Abelardo De La Espriella, a right-wing populist millionaire with no previous political experience, appears headed for a razor-thin victory over the left-wing senator Iván Cepeda in Colombia’s presidential election. If preliminary results hold, in less than two months, the Trump-backed political outsider will take the reins of Latin America’s third-largest country, succeeding Gustavo Petro, who rode a wave of frustration with conventional politics and made history four years ago as Colombia’s first leftist president.
It might be tempting to interpret these results as a mere swing from left back to right. But Colombia is not merely experiencing a conservative turn; it is undergoing a turbulent political cycle marked by bitter polarization and driven by dissatisfaction with established institutions and repeated, unfulfilled demands for transformation. What Mr. De La Espriella represents most is not just a conservative shift but what is known, in Spanish, as “un salto al vacío”: a leap into the void.
In Colombia, as in so many other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, the desire for change has often become more potent than any particular ideology. Over the past decade, the region has seen a particularly strong anti-incumbent wave, with voters rejecting governing parties regardless of their political stripe. Amid mounting economic and security concerns, citizens seem increasingly willing to accept authoritarian leaders or governments that they see as more capable of addressing their problems; adhering to procedural or institutional norms is less important than delivering results.
That anti-incumbent fervor helped propel Mr. Petro to power in 2022; now those same aspirations for hope and change have fueled Mr. De La Espriella’s rise. It is a revealing pattern. The government’s inability, over the past decades, to address Colombia’s chronic problems — persistent violence, profound inequality and a weak state presence across large swaths of the country — has repeatedly undermined public confidence in centrist political forces. Both Mr. Petro and Mr. De La Espriella successfully tapped into that disaffection, presenting themselves as outsiders challenging what they depicted as a sclerotic and discredited political order, albeit in very different ways.
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