SPECIAL EDITION: ABELARDO IN A SQUEAKER
It was closer than expected, but Colombia picks the conservative outsider
With a historically high turnout of over 63%, Colombia went to the polls today for the presidential runoff and the preliminary results show Abelardo de la Espriella has won with 49.65% of the vote against Senator Ivan Cepeda with 48.70%. The margin in the initial count was just over 200,000 votes from about 26 million cast, a closer race than many opinion polls were suggesting. But with the size of the turnout and the relatively small number of blank or spoiled ballots, it is enough of a victory to be relatively sure that the certified results will confirm Abelardo’s victory.
From first leftist to first outsider
The swing from outgoing President Gustavo Petro - the country’s first leftist president - to a conservative populist who has never held public office is an extraordinary ongoing repudiation of Colombia’s political establishment. The fact that today’s turnout was so high only sharpens that repudiation. Today’s victory caps a remarkable accomplishment by an attorney who once represented the chief money launderer of Venezuela’s Chavista regime and launched into politics through a flashy, populist discourse over social media. He will face a fragmented Congress where the leftist coalition of his defeated opponent holds the largest blocks in both houses but not majorities.
Analyzing the results: How Cepeda lost and how Abelardo won
Some curious facts emerge from today’s results:
Ivan Cepeda ran a terrible campaign in the second round despite Petro’s mobilization of the state to help him. In the final week Cepeda finally caught fire and began to gain momentum with a more appealing message. Several observers on Colombian television tonight reported hearing anonymous sources close to Abelardo confess that if the campaign had gone an extra week they would have lost to Cepeda. But, he didn’t have that extra week.
In comparison to the first round results, Abelardo gained fewer votes than Cepeda, illustrating how decisive the leftist’s late start might have been to his defeat. Cepeda’s speech to his supporters tonight, where he pledged to accept the certified results, showed a level of political maturity that was absent from his sour harangue on the evening of the first round when he fell short of expectations.
De la Espriella also had a bit of a bumpy second round campaign, launching his own allegations of vote manipulation by drug gangs and armed terrorist factions he said were allied with Cepeda. By leaning into a rival conspiracy theory rather than pounding away on the critique of the Petro-Cepeda policies around crime, insecurity, violence and the “Total Peace” initiative with terrorist factions, his message lost some of its strength with swing voters.
All of that said, the map of the results by department showed little to no change from the first round: Cepeda won the outer rim of the country while Abelardo won the heartland. Yet, Abelardo — with his home base in Barranquilla - cut into Cepeda’s base in the coastal region as well as in the capital city of Bogota. The leftist’s margins were not as big as they needed to be there, and many young voters found Abelardo’s rock-show nationalism appealing.
Abelardo’s victory will also determine the future of the establishment Democratic Center party. It was not only a good night for the populist outsider and his movement, but for the last elected president of the center-right, Ivan Duque. Much of Abelardo’s political firmament, including his running mate Jose Manuel Restrepo, came from Duque’s political operation. The political elevation of duquismo tonight is important. Whether it means a shift away from the Democratic Center to a larger fold of Abelardo’s Defensores de la Patria — much like what happened in Argentina with Patricia Bullrich after President Javier Milei’s victory — it isn’t entirely clear tonight. But with the collapse of Paloma Valencia in the first round, the future of the Democratic Center party is certain to be redefined by these events.
Petro, true to form, started tweeting conspiracy theories the moment the preliminary results showed Abelardo’s victory becoming clear. He alleged, without a shred of evidence, that Israel somehow had hacked the vote counting software and manipulated the results. Many seasoned experts reacted by explaining in detail how this was pure fantasy on Petro’s part, something that is not even possible with the country’s voting system. It was yet another insane rant after so many before it that sharpened Petro’s image as an isolated, paranoid figure who never understood how to be president or how to lead effectively.
So much for the first product of Colombia’s repudiation of the establishment. We will see how the second product of it, President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella, takes the baton and runs with it.
What to watch for next
The audit of the ballots began almost immediately tonight, and Petro’s reckless statements are likely to be rubbished further by the certified outcome. It will be a vindication of Colombian democracy and how strong the public’s faith and participation in it remains no matter what politicians say. Cepeda’s pledge to accept the results put aside most concerns about the aftermath of this extraordinary campaign.
Abelardo’s top cabinet picks, much like Petro’s after his 2022 victory, will be critical to watch. If he names a finance minister with little experience or a divisive profile, markets will be disquieted. His anti-elites rhetoric in the campaign helped him overcome the center-right establishment, but will he govern with a sustained hostility for those in that establishment he will need in order to be effective? Strong signals will come from his cabinet picks, but let’s not forget that Petro got strong marks for his first cabinet and then proceeded to fire and alienate most of them in short order. A failed presidency followed and is about to conclude in a few weeks.
The president-elect has no visible political foundation in civil society, nor does his coalition amount to much of a political party. This was a similar feature for Milei’s outsider presidency in 2023, but the Argentine president had served a term in Congress when he took the presidential sash. De la Espriella has no public service experience of any kind, and taking the helm of a large and complex country of 54 million people is an enormous task. The mercurial, personality-driven presidency of Petro was not only a useful foil for Abelardo, but a warning: It doesn’t work, and it usually ends quite badly.
I’m writing this before the president-elect’s victory speech, so it remains to be seen what kind of president he will begin to be tonight. It was an extraordinarily polarized election result, and no country can be effectively led if it remains eternally polarized. But I would argue that the Colombian electorate today did not express a desire for eternal polarization.
While both candidates went hard after the anti-vote, it seems it was a wash given the tiny margin. But both Abelardo and Cepeda (for him, in the final week) also made sincere appeals to the optimism and social aspirations of the Colombian people. They wore very different colors, and had starkly different visions of what those aspirations were, but such a high turnout was not from protest voting. There was a healthy dose of tentative hopefulness as well.
Cepeda should remember this as he is graceful in defeat. But more importantly, Abelardo de la Espriella needs to keep this in mind more urgently. Javier Milei won a huge landslide victory in Argentina in 2023, and overcame a lot of early challenges by keeping faith with the voters who trusted him. Abelardo has no big mandate tonight but he will have the presidency, and the voters who trusted him took a risk. He has to keep faith with their hopes as much as with their fears, or he risks losing the legitimacy he won today.