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

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 on Sunday. That is no insignificant margin, given that De la Espriella’s lead over Cepeda amounted to little more than 670,000 votes – 43.7% against 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 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. Abelardo de la Espriella gestures outside a polling station in Barranquilla on Sunday. He took 43.7% of the vote. Photograph: Charlie Cordero/Reuters 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. …