A hard-right Donald Trump fan and a leftist senator on Monday threw themselves into campaigning for Colombia’s presidential runoff, a day after leading a first-round vote dominated by drug-related guerrilla violence.
Right-wing lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella was the surprise winner of Sunday’s vote, garnering over 43 percent to 41 percent for the favorite, senator Ivan Cepeda.
De la Espriella stormed from behind in recent weeks on a tough-on-crime platform that has resonated with voters across Latin America worried about surging violence by armed groups.
The millionaire self-described “Tiger,” who has billed himself as a political norm-smashing outsider, vowed to end talks with cocaine-trafficking rebels and instead crush them with military force.
Cepeda, an acolyte of polarizing left-wing President Gustavo Petro, campaigned on keeping the struggling peace process alive and expanding social programs to reduce inequality.
On Sunday night, he vowed to defeat the “fascist extreme right,” linking his rival to mafia people and plutocrats.
He and Petro also questioned the accuracy of the results, leading De la Espriella on Monday to accuse them of trying to “steal democracy from us” and draw parallels with ousted Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro.
Cepeda faces an uphill battle to make up lost ground in the June 21 runoff.
Third-placed candidate Paloma Valencia, an establishment conservative who found herself outflanked by De la Espriella on the right, backed him against what she called Cepeda’s “neocommunism.”
De la Espriella “captured the spirit of anti-Petro sentiment and right-wing radicalism,” Juan Nicolas Garzon, a professor of Political Science at the University of La Sabana, explained to AFP.
Cepeda, a philosopher and human rights activist who speaks in measured tones, needs to be “a bit more confrontational,” Garzon added.
One of the questions hanging over the run-off is how centrists will vote.
Failed vice-presidential candidate Juan Daniel Oviedo, a centrist, lamented that the country was “caught between populist extremes” and he refused to endorse either finalist.
The campaign was marred by car bombs, drone attacks and the assassination of a leading presidential candidate and dozens of local political leaders.
De la Espriella addressed rallies from behind bulletproof glass.
He has vowed a “shock plan” to bombard armed groups, echoing the iron-fist rhetoric that has swept the right to power across Latin America.
“We’ll start immediately with the bombing of narco-terrorist camps,” he told AFP in an interview during the campaign.
He has also pledged to build 10 mega-prisons, modelled on El Salvador’s brutal Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), where inmates, he says, will survive on “bread and water.”
While Colombia has thrived in the decade since a landmark peace accord with FARC guerrillas, pockets of the country are still under the grip of armed groups vying for control of cocaine routes, illegal gold mining and extortion.
– ‘Radical extremes’ –
Many voters accuse Petro, who was constitutionally barred from seeking reelection, of allowing violence to flourish while pursuing peace.
Cepeda, 63, is the son of a leftist senator killed by right‑wing paramilitaries.
His supporters point to a higher minimum wage, increased education spending and land transfers to poor communities under the left.
Gloria Terranova, a 59-year-old coffee plantation worker, said she held out hope that Cepeda might still win the presidency despite finishing second in the first round.
“Right now we are at radical extremes: one side wants peace, the other wants war,” she said.
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