Far-right outsider Abelardo de la Espriella will face left-wing Senator Ivan Cepeda in the run-off for Colombia’s presidential election next month.After polls closed on Sunday, the two candidates quickly surged ahead in the vote tally, extinguishing the hopes of right-wing Senator Paloma Valencia, a former frontrunner.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listAs of Sunday afternoon, with 99 percent of the votes tallied, de la Espriella took the lead, with 43 percent of the ballots cast in his favour.Cepeda trailed him by more than 600,000 votes, earning 40 percent support.Neither candidate breached the 50-percent threshold needed to avoid a head-to-head match-up on June 21. But the results are likely to buoy de la Espriella’s campaign going into the final round.Cepeda had consistently topped public opinion polls in the final weeks before the vote. A May 24 poll from the National Consulting Centre (CNC) showed him with more than 33 percent support, ahead of de la Espriella’s 30.9 percent. Ivan Cepeda, left, will face Abelardo de la Espriella in the June 21 run-off election [AFP]De la Espriella’s ‘outsider’ campaignQuestions about security were at the forefront of voters’ concerns going into Sunday’s election.De la Espriella, a businessman and lawyer who has never held elected office, leaned heavily into fears of crime as he launched an outsider campaign, similar to the dark-horse bid of Argentinian President Javier Milei.By contrast, Cepeda is a well-known quantity in Colombian politics. His father was a senator, too, before he was assassinated in 1994, in what was widely considered to be an act of political violence. Advertisem …
