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“Years ago, I told the nation that I would only enter politics in a case of absolute emergency. That moment has now come. Colombia is living through its darkest hours.” With these words, Abelardo de la Espriella stepped up to the microphone on 16 July 2025 and announced his candidacy for the Colombian presidential election.
One year later, on 21 June 2026, the preliminary count showed him in the lead with 12.96 million votes (49.66 percent), ahead of the candidate from the governing Pacto Histórico party, Iván Cepeda, who received around 12.71 million votes (48.7 percent) in a runoff election that saw a historically high turnout. Neither candidate reached the 50 percent threshold, with the difference amounting to less than one percentage point.
At the time, the official final count — the tallying procedure overseen by judges — was still underway. Cepeda has since recognized both the preliminary result and De la Espriella’s election victory, having initially contested the count in a quarter of all polling stations. After the recounts conducted in the days that followed, he no longer expected any significant changes to the outcome.
In his press statement made on Wednesday morning, Colombian time, Cepeda also emphasized that recognizing his opponent’s electoral victory should not be equated with legitimizing the means that had contributed to that result. He was particularly critical of Donald Trump’s interference in the election campaign, as well as the extensive use of AI-generated deepfake videos and other disinformation campaigns aimed at discrediting him and his candidacy.
Even before the official final result was announced, one fact was already clear: Colombia is divided, and the new president will have to find a way to win over the other half of the country.
“El Tigre” and His Public Persona
Abelardo de la Espriella is 47 years old. He was born in Bogotá and grew up in Montería, in the Department of Córdoba, one of the epicentres of Colombian paramilitarism during the 1990s and 2000s. He studied law at the Universidad Sergio Arboleda, a private university, and in 2002 founded the law firm De la Espriella Lawyers, which today has offices in Bogotá, Barranquilla, Medellín, and Miami. Alongside this, he built up a sprawling business network spanning real estate, hospitality, alcoholic beverages, and fashion, including the luxury clothing brand De la Espriella Style. His public persona cultivates the image of the successful entrepreneur and jet-setting lawyer. De la Espriella holds Colombian, Italian, and United States citizenship and, according to his own account, is also a registered member of the US Republican Party. To acquire US citizenship, he was required to swear the oath of allegiance to the Constitution and laws of the United States, formally renouncing political loyalties to any other state. De la Espriella had lived in Italy for a long time and only returned to Colombia in 2025 to run for the presidency.
De la Espriella publicly refers to himself as “El Tigre” (The Tiger). He loves to make grand entrances, provocative statements, and revels in the spectacle. His political style is characterized by belligerent language and nationalistic displays. He has spoken of “gutting” the left, named his movement Defensores de la Patria (Defenders of the Fatherland), and repeatedly resorted to military gestures and commands such as “Steadfast for the fatherland!” during public appearances.
De la Espriella launched his campaign in November 2025 at a concert venue in Bogotá, staging it in the style of a pop show. He has recorded albums, wears tailor-made shirts, and portrays himself as the man who will save the country because no one else is capable of doing so. Comparisons to Nayib Bukele are no coincidence, both in terms of political staging and ideological orientation: De la Espriella admires the Salvadoran president and has adopted the same combination of authoritarian security discourse, digital media presence, and outsider rhetoric.
He dubbed his government programme “El Milagro de los Nunca” — the miracle of those who have never held power. Ideologically, the direction is clear: a radical dismantling of the state, tax cuts for businesses, support for fracking, deregulation, and the acceleration of environmental permits in the mining and energy sectors. Economically, he takes his cues from Javier Milei’s “chainsaw model”. At the same time, on issues of security, he promises the opposite of a smaller state: more police and military, ten Bukele-style maximum-security prisons, the establishment of special military zones, and the declaration of a state of emergency against organized crime. He also proposes terminating all ongoing peace negotiations, withdrawing Colombia from the Organization of American States, the United Nations, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, restoring relations with Israel, and joining Trump’s regional military alliance, the “Shield of the Americas”.
