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Abelardo De La Espriella wins Colombia election, continuing rightward trend in Latin America
Colombian right-wing candidate Abelardo De La Espriella has clinched a narrow victory in Sunday's presidential election, according to an initial ballot count, as voters bet on his promise of a crackdown on crime and a stronger economy. De La Espriella had 49.66 per cent of the vote while his rival, Senator Ivan Cepeda, trailed by some 250,000 votes at 48.70 per cent.
"I will govern for all Colombians, for those who voted for me and for those who chose the other candidate," De La Espriella told a crowd of supporters gathered in the coastal city of Barranquilla, promising to respect all citizens' rights.
Colombia and Peru, with elections this month, are now poised to join Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia and Panama in moving right. It's a stark reversal of the region's so-called pink tide that brought several leftist governments to power in the early 2020s, including Gustavo Petro, Colombia's first leftist president.
De La Espriella clinched a narrow win in Colombia's presidential runoff, part of a rightward shift across Latin America.
De La Espriella, also a citizen of the U.S. and Italy, received a congratulatory call from U.S. President Donald Trump, who has clashed with Petro since returning to the White House last year. Cepeda, 63, had vowed to continue the policies of Petro, including state pension payments for the poor and peace talks with armed groups.
De la Espriella has blamed Petro for the country's economic and security woes and has vowed to end peace talks with rebels and criminal groups, boost the oil and gas sector, lower taxes and reduce the size of the state by up to 40 per cent. But he has said he will preserve Petro's 23 per cent increase in the minimum wage.
De La Espriella, a lawyer with no prior political experience, will have to grapple with high public debt. The closeness of the race, with less than one percentage point separating the two candidates, will likely force him to water down some of his proposals to get support from a divided Congress.
Cepeda told his supporters at an event in Bogota that he would await a final, ballot-by-ballot check of the initial count, saying his campaign is challenging results from some 33,000 ballot boxes, out of 122,000 in total.
More than 41 million Colombians were eligible to vote, with more than 26.2 million casting ballots. Some 420,000 voters turned in blank ballots, usually seen as a protest vote, the registrar figures showed.
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