Trump admirer’s surprise first-round win is a blow to Colombia’s traditional conservatives

Success of far-right presidential candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, suggests some voters are ‘fed up with politics’

The far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella and the leftwing senator Iván Cepeda have just under three weeks to compete for the roughly 3.6m votes that did not go to either of them in the first round of Colombia’s presidential election.

That is no insignificant number, given that De la Espriella’s lead over Cepeda amounted to little more than 670,000 votes – 43.7% to 40.9%.

Although polls had shown the wealthy lawyer gaining ground, they had also consistently indicated a solid lead for the senator, who is backed by the leftwing president, Gustavo Petro. This made De la Espriella’s first-round victory on Sunday a surprise to most Colombian analysts and politicians.

An admirer of Donald Trump and other far-right leaders in the region, he campaigned amid a string of controversies and with a promise to end, within 90 days, Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict which has claimed nearly half a million lives.

His lead on Sunday is being interpreted as a sign that the radical right has overtaken Colombia’s traditional conservative forces, reflected in the collapse of the candidacy of the rightwing senator Paloma Valencia.

A loyal follower of the former president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who governed from 2002 to 2010, Valencia spent months in second place in the polls but lost momentum in the final weeks and finished with just 6.9% of the vote.

“What really helped De la Espriella was Valencia’s collapse,” said the political scientist Yan Basset. “There was a tactical shift of rightwing voters towards De la Espriella, who appeared to be the safest rightwing candidate to reach the runoff.”