Colombia’s outgoing president on Sunday raised questions about the country’s elections, revealing that his favorite candidate, Iván Cepeda, will face a run-off next month against his right-wing opponent, Abelardo de la Espriela.
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In the first round of voting on Sunday, neither candidate received more than 50% of the vote. With more than 99% of the votes counted, de la Espriela, who is running as a candidate for the party he founded, Defensor de la Patria, was leading with more than 43% of the votes. Cepeda, a member of the incumbent political party Pacto Histórico, was behind with just over 40%.
President Gustavo Petro, who supported Cepeda, said he would not accept the provisional results released by the country’s election commission, arguing that some of the software used by private companies to count the votes was flawed and the results were not binding.
Petro claimed that 800,000 IDs representing people not participating in the official census were added to the software.
Cepeda also cast doubt on the results, citing errors and discrepancies in the counting of votes.
“Today we secured 10 million votes that were miscounted in Colombia,” Cepeda said in a speech in Bogota. “I would like to confirm that there is a discrepancy.”
The country’s electoral body, the National Civil Registration Authority, will publish provisional results ahead of the final official results. Hernán Penagos, head of the office, said in March that the preliminary tally for this year’s parliamentary elections had reached 99.8% accuracy (a historic high) compared to the final results.
Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch, said on Sunday’s X broadcast that Colombia’s electoral system is “independent and reliable.”
“It is unfortunate that the president is sowing unwarranted suspicion,” Gebertus wrote.
“Mr. de la Espriela and Mr. Cepeda will proceed to the second round of voting. The election results must be respected,” he added, calling on the international community to rally around the National Population Register.
Sunday’s results set the stage for a showdown between Mr Cepeda, a leftist senator who helped negotiate Colombia’s historic 2016 peace deal, and Mr de la Espriela, a lawyer and political outsider who considers himself an ally of US President Donald Trump and has vowed to crack down on crime.
“We will defeat tyranny and absolutism,” de la Espriela wrote to X after it was revealed that his party would advance to a June runoff.
“We were able to advance to the runoff because of the more than 10 million Colombians who responded to our calls,” said de la Espriela, who often calls himself “Tiger.”
The runoff election is scheduled for June 21st.
Paloma Valencia of the conservative Central Democratic Party, a protégé of right-wing former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe and an avowed centrist who could build coalitions, was expected to be a candidate who could advance to the second round. But on Sunday, he received less than 7% of the vote and was eliminated from the race.
Voters in Valencia, who ran against Petro’s term-limited left-wing mandate, may support de la Espriela in the next vote to decide the next leader. Valencia supported Mr de la Espriela in a press conference on Sunday after the results.
Sunday’s vote, seen as a referendum on Petro’s policies, comes 10 years after Colombia signed a historic peace deal with guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
The agreement offered hope of breaking the cycle of fighting between rebels and the government, but violence has since relapsed, reaching a climax in the run-up to the presidential election.
Drone attacks by criminal organizations are on the rise, and armed attacks have plagued the election campaign, with politician and presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay, 39, shot dead at a political rally last June.
Mr. Petro, a former Marxist revolutionary and the first left-wing president of modern times, has had frequent feuds with Mr. Trump and has used the conflicts to build his image.
But in February, the two leaders appeared to reconcile in a closed-door meeting in the Oval Office, after which Petro left the White House with a red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap and a signed copy of Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal.”
After the meeting, President Trump said he and Petro “got on very well.”
But some U.S. officials have moved to put the spotlight on de la Espriela, suggesting that voting for Mr. Cepeda could be a mistake.
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who has been a key voice in advising President Trump’s policy toward Colombia and attended Petro’s February meeting with Trump, said at an Atlantic Council event last week that the Colombian election is critical and “will determine what direction the people go.”
“We found a way out, and the only way out was to take military action in Venezuela,” Moreno said.
Moreno said he will be the international observer for this week’s elections to ensure free and safe elections.
Last week, Mr. Petro responded to Mr. Moreno’s comments about X, asking him not to make any comments that are “unrelated to his mission of election oversight.”
“Political statements regarding the people’s vote are illegal interference with the people’s free decisions,” Petro said.
Other U.S. lawmakers also spoke out ahead of the election. Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) formally endorsed Mr. de la Espriela in the lead-up to the election.
Salazar, Moreno and other lawmakers, including Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.), congratulated de la Espriera for leading the polls after Sunday’s results were announced.
“Democracy won today, but the work is not done yet. There will be a run-off in three weeks, and at the request of the CNE, I will be back to observe the final round,” Moreno wrote in the X newspaper.
