ELECTIONS IN COLOMBIA: THE FIRST ROUND WAS A HARSH BLOW FOR THE GOVERNMENT AND ITS CANDIDATE

COLOMBIA - In Brief 31 May 2026 by Andrés Escobar Arango
Today, Colombia held its first round elections to choose President for the Constitutional period 2026-2030. Without hesitation, the big news about this election day was the win of the hard-right, outsider candidate Abelardo De La Espriella (ABDLE), with more 670.000 votes above the government’s candidate, Iván Cepeda. The latter, and the government, were very confident that they would easily beat the ABDLE (expected to be the runner-up), even arguing that they were strong enough to get 50% of the vote to be able to elect President in the first round, avoiding the run-off. The reality was sharply different: ABDLE got close to 10,5 million votes (almost 44% of the total), while the government’s candidate got 9,7 million votes with 41% of the total. That is, the difference was close to three percentage points (pp). The second big piece of news was related to the center-right candidate, Paloma Valencia. She ended-up in third place, as expected, but with an extremely low number of votes, around 1,6 million votes (7% of the total pool). Clearly, many right-wing votes moved in the last week towards ABDLE, expecting that he was going to win (as indeed he did), looking to give him more strength for a probable run-off. Thirdly, the so-called “center”, represented by Sergio Fajardo and Claudia López, was able to get close to 6% of the total vote (Fajardo 1 million and López around 0.23 million votes). Although a meager result for them, these 1,2 million votes will be key in deciding who finally wins the presidency on June the 21st, when the run-off will take place. And finally, the blank vote was substantially lower than both the observed in previous election days and, also, what...

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