Colombia’s Divided Electoral Geography
The results of Colombia’s most recent election split the country into two geographic and social halves that have only become more sharply defined since the 2016 peace plebiscite. At that time, the “No” vote prevailed, rooted as it was in the Andean urban centres, the major inland cities, and the well-established middle classes. By contrast, the Pacific and Caribbean coasts, the Amazon region, the departments bordering Venezuela, and Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities voted in favour of peace. This pattern was repeated in the elections held in 2018, 2022, and 2026.
In the first round of voting, De la Espriella achieved particularly strong results among the urban middle and upper classes of the Andean region, as well as in the conservative, agricultural rural areas of inland Colombia. At the same time, he managed to make significant gains for the political right along the Caribbean coast, which has traditionally tended to lean left. After the first round, 76.4 percent of voters who had backed Paloma Valencia, the Uribista candidate who took 6.9 percent in the first round, switched to De la Espriella. Uribism, for decades the hegemonic force of the Colombian right, rallied behind “El Tigre”: even Álvaro Uribe himself called on people to vote for De la Espriella. This goes to show that Uribism had been politically burnt out, prompting the right to adopt a fresh face and a new political style in order to win the election.
De la Espriella drew his support primarily from the traditional electoral strongholds of the Colombian right: conservative social milieus, business owners, the self-employed, and those segments of the urban middle and upper classes that associated the Petro government (contrary to what the macroeconomic evidence indicates) chiefly with economic uncertainty, an allegedly excessive expansion of state regulation, and a deterioration in the security situation (which was in fact a reality in many places). The decisive factor behind his success was his ability to unite a broad anti-Petro camp by placing security at the centre of his campaign. At the same time, De la Espriella was able to appeal to a section of the younger population: he was the first Colombian candidate to conduct an algorithmically driven election campaign using AI-generated content and viral short-form videos on an industrial scale.
Cepeda, by contrast, won in Bogotá and in the peripheral regions along the coasts and land borders with neighbouring countries. He mobilized trade unions, social movements, environmental organizations, and sections of the universities. However, he was unable to free himself from the shadow of an incumbent president who, despite enjoying high approval ratings towards the end of his term, had lost support among the urban middle classes. Cepeda remained the candidate of a loyal progressive base, only opening himself to the political centre and to new social constituencies after losing the first round.
De la Espriella’s Meteoric Rise
At the outset, De la Espriella was not regarded as a serious candidate. Nor did he participate in the Gran Consulta por Colombia (Great Consultation for Colombia) on 8 March, through which the political right sought to select its candidate. Instead, he built his own campaign: he collected 4.8 million signatures for his candidacy, chose former finance minister José Manuel Restrepo to be his vice-presidential running mate, and initially focused his campaign strategy on his own political camp and on his rival within the right, Paloma Valencia. The campaign worked by contrasting “los nunca” — those who, by their own account, had never been part of the political power elite — with “los de siempre”, the political class that has governed Colombia for decades. With this outsider rhetoric, De la Espriella drew on discourses that the left had successfully employed in their 2022 election campaign, when the then vice-presidential candidate Francia Márquez spoke on behalf of the “nadies” (nobodies) — those social groups who felt excluded by the traditional elites.
On the other side stood an incumbent left-wing government on the defensive. Cepeda was seen as the candidate of continuity for Petro’s (peace) policy, just as the security situation was deteriorating in some regions. On top of this, Petro’s central domestic reform project — a fundamental overhaul of the healthcare system — ultimately failed in Congress after protracted disputes. Cepeda was unable to step out of his government’s shadow and establish himself as an independent political alternative.
Behind De la Espriella’s populist outward image lies a darker side that, under different political circumstances, probably would have proved decisive in determining the outcome of the election. As a lawyer, he represented controversial figures like Álex Saab, the alleged front man for Nicolás Maduro, and David Murcia Guzmán, the founder of the DMG pyramid scheme. More serious still is the history of the Fundación Iniciativas por la Paz (FIPAZ), of which he served as president in the early 2000s. The Comisión de la Verdad (Truth Commission), which examined the causes and dynamics of the armed conflict as part of the peace agreement, along with rulings by the Justice and Peace Tribunal — the special court system responsible for the judicial reckoning with the demobilization of paramilitary groups — characterized FIPAZ as an instrument created by the AUC paramilitaries to extend their political influence during the demobilization negotiations. AUC commander “Ernesto Báez” stated that De la Espriella had used student networks to mobilize support for the paramilitaries; Salvatore Mancuso confirmed the existence of such links before the Special Jurisdiction for Peace in 2024. Ten days before the runoff election, Cepeda filed a criminal complaint with the Colombian Attorney General’s Office and the International Criminal Court, accusing De la Espriella of financing terrorism and membership of a criminal organization. De la Espriella rejected all of the allegations; in any case, they do not appear to have troubled his voters.
