With 99.84% of the results counted, the right-wing candidate Abelardo de la Espriella won the presidential runoff in Colombia with 12,941,992 votes, equivalent to 49.65%. In second place is the communist Iván Cepeda Castro, from the Pacto Histórico, with 12,694,863 votes, or 48.70%.
The difference between the two candidates is now 247,129 votes, with a narrow lead of 0.95 percentage points for De la Espriella. With the count practically closed, the candidate from Defensores de la Patria maintains the lead over the representative of the left-wing establishment in an extremely tight election.
With 99.84% of the polling stations reported, the presidential runoff shows higher participation than recorded in the first round. According to official data, 26,313,368 Colombians voted, equivalent to 63.52% of the electorate, compared to 23,978,304 voters in the first round, when participation was 57.88%. The runoff mobilized 2,335,064 more voters so far, an increase of 5.64 percentage points.
The increase in participation was also reflected in valid votes, which rose from 23,685,329 in the first round to 26,063,215 in the runoff, even without completing 100% of the polling stations. Additionally, votes for candidates increased from 23,278,359 to 25,636,855, 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 annulment of polling stations due to alleged irregularities in E14 forms without signatures from jurors, in an attempt to create tension in the final stretch of the count just as the right-wing candidate maintains the lead over Cepeda.
The victory of De la Espriella marks a turning point for Colombia. Following the exhaustion of Gustavo Petro's leftist experiment, the newly elected president will face the challenge of restoring order, confronting organized crime, and rebuilding the authority of the State in a country that voted for a change in direction.
