Abelardo de la Espriella, a far-right lawyer and businessman whose campaign drew repeated endorsements from US President Donald Trump, won Colombia's presidential runoff on June 21 by a margin of less than one percentage point, defeating leftist senator Iván Cepeda in a result that hands the country's right wing its first victory since Gustavo Petro's election in 2022.

With more than 99% of polling stations reporting in the preliminary count, De la Espriella secured 49.7% of the vote to Cepeda's 48.7% — a gap of fewer than 250,000 votes out of more than 25.6mn cast, according to Colombia's National Registry. The result makes De la Espriella, a 47-year-old former criminal defence lawyer who has never previously held public office, the biggest vote-getter any Colombian presidential candidate has secured to date.

Cepeda, 63, a senator from the ruling Historic Pact and the chosen successor of outgoing president Petro, stopped short of conceding. Speaking to supporters in Bogotá on Sunday evening, he said his campaign regarded the preliminary count as "unofficial and non-binding" and announced it would formally challenge results at roughly 33,000 polling stations during the official tally. "We will not allow the rollback of the social gains we have achieved," he told the crowd. "We will not allow democracy to be violated." No legal challenge has previously overturned the outcome of a Colombian presidential election.

Colombia's electoral authorities said the official manual count, to be consolidated by the National Electoral Council, was expected to conclude in the coming days, with quick counts historically tracking closely with certified results.

A divisive victory speech

De la Espriella, who has built his political identity around the nickname "El Tigre", addressed thousands of jubilant supporters from behind bulletproof glass at a rally in the Caribbean city of Barranquilla, declaring: "Colombia, here is your tiger. Colombia, here is your president." In a 50-minute address that stretched well beyond his campaign's combative register, he pledged to govern for "all Colombians," including those who voted against him, and vowed to respect the 1991 constitution, judicial independence and the separation of powers, El Espectador reported.

"For those who have sown violence, terror, drug trafficking and corruption all these years, their time is up," he told the crowd, before turning more conciliatory: "Today more than ever, I stand firm for the nation." He was joined on stage by his wife, Ana Lucía Pineda, his five children, and his running mate, José Manuel Restrepo, who is set to become vice-president.

The shift in tone marked a departure from a campaign that had relied heavily on polarising rhetoric, branding Cepeda and the Colombian left as existential threats to the nation. Analysts noted that the conciliatory register reflected the realities of a razor-thin mandate that leaves De la Espriella with little room to pursue his most radical proposals once in office.

International reaction

The result was swiftly welcomed in Washington. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated De la Espriella on social media, writing that the Trump administration "looks forward to working closely with your incoming administration to advance regional security co-operation, end illegal immigration to the United States, and strengthen our economic ties." Trump, who issued repeated endorsements of De la Espriella during the campaign and frequently attacked Cepeda as a "radical left Marxist," reportedly placed a congratulatory call to the president-elect and extended an invitation to the White House, according to Colombian media reports.

De la Espriella also received endorsements during the campaign from a cluster of fellow right-wing leaders across the region, including Argentina's Javier Milei, Ecuador's Daniel Noboa, Chile's José Antonio Kast and Paraguay's Santiago Peña. In his victory speech, he signalled he would take a harder diplomatic line with governments he regards as undemocratic, saying Colombia would not maintain relations with "countries that do not respect freedom or the rule of law."

President Petro, who was constitutionally barred from seeking re-election, urged caution over the result and accused unspecified foreign governments — naming the United States, Argentina and Ecuador — of improperly interfering in Colombia's electoral process. "No one can be proclaimed president," Petro wrote on social media. "It is the vote count that determines who the president is. I obey the judges." Colombia's national registrar, Hernán Penagos, said roughly 9,000 judges and notaries were reviewing electoral records across nearly 3,000 counting commissions to verify the preliminary figures.

Protests and a divided country

The declaration of a winner triggered immediate unrest. In Cali, Colombia's third-largest city, a demonstration that opened calmly, with traditional Indigenous drumming, turned confrontational as the night wore on: some marchers set American flags alight and hurled bricks at riot police, who responded with tear gas. A separate, smaller gathering of mostly young demonstrators near Bogotá's national university also turned tense, with isolated incidents of arson directed at street barricades.

"I firmly believe that we need someone who looks out for all of us, not just for a few," one protester, a 26-year-old student named Natalia, told AFP, adding that years of right-wing government had previously benefited only the wealthy. Another protester, Isabella Giraldo, said she believed irregularities had affected the vote count and warned of further demonstrations: "For every injustice we see or every right they take away from us, there will be a new protest."

Elsewhere, De la Espriella's supporters celebrated in the streets of several cities, many wearing the yellow national football jersey that became a fixture of his campaign.

A hardline platform meets a narrow mandate

De la Espriella built his career as one of Colombia's most prominent and most controversial criminal lawyers, representing clients including the founder of a pyramid scheme that defrauded thousands of Colombians and Alex Saab, a businessman extradited to the US on money-laundering charges over his links to Venezuela's regime of ousted president Nicolas Maduro. He has paired that legal record with a flamboyant media presence, including a fashion line, luxury-branded products and recordings of himself singing standards such as "My Way" and "Volare".

His platform centres on ending negotiations with armed groups, launching air strikes against guerrilla camps, building ten "mega-prisons," reopening the country to fracking and hydrocarbon exploration, and pursuing a fiscal adjustment programme aimed at shrinking the state. He has pledged to dismantle Petro's "total peace" strategy, which critics say failed to curb violence from criminal groups and dissident guerrilla factions during the outgoing administration.

He inherits a fiscal deficit that analysts say will require a fresh tax reform, with public debt hovering near 63% of GDP, alongside a Senate in which his movement holds only a handful of seats. Following the elimination of conservative senator Paloma Valencia in the first round, De la Espriella secured backing from several established parties, including the Democratic Centre, the Conservative Party and Radical Change – support he will likely need to translate into legislative majorities despite his repeated insistence that he remains a political outsider untethered to traditional power structures.

The closeness of the result laid bare the scale of the challenge facing a president-elect who built his campaign on division but takes office, on August 7, presiding over a country split almost exactly down the middle. That divide crucially extends to how to confront the armed groups, such as FARC dissident factions, that still hold sway over parts of the country: between those who back De la Espriella's promise of a military crackdown and those who fear abandoning negotiation will reignite the conflict it was meant to end.