With 99.70% of the results counted, the right-wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella won the presidential runoff in Colombia with 12,927,006 votes, equivalent to 49.65%. In second place is the communist Iván Cepeda Castro from the Historical Pact, with 12,681,268 votes, or 48.71%.
The difference between the two candidates is now 245,738 votes, with a narrow lead of 0.94 percentage points for De la Espriella. With the counting practically closed, the candidate from Defensores de la Patria maintains the lead over the representative of the leftist establishment in an extremely tight election.
With 99.70% of the polling stations reported, the presidential runoff shows a higher turnout than that recorded in the first round. According to official data, 26,284,052 Colombians voted, equivalent to 63.45% of the electorate, compared to 23,978,304 voters in the first round, when turnout was 57.88%. The runoff mobilized 2,305,748 more voters so far, an increase of 5.57 percentage points.
The increase in participation was also reflected in valid votes, which rose from 23,685,329 in the first round to 26,034,157 in the runoff, even without completing 100% of the polling stations. Additionally, votes for candidates increased from 23,278,359 to 25,608,274, while blank votes proportionally decreased from 1.71% to 1.63%. Null votes also fell from 1.02% to 0.83%, indicating an election with greater effective participation.
The guerrilla Gustavo Petro aims to annul the victory
While the right-wing Abelardo de la Espriella leads in the provisional count, the communist president Gustavo Petro has already begun to raise suspicions about the electoral process. Through his social media, the president called for the challenge of polling stations due to alleged irregularities in E14 forms without signatures from jurors, in an attempt to create tension in the final stage of the count just as the right-wing candidate maintains the lead over Cepeda.