When the election result was made public, the usual suspects were quick to weigh in: Javier Milei tweeted “The lion and the tiger are roaring in Latin America”; Donald Trump wrote “He won. Great!”; Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa declared “Today, Colombia chose order over impunity”. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced plans to cooperate on security and migration. Support from the international right-wing network is clearly evident: De la Espriella is part of a political project that is being championed in Latin America from Buenos Aires, San Salvador, Quito, La Paz, Santiago, and now also Lima and Bogotá. He promptly announced Colombia’s accession to Trump’s regional alliance, the “Shield of the Americas”, accompanying the pledge with an image of a tiger standing beside a bald eagle.
A Right-Wing Wave in Latin America
The election result represents not merely an election outcome but a fundamental turning point. What will happen over the next four years to peace and the economy — the two axes around which Colombian politics has revolved for decades?
One thing is certain: the peace process that began under Santos and was strengthened under Petro now faces the threat of being dismantled. De la Espriella has announced that he will end all ongoing negotiations — with the ELN, armed FARC dissident groups, and neo-paramilitaries. His strategy is one of military conquest, not negotiation. The Bukele model — with its mega-prisons, special powers, and mass arrests — will be transplanted onto Colombia, a country with four times the population of El Salvador and a landscape of conflict that is infinitely more complex in both geographical and social terms.
When it comes to the economy, De la Espriella is promising to shrink the government apparatus by 40 percent (through mass layoffs, the dissolution of government agencies, and the privatization of state-owned enterprises), support for fracking, tax cuts for businesses, and the reversal of Petro’s labour and pension reforms. In Congress, however, he commands no secure majority and will therefore need the support of parts of the political centre. The fact that he will be unable govern without establishing such a coalition is likely to quickly expose the limits of his anti-establishment rhetoric.
Another thing is certain: the election outcome of 21 June 2026 is not an isolated event, but part of a broader wave. Over the past three years, almost every election in Latin America has been won by candidates from the right or far right. In October 2025, Rodrigo Paz won Bolivia’s presidential election after two decades of left-wing government, and two months later José Antonio Kast followed suit in Chile; Milei governs in Argentina, Bukele in El Salvador, Noboa in Ecuador, and soon, in all likelihood, Keiko Fujimori in Peru. Colombia has now joined this list —the same country that this year marks the tenth anniversary of the peace process with the FARC guerrillas, the ineffective implementation of which by the state is one of the reasons why the nation’s elections can today be won through fearmongering and promises of security and order.
The right’s election victories across Latin America do indeed share common features: security instead of social justice; tax cuts for the wealthy instead of redistribution; authoritarian leadership instead of compromise. De la Espriella has infused this political vocabulary with distinctly Colombian details — exhaustion caused by decades of conflict, impatience with a peace process that promised much but delivered little — and has wrapped it all up in the branding of a successful entrepreneur: wealth as proof of competence, blunt rhetoric and spectacle as proof of courage, and a lack of political experience as evidence of an anti-establishment approach.
Nevertheless, more than half of the electorate did not vote for him. It is already becoming clear that the divisions within Colombian society will not be overcome over the next four years, but instead are likely to deepen.
“El Tigre” has secured his electoral victory by the narrowest of margins. Colombia’s progressive forces squandered a historic chance to consolidate the course of reforms that had already been set in motion — not least due to ineffective communication and an election campaign that failed to keep pace with the times. Yet the achievements and limitations of four years of left-wing government have left a lasting imprint on public consciousness and will remain etched in the collective memory, providing a foundation on which a future attempt can build. Until then, the task at hand is to wage a defensive struggle to ensure that as much as possible of the social rights, democratic framework, and institutions that have been won can be preserved.
Translation by Diego Otero and Louise Pain for Gegensatz Translation Collective.
