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The left-wing senator and far-right newcomer will face each other in a runoff on June 21, with security a top issue.
Published On 31 May 2026
Far-right outsider Abelardo de la Espriella will face left-wing Senator Ivan Cepeda in the runoff for Colombia’s presidential election next month.
As polls closed on Sunday, the two candidates surged ahead in the vote tally, quickly extinguishing the hopes of right-wing Senator Paloma Valencia, a former frontrunner.
As of Sunday afternoon, with 99 percent of the votes tallied, de la Espriella took the lead, with 43 percent of the ballots cast in his favour.
Cepeda trailed him by more than 600,000 votes, earning 40 percent of the ballots.
Neither candidate breached the 50-percent threshold needed to avoid a head-to-head match-up on June 21. But the results are likely to buoy de la Espriella’s campaign going into the final round.
Cepeda had consistently topped public opinion polls in the final weeks before voting. A May 24 poll from the National Consulting Centre (CNC), for instance, showed him with more than 33 percent support, ahead of de la Espriella’s 30.9 percent.
But questions about security were at the forefront of voters’ concerns going into Sunday’s election.
De la Espriella, a businessman who has never held elected office, leaned heavily into fears of crime as he launched an outsider campaign, similar in the style to the dark-horse bid of Argentinian President Javier Milei.
By contrast, Cepeda is a well-known quantity in Colombian politics. His father was a senator too, as well as a leader in Colombia’s Communist Party, before he was assassinated in 1994, in what was widely considered to be an act of political violence.
Cepeda himself has served as a senator since 2014. Before that, he served in the Chamber of Deputies, representing the capital Bogota.
During his political career, he became embroiled in a long-running legal dispute with former right-wing President Alvaro Uribe, whom he accused of complicity with right-wing paramilitaries.
Uribe initially sued Cepeda for defamation, but in a dramatic twist, the Supreme Court dismissed the charge and instead investigated Uribe for witness tampering.
While Uribe was found guilty and sentenced to 12 years of house arrest, an appeals court ultimately struck down the verdict, citing procedural errors, including insufficient evidence.
