Just days before the World Cup, thousands of Colombians across the country emerged wearing the national team’s soccer jersey, turning the streets into a sea of bright yellow.
But Colombians were not out en masse to cheer the country’s beloved soccer team. They were voting on Sunday for Abelardo De La Espriella, a right-wing presidential candidate who had urged supporters to wear the jersey during the final days of his campaign.
They wore the shirts to enormous closing campaign rallies and to voting booths, in a show of force that also amounted to a stunt, bypassing laws prohibiting the use of campaign clothing at polling sites.
Mr. De La Espriella, who was endorsed by President Trump on Tuesday, has turned Colombia’s emblematic uniform — typically a symbol of unity in the soccer-crazed country — into his campaign’s official attire. On Sunday, his nationalist message helped propel him to a runoff against a left-wing candidate later this month.
Now, with two major events taking place this month, the final presidential vote and Colombia’s participation in the World Cup, the country’s revered jersey — known as la amarilla, or “the yellow one” — has emerged as a new partisan battleground.
Iván Cepeda, the leftist senator challenging Mr. De La Espriella, accused his opponent of “stealing” the national jersey for political gain. Colombia’s soccer federation denounced the use of the national team for “political confrontation.”
The clash has also ignited a national debate. Is it OK for followers of one Colombian candidate to claim the jersey, or is a symbol of the whole nation being hijacked by the slice of voters that Mr. De La Espriella has so effectively mobilized?
Colombians are divided.
“It’s disgusting,” said Adriana Salazar, 27, a barista in Bogotá, the country’s capital.
Wearing the jersey now amounts to bullying, she said, “intimidating the people who don’t agree with you,” both at the polls and in every day life. She noted that the jersey remained ubiquitous even after Election Day on Sunday.
De La Espriella supporters gloated, posting memes mocking Mr. Cepeda for sparking the jersey controversy after Mr. De La Espriella won more votes, albeit barely, in the first round. (Mr. De La Espriella and Mr. Cepeda finished first and second, but because neither received more than 50 percent of the vote, they will compete in a runoff.)
Some political observers wondered whether drawing attention to the jersey might only fuel support for Mr. De La Espriella.
Pablo González, a retired member of Colombia’s security forces who supports Mr. De La Espriella, said Mr. Cepeda’s accusations were a desperate act, because “he feels defeated.”
“The jersey belongs to everyone, and anyone can wear it whenever they want,” said Mr. González, 70, who lives in Bogotá.
Colombia’s soccer uniform, adopted in 1985, is meant to resemble the national flag: yellow jersey, blue shorts and red socks. After failing to qualify for the World Cup in 2022, the national team will play the group stage in Mexico and Miami. Its first match is on June 17, against Uzbekistan.
Because Colombian presidential elections coincide with the World Cup every four years, politicians have long sought to wield the soccer team’s popularity for electoral gain.
But until Mr. De La Espriella began encouraging his followers to wear the team jersey, Colombians said the shirts had never been so widely visible.
During his speech on Sunday after polls closed, Mr. De La Espriella wore a jersey with “Presidente” and a “10” on the back, the number worn by two of Colombia’s most famous players, Carlos “El Pibe” Valderrama and James Rodríguez. The candidate’s wife and young children also wore team jerseys.
By wrapping himself in the fabric of the national team, Mr. De La Espriella is drawing from a playbook used by other Latin American leaders, from Brazil to Peru.
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, the former far-right president, encouraged his supporters to wear the nation’s yellow-and-green jersey to the polls in 2018 and 2022. That shirt — perhaps the most recognizable in international soccer — lost its status as a politically neutral symbol in Brazil after many liberal fans refused to wear it out of fear of being mistaken for Bolsonaro supporters.
And after Colombia reached the quarterfinals of the 2014 World Cup, the strongest showing in the team’s history, former President Juan Manuel Santos frequently wore the yellow jersey as he tried to rally Colombians behind a divisive peace deal with the country’s largest guerrilla group.
This year, as Colombia grapples with a resurgent armed conflict, Mr. De La Espriella has used the jersey to tap into national pride as he runs on a platform to “defend the homeland” from drug traffickers and armed groups. Wearing the jersey has also helped Mr. De La Espriella, a jet-setting criminal-defense lawyer fond of tailored suits, to rebrand himself as a man of the people.
Daniel Alarcón, a Peruvian-American journalist and co-host of a World Cup podcast, lamented the politicization of the soccer jersey.
“When you put on the national team jersey, I feel like everybody is celebrating their own private vision of what they wish the country were,” he said. “Once a national symbol like that gets associated with one political party or another, I do think something is lost.”
Invoking the roar of a crowd after a scored goal, he said, “an opportunity for an apolitical moment of transcendence vanishes.”
The Colombian Football Federation sought to be diplomatic, denouncing the use of the jersey for politics while stressing that it had no power to limit how Colombians choose to wear the shirts.
“We deeply regret that the Colombian national team jersey, which symbolizes discipline, sportsmanship, teamwork and the ability of our players, is being misinterpreted or is the subject of controversies unrelated to sporting glory,” the federation said in a statement. ”
As the Colombian soccer squad prepared to play its final friendly match in Bogotá on Monday before traveling for the World Cup, Colombians continued bickering online.
Right-wing commentators cast Mr. Cepeda’s criticism of Mr. De La Espriella as hypocritical and resurfaced photos of President Gustavo Petro, a Cepeda ally, wearing the jersey during his presidential run in 2022. While Mr. Cepeda urged people not to use the jersey for political purposes, some on the left wondered whether they, too, should appropriate it to prevent it from becoming a right-wing symbol.
Shops owners and street vendors stood on the sidelines, keeping la amarilla visibly in supply.
On Monday night, the argument grew more heated when supporters marching for Mr. Cepeda surrounded the official bus of the Colombia national football team and plastered it with campaign fliers. The bus was near El Campín, the stadium where Colombia was playing its friendly match against Costa Rica, when demonstrators blocked its path until the police cleared the way, video shows.
Mr. González, the De La Espriella fan, said that, if anything, the dust up over the jerseys had made his supporters even more committed.
Through their networks, he said, they had spread the word to wear their yellow jerseys daily through the end of the World Cup. “And there’s all the more reason to wear it on June 21,” he said — runoff day.
Luis Ferré-Sadurní is a reporter for The Times based in Bogotá, Colombia
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