I’ll have more to say about Colombia’s election soon, but for this morning, a few notes as I outline and organize my thoughts. I’m moderating an event about Colombia’s election results co-hosted by Canadian Council for the Americas and the Stimson Center at 11AM EDT.
For the second time this month in Latin America, a far-right candidate defeated a far-left candidate for the presidency by less than one percent of the vote in a second-round runoff election. Fewer than 300,000 votes separate Abelardo de la Espriella and Ivan Cepeda of the nearly 26 million votes cast. It’s a larger margin than Fujimori’s in Peru, but not by much.
However, Abelardo doesn’t care if he won by 1 vote or 20%. He is going to treat his victory as a full mandate. He will not moderate willingly. In some ways, this is a pattern among all presidents who win from all ideologies in Latin America. In other ways, de la Espriella will be more extreme than some others because he feels less constrained by the institutions.
Nobody should trust Abelardo. This will be a key message in much of what I say and write this week. He said whatever he needed to say to win the election, but he is not someone with a fixed ideology. He doesn’t have the lifelong commitment to austerity that defines Javier Milei. His militaristic mano dura rhetoric was more about campaigning than a true belief in hardline security policies that define Alvaro Uribe or Daniel Noboa. He has made a career of working for the highest bidder for his legal services, no matter how shady the client, and that won’t change now.
It’s possible to argue that his ideological vagueness could be a positive. Maybe he moderates his policies because he doesn’t really care about the positions. I doubt Colombia will be so lucky.
I expect a performative security populism along the lines of El Salvador’s president (I’ve seen several people online call him “Temu Bukele,” and I’m still laughing at that, despite some of the darker implications). There will be detentions, more jails, attacks on critics, but also backroom deals and negotiations. He will be a Trump ally in the Shield of the Americas.
Meanwhile, the austerity rhetoric will not be matched by real cuts in Colombia’s budget. Abelardo will embrace rightwing economic populism along the lines of Bolsonaro or Trump rather than Milei. Austerity rhetoric will mask some big spending. The problem for Colombia is that it can’t afford it, even in the short term, the way the US or Brazil can. Petro has left the country in a fiscal mess and deserves the blame, but the new president is unlikely to fix it and may even make it worse.
What happens to Petro, Cepeda, the center, and the rest of the opposition? I’m sure Petro will continue to claim fraud, but it won’t matter. The opposition to Abelardo is going to start out divided, giving the new president a honeymoon. The longer they are internally divided, the more leeway the new president gets.
Will Colombia’s institutions be able to restrain the more authoritarian impulses of Abelardo? I hope so. Colombia’s institutions including the Congress and courts are a decently strong check on the president. At critical moments, they restrained the worst impulses of Uribe and Petro. I do think the question of how the institutions hold remains a key one to monitor.
Another key point (I could make this after many elections) that should be obvious but is often lost in the moment is that the de la Espriella presidency will play out over years, not weeks. The early honeymoon period could play out very positively for the new president, only to descend into chaos a few months later. Or he could have an early crash and rebound three years in. Don’t take the first month signals as defining the presidency.
To the question of whether there is a “shift to the right in Latin America,” which is what everyone wants to talk about, the answer is no on the voters, but yes on the politicians.
Voters have barely moved in recent years. Most of the recent elections have been decided on a shift of a small percentage of voters. To the extent there is a pendulum as it relates to voters, it’s moving in the tiniest of vibrations back and forth. Anti-incumbency explains far more than ideological shifts. After divided “invisible primaries” and first round campaigns that eliminate most centrist candidates, many of voters are deciding in second rounds for the candidate they consider “less bad” rather than the one who most closely resembles their ideology.
Yet, despite the voters staying relatively stable, from the point of view of who is winning and the ideologies that are being implemented, the pendulum is moving in enormous sweeping swings that knock down everything in their path. There is nothing small about the shifts to Milei, Kast, Fujimori or de la Espriella. Similarly, there was nothing small about the victories of Boric, Castillo, Petro and Lula in the previous election cycle. Each election seems to bring enormous political and policy shifts in the region that can’t be ignored or minimized, even if they go well beyond what the average voter wants.
More later this week and next….