Abelardo De La Espriella, a right-wing populist millionaire with no previous political experience, appears headed for a razor-thin victory over the left-wing senator Iván Cepeda in Colombia’s presidential election. If preliminary results hold, in less than two months, the Trump-backed political outsider will take the reins of Latin America’s third-largest country, succeeding Gustavo Petro, who rode a wave of frustration with conventional politics and made history four years ago as Colombia’s first leftist president.
It might be tempting to interpret these results as a mere swing from left back to right. But Colombia is not merely experiencing a conservative turn; it is undergoing a turbulent political cycle marked by bitter polarization and driven by dissatisfaction with established institutions and repeated, unfulfilled demands for transformation. What Mr. De La Espriella represents most is not just a conservative shift but what is known, in Spanish, as “un salto al vacío”: a leap into the void.
In Colombia, as in so many other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, the desire for change has often become more potent than any particular ideology. Over the past decade, the region has seen a particularly strong anti-incumbent wave, with voters rejecting governing parties regardless of their political stripe. Amid mounting economic and security concerns, citizens seem increasingly willing to accept authoritarian leaders or governments that they see as more capable of addressing their problems; adhering to procedural or institutional norms is less important than delivering results.
That anti-incumbent fervor helped propel Mr. Petro to power in 2022; now those same aspirations for hope and change have fueled Mr. De La Espriella’s rise. It is a revealing pattern. The government’s inability, over the past decades, to address Colombia’s chronic problems — persistent violence, profound inequality and a weak state presence across large swaths of the country — has repeatedly undermined public confidence in centrist political forces. Both Mr. Petro and Mr. De La Espriella successfully tapped into that disaffection, presenting themselves as outsiders challenging what they depicted as a sclerotic and discredited political order, albeit in very different ways.
To Mr. Petro’s credit, his tenure wasn’t all bad. He gave voice to legitimate grievances about poverty and inequality and expanded the political conversation to include Afro-Colombian communities, Indigenous people and other groups long excluded from power. But like other Latin American populists, he ultimately proved more effective at campaigning than at governing. His administration was marked by infighting, corruption scandals, attempts to bypass Congress and an inability to turn ambitious promises into lasting reforms. He presided over an acute fiscal imbalance, a crisis in the health sector and the politicization and hollowing out of Colombia’s traditionally strong technocracy.
Most important was his failure on security. Mr. Petro’s signature initiative, known as Total Peace, sought negotiated settlements with insurgent criminal groups and urban gangs after years of sustained military pressure. Although the effort was well intentioned, the results were profoundly disappointing. Armed organizations flourished; the number of active combatants in conflicts once again ballooned; a hamstrung Colombian military saw its morale plummet. Coca production rose to record levels, and violence ticked back up. Many Colombians concluded that the government had lost control of the country.
Mr. De La Espriella, a successful criminal defense lawyer known for representing often-controversial clients, proved astute in exploiting these vulnerabilities. Next to Mr. Cepeda, who often appeared rigid and uninspiring, Mr. De La Espriella seemed the consummate showman, blending emotional appeals with populist messaging and promises of a hard-line security approach in part emulating the policies of President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Mr. Bukele’s model — defined by the mass arrests of suspected gang members, mega-prisons and significantly expanded military and police powers — has captivated populations across the region. Regardless of whether such an iron-fisted strategy can succeed in Colombia, it provided a clear alternative to a security policy many voters viewed as fruitless.
Should Mr. De La Espriella take charge, Colombians can expect stronger support for private enterprise and foreign investment, a more conservative social agenda and closer alignment with the region’s right-leaning leaders. Critics worry they might also see a decline in adherence to democratic norms, citing Mr. De La Espriella’s hard-line security policies that could weaken judicial independence, minority rights and institutional constraints on executive power. There are legitimate concerns that an aggressive, take-no-prisoners security strategy could escalate human rights abuses without addressing the underlying drivers of violence, such as weak institutions and a lack of economic opportunities.
Mr. De La Espriella, who holds both Colombian and U.S. citizenship, will have an enthusiastic backer in President Trump, who has already issued him a hearty endorsement. Security cooperation between Washington and Bogotá has sputtered along during the Petro era: While intelligence sharing, cocaine seizures and joint efforts against organized crime largely continued, relations were strained by profound ideological differences between the governments and Mr. Petro’s opposition to traditional counternarcotics strategies. Under Mr. De La Espriella, this cooperation could deepen, leading to the kinds of joint military operations that have recently taken place in Ecuador and Venezuela.
That would have consequences across the region. A dramatic move toward U.S.-backed militarization is bound to put leftist regional leaders like Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum on edge. Their concern over growing U.S. interventions in Latin America is practical as well as ideological. It’s not clear that a return to a heavy-handed, U.S.-led military model will be effective in dismantling sprawling transnational crime networks. It could instead push violence across the region’s porous borders, exacerbating already serious security problems.
If Mr. De La Espriella sets out to reshape Colombia — and, by extension, the region — by fiat, he may run into the same guardrails that thwarted his predecessor. One of the most important lessons of the Petro years is the remarkable resilience of Colombian democracy. During Mr. Petro’s tenure, Congress, the courts, civil society organizations and an independent press repeatedly resisted executive overreach and demonstrated their capacity to defend institutional checks and balances.
Mr. De La Espriella might assume Colombia’s top office, but his political movement has limited representation in Congress which will force him to negotiate with many of the same parties he roundly denounced throughout his campaign. The outsider who promised to upend the system may soon discover that governing requires working within it.
The real question is not whether Colombia has moved left or right. It is whether its democratic institutions are strong enough to channel yet another wave of anti-establishment politics without sacrificing the rule of law. The answer will determine whether this election marks the latest swing of the political pendulum — or a definitive, perilous step into the void.
Michael Shifter is a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue and teaches Latin American politics at Georgetown University and George Washington University.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Colombia Leaps Into the Void appeared first on New York Times.
