Cepeda, de la Espriella advance in Colombia’s presidential election

Far-right outsider Abelardo de la Espriella will face left-wing Senator Ivan Cepeda in the runoff for Colombia’s presidential election next month.

As polls closed on Sunday, the two candidates surged ahead in the vote tally, quickly extinguishing the hopes of right-wing Senator Paloma Valencia, a former frontrunner.

As of Sunday afternoon, with 99 percent of the votes tallied, de la Espriella took the lead, with 43 percent of the ballots cast in his favour.

Cepeda trailed him by more than 600,000 votes, earning 40 percent of the ballots.

Neither candidate breached the 50-percent threshold needed to avoid a head-to-head match-up on June 21. But the results are likely to buoy de la Espriella’s campaign going into the final round.

Cepeda had consistently topped public opinion polls in the final weeks before voting. A May 24 poll from the National Consulting Centre (CNC), for instance, showed him with more than 33 percent support, ahead of de la Espriella’s 30.9 percent.

But questions about security were at the forefront of voters’ concerns going into Sunday’s election.

De la Espriella, a businessman who has never held elected office, leaned heavily into fears of crime as he launched an outsider campaign, similar in the style to the dark-horse bid of Argentinian President Javier Milei.