The Republic of Colombia celebrated elections on May 31. Two candidates — Iván Cepeda on the left and Abelardo de la Espriella on the right — advanced to the final round to succeed President Gustavo Petro, the country’s first-ever leftist president. The final vote will take place on June 21. Why did the two candidates who advanced to the runoff succeed, and what explains the poor performance of the other candidates in the first round of elections? There were 13 candidates who threw their hat in this year’s presidential race, but only three contenders were seen as viable.
The first was Iván Cepeda, a current Senator for el Pacto Histórico (the Historic Pact). He has a strong history in Colombia’s left-wing movement and is an internationally recognized champion for human rights. He represents continuity and is expected to deepen Gustavo Petro’s social democratic reform agenda.
There is now a strong progressive constituency in the country who support social justice-oriented policies, so it was no surprise to anyone that Cepeda easily advanced to the second round with 41 percent of the vote. However, the polls consistently had him as the favorite, so the fact that he failed to get a plurality of the vote was a shock to many observers and has filled many sectors on the left with a bit of panic.
The second was Abelardo de la Espriella, a lawyer by trade and a complete political outsider. He recently founded his own party, Defensores de la Patria (Defenders of the Homeland), and his political program is a mix of economic libertarianism, Nayib Bukele-style punitive populism, and anti-left nationalism. The polls always had him in second place, hovering around 30 percent, but platforms like Polymarket had him as the favorite weeks before the first round.
And the prediction markets guessed correctly. Abelardo earned 44 percent of the vote, 675,000 more votes than Cepeda, and outperformed all the opinion polls. The right-wing base decided to consolidate behind him because they feared that Cepeda had the possibility of winning the election outright if they split their vote. They felt that a hard right candidate who promised to eviscerate the left and go after organized crime with an iron fist best represented their interests.
The final candidate who was seen as viable was Paloma Valencia. She is a Senator for el Centro Democrático (Democratic Center), a party that has been the standard bearer of conservative politics in Colombia for the past 12 years. She polled in a distant third, but there existed a small chance that she could rally support and eke out a surprise second-place finish.
However, after she chose Juan David Oviedo as her running mate, Valencia’s campaign was criticized for “centrist-washing.” The selection of a political moderate as her VP was expected to expand her appeal, but she soon hit a brick wall. Both Valencia and Oviedo appeared together in a couple of very awkward interviews where they could not agree on some very basic principles like reproductive rights, marriage equality, and who will be the next defense minister. This ideological incoherence torpedoed her campaign and led right-wing voters to unite behind de la Espriella. With Cepeda and de la Espriella advancing to the second round, what are the key factors that could determine the outcome on June 21? There are two factors that will determine who wins the presidency. The first is turnout. An impressive 58 percent of the electorate participated in the first round of elections, and it is expected that this threshold will cross the 60 percent mark in round two. It will be interesting to see who can mobilize voters who stayed home and who can activate new ones. But the more crucial second factor will be who can win the centrist vote on June 21.
Since the vast majority of Centro Democrático voters already shifted to Abelardo in the first round, the majority of the 1.6 million people who cast their vote for the Valencia-Oviedo ticket appears to be up for grabs. Two centrist mainstays, Sergio Fajardo and Claudia López, both ran independent campaigns for president in the first round and combined for 1.2 million votes. The candidate who can win the vast majority of those 2.8 million will win the election. Which of the two candidates is doing a better job of winning over these centrist voters? It is hard to say. Cepeda has made some public overtures to the political center by admitting that some of their critiques of the Petro administration are valid, and that he is open to engaging in a dialogue to come up with a program that unifies both factions. He has already dropped the idea of convening a constituent assembly, which has been a great source of distress to moderate voters. It is no surprise that this announcement was well-received.
However, I do think the Cepeda campaign has made some critical mistakes. His campaign has been underwhelming, especially compared to his opponent, and Cepeda may have believed that he could win with name recognition plus the fact that he is the continuity candidate. This led him to not seek alliances nor expand his electoral coalition before May 31st, and his overtures now can be seen as coming a little too late. Another critical mistake he made was not initially recognizing the electoral results when they were announced. He later distanced himself from this position, but the fact that he did so could potentially be off-putting to some centrists.
De la Espriella is also appealing to the political center, but he is doing so without making any compromises to his program. This has the potential to backfire because Abelardo is rightfully seen as someone with an authoritarian streak who has associated himself with some of the country’s most controversial figures.
As an attorney, de la Espriella represented businessmen and politicians with links to right-wing death squads. Plus, he employs an aggressive and bellicose rhetoric that views the political left as an internal enemy that needs to be eradicated. He has explicitly called Iván Cepeda an enemy of the country. The discourse here is very dangerous, especially considering that Cepeda’s father was murdered by a right-wing death squad in collaboration with the state as part of an exterminationist campaign against Union Patriótica (Patriotic Union) in the mid-1980s and 1990s. Every election serves in some way as a referendum on the incumbent’s performance as head of state. How has Gustavo Petro fared these past four years? As the country’s first left-wing president, it was expected that Petro’s ambitious reform agenda would encounter significant hurdles in the Colombian Congress, yet he was still able to produce some legislative victories.
Petro’s two great successes are the two bills he passed to reform the country’s tax code and labor relations. The largest incomes and fortunes in the country are now subject to a more progressive tax regime meanwhile workers’ rights and benefits were expanded. Petro can also proudly boast that his administration set a record in public education investment, and his government allocated more resources to smaller departments and regions compared to his predecessors.
Petro also prioritized the redistribution of unproductive land to peasant organizations and families, which resulted in greater agricultural output throughout his term — even though his proposals were met with some legislative and judicial obstacles that slowed down the pace of redistribution.
From a macroeconomic perspective, the country seems to be on solid footing — there’s economic growth, there’s expansion in the formation of small businesses, the minimum wage has increased, the exchange rate is stable, and poverty, unemployment, and the number of people in the informal sector have all decreased.
But there are still many areas that need to be urgently addressed. The country has a very high debt burden, foreign direct investment fell in 2025 (though was starting to rebound in the first quarter of this year), and the healthcare sector is undergoing an insolvency crisis that negatively affects the delivery of an essential service. Petro’s proposals in the Congress to try to solve the problems in the healthcare system went nowhere.
Petro’s biggest shortcoming as president has been his failure to negotiate a peace deal with a myriad of guerrilla organizations and other groups involved in organized crime. The failure of his “Total Peace Plan” has led to the deterioration of public safety and territorial expansion of illegal armed groups.
The lack of public security guarantees — in addition to a backlash to the left’s victory — led to a further radicalization and mobilization of the right. It is very reminiscent of the hard right’s reaction towards the failed peace process with the FARC in 2002, which directly led to the emergence and dominance of the right-wing president Álvaro Uribe Velez.
Abelardo is simply riding that wave — and if he wins the presidency, he may attempt to weaponize the state’s institutions to go after his political opponents. He may even invite the Trump administration to directly intervene in the country to conduct lawfare against the left.
As my colleague Sanho Tree has pointed out, there is a direct connection between the propagation of lies about the drug trade and U.S. aggression towards Latin America . The U.S. State Department and the Treasury Department already got the ball rolling last year by placing sanctions on President Gustavo Petro under false pretenses. Who will win Colombia’s presidency? Political predictions are the art of getting things wrong. Over the past couple of years, political influencers on social media, especially those on the Latin American right, have given a lot of weight to prediction markets. Polymarket has Abelardo as the overwhelming favorite, and the latest polls now have him winning, but I believe Cepeda can cause gamblers to lose their money and pull off an upset.
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