vote— did not reach the polls in the quantity he needed. In part, they say in his team, due to a logistical issue: in Colombia there are citizens who live in such remote places that this Sunday, simply, they did not have the means to get to the polls.

Now he has less than three weeks to solve two problems at once: win over part of the three million Colombians who opted for other candidates and mobilize those who did not go to the polls. The challenge is to do so from a position of weakness.