Lawyer and Trump admirer has risen rapidly in the polls and will face Iván Cepeda in election runoff in three weeks

The far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella won the first round of Colombia’s presidential election on Sunday and will face senator Iván Cepeda, the candidate backed by leftwing president Gustavo Petro, in the runoff.

With 99.97% of ballots counted, the outsider and Donald Trump admirer Espriella secured 43.7% of the vote – just over 10.3m votes – compared with 40.9% (about 9.6m votes) for Cepeda, a philosopher and human rights activist who has served as a senator since 2014.

The two will face each other in a runoff on 21 June.

Although polls in recent weeks had already detected Espriella’s rapid rise, most still showed him trailing Cepeda, who for months seemed to hold a solid lead.

Petro posted on X that “as president, I do not accept the preliminary results” released by the National Civil Registry, the independent public body responsible for organising Colombia’s elections.

Without showing any evidence, the president claimed the count included “800,000 additional people” and said he would only “consider and accept” the results of the official scrutiny process, during which the National Electoral Council reviews the physical tally sheets, a procedure that can take days or even weeks.

After a wave of victories by far-right candidates in recent years in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia and Honduras, Colombia remains one of the few countries in Latin America still governed by the left, alongside Mexico and Brazil, which will hold its own presidential election in October.

Espriella is an outspoken admirer of several rightwing leaders in the region, including the US president, Donald Trump, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Argentina’s Javier Milei.

A criminal lawyer and millionaire businessman who has never held public office, Espriella built his campaign around a promise to return to a policy of total confrontation in response to Colombia’s worsening security crisis, now considered the worst since the landmark 2016 peace agreement between the government and most of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

The past few months have been marked by a surge in guerrilla attacks, homicides, kidnappings, forced displacement and massacres, and last year the rightwing senator and presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot during a campaign event by a Farc dissident group and later died.

See also:

• Pro-Trump candidate pulls ahead in Colombia presidential vote as ruling party sows doubt in results (Associated Press)