FRANCE PERSPECTIVE

Paris, June 22, 2026. One percentage point. That was the razor-thin margin — 49.7 percent against 48.7 percent — by which Abelardo de la Espriella won Sunday's runoff in Colombia's presidential election, defeating left-leaning senator Ivan Cepeda, according to official preliminary results. Forty-one million voters went to the polls in a nation marked by six decades of internal armed conflict and a recent resurgence of violence linked to drug trafficking organizations.

Behind bulletproof glass, dressed in Colombia's national football team jersey — a campaign uniform turned symbol — the president-elect celebrated before thousands of supporters gathered in Barranquilla the start of a "new era." He takes office August 7 for a four-year term. His victory was immediately hailed by Donald Trump, who posted on Truth Social a photo of the elected leader with the message: "He won, and by a lot." U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio commented on X about future collaboration "on security matters," to "end illegal immigration to the United States" and "strengthen our economic ties."

French media unanimously emphasizes the meteoric rise of this 47-year-old lawyer and novice businessman, whom La Tribune recently compared to Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele: private jet, luxury watches, Tuscan vineyard estate, but hard-line security rhetoric. A self-declared admirer of Bukele, Argentine Javier Milei, and Trump, de la Espriella built his ascent on a radical pledge: to pursue "relentlessly the criminals, within the framework of the Constitution and the laws of the Republic."

The campaign unfolded amid high tension — bombings attributed to guerrilla groups, assassination of a presidential candidate. France 24 and RFI stress the tightness of the result: Cepeda refused to concede defeat, announcing he would contest results from 33,000 polling stations pending final tallies.

Colombia thus joins Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador in a rightward shift across Latin America that French media characterize as a deep-rooted trend. Le Monde and BFMTV note that leaders from these countries, aligned with Washington, quickly congratulated the president-elect. Yet the picture is not uniform: in Cali, the nation's third-largest city, protesters burned American flags and clashed with riot control forces, dispersed with tear gas.