Two days before its presidential election, Colombia stands at a fork in the road. The two candidates competing in the 21 June runoff offer irreconcilable visions of the country’s future. The one who looks likelier to win threatens to drag Colombia backwards.

Recent polls give far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella a lead of four to eight percentage points, well above the 2.84-point margin that separated him from leftist candidate Iván Cepeda in the 31 May first round.

De la Espriella is a controversial, media-driven criminal lawyer who’s never held elected office. The movement he recently founded, Defenders of the Homeland (Defensores de la Patria), has Donald Trump’s public backing. Calling himself ‘The Tiger’, he’s modelled his campaign on the populist template of Argentina’s President Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Drawing inspiration from both, he’s vowed to shrink the state, combat corruption with the kind of measures normally used against organised crime and build 10 megaprisons.

Cepeda, in contrast, has a long record of human rights advocacy and has been in politics since 2010, serving first as a representative and as a senator since 2014. He’s the candidate of the ruling Historic Pact (Pacto Histórico) coalition, representing continuity with outgoing President Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first-ever leftist president, who’s constitutionally barred from re-election. Cepeda currently chairs the Senate’s Peace and Post-Conflict Commission. His father, secretary-general of the Communist Party, was killed in 1994 by paramilitaries in alliance with state agents.

The collapse of the centre

De la Espriella massively outperformed first round pre-election polls, leading to Cepeda and Petro questioning the preliminary vote count. But the European Union’s Electoral Observation Mission, deployed across the country in unprecedented numbers, reported a transparent and orderly process, as did the Organization of American States. Cepeda eventually recognised the results.

The shock results revealed a polarisation a decade in the making. Since Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement started a contested and incomplete transition away from armed conflict, Colombian politics has split into two mutually hostile camps. The election confirmed the disappearance of the remaining middle ground between them, with the established right-wing force, the Democratic Centre party, reduced to irrelevance. Its candidate, senator Paloma Valencia, political protégé of former President Álvaro Uribe, in power from 2002 to 2010, got only 6.3 per cent of the vote. Within hours of results being announced, she threw her support behind de la Espriella with a call to defeat what she called ‘neocommunism’.

War and peace

While the runoff contenders stand on opposite sides on almost every issue, nothing divides them more than the 2016 Peace Accord with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that sought to end a six-decade armed conflict that affected over 10 million people. According to figures from the Ombudsman’s Office, 1,155,339 people were killed, 9,102,924 forcibly displaced and 208,438 subjected to forced disappearances during the conflict.

The agreement has always been deeply contested. Petro’s flagship ‘Total Peace’ policy has sought to end the conflict through negotiations with all guerrilla groups, including the National Liberation Army (ELN) and dissident FARC factions, bring criminal gangs and drug traffickers to justice, and prioritise the protection of civilian communities. But it has failed to stop the violence. Armed criminal networks and former guerrilla factions continue to exercise territorial control across much of Colombia.

Cepeda was involved in the talks with FARC that produced the 2016 accord and subsequent negotiations with the ELN, and has been a key negotiator in Congress. On the campaign trail he’s talked of ‘comprehensive peace’, acknowledging that lasting peace means addressing the structural roots of violence, including access to land, inequality, poverty and the absence of state services in rural areas.

De la Espriella’s position is the polar opposite. He’s declared there will be no peace process under his watch, pledging to resume aerial bombardment of illegal armed groups and reinstate fumigation of coca leaf crops with herbicides, which has well-documented environmental and public health impacts. He argues that negotiation has only helped criminal organisations entrench themselves further through drug trafficking and illegal gold mining. He says the accord’s ratification by Congress after voters narrowly rejected it in a 2016 referendum made the whole process illegitimate, even though the referendum campaign was distorted by an orchestrated disinformation campaign. He wants to bring Colombia into Trump’s Shield of the Americas military coalition and work together to develop a joint anti-drug trafficking offensive. His promises resonate with a society that’s going to the polls in fear, concerned about insecurity above all else.

Domestic and international human rights organisations have warned about the devastating consequences of a return to full military offensive in Colombia’s conflict zones, particularly on civilian populations and the environmental defenders and Indigenous communities who face lethal threats in territories where armed groups and extractive industries overlap.

Climate crossroads

Just weeks before the first round, Colombia stood at the centre of one of the most significant moments in global climate diplomacy in years. Colombia hosted the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels from 24 to 29 April, in partnership with the Netherlands, bringing together 57 states alongside civil society, scientists and subnational governments. The conference was born out of frustration with the repeated failure of United Nations climate summits to deliver binding commitments on fossil fuel phase-out, and saw states commit to develop national roadmaps on ending fossil fuel consumption and production. The summit established Colombia as a global climate champion.

Colombia has significantly expanded its use of renewables. Solar and wind provided just two per cent of the energy mix when Petro took office in 2022; by April 2026, the figure had reached nearly 16 per cent. Colombia has issued no new contracts for the exploration and extraction of coal, gas and oil since early 2023. Although over 100 exploration contracts remain in force, the aim has been to make a gradual transition to cleaner energy and reduce the economy’s fossil fuel dependence.

This is now at risk. Cepeda has pledged continuity with Petro’s environmental and energy transition agenda, but de la Espriella has framed fossil fuel expansion as a fiscal imperative. He says that to counter a deficit running at 5.3 per cent of GDP and public debt at 62.9 per cent, Colombia must expand oil and gas revenues. He calls for the immediate legalisation of fracking, an extractive process currently banned by a judicial moratorium due to its wide impacts on communities, ecosystems and water sources. Petro’s government has blocked exploratory fracking projects.

The stakes extend well beyond Colombia’s borders. At the recent conference, Petro warned that the world risked climate catastrophe. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest is reducing its ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Significant parts of the Amazon fall within Colombia’s borders, and armed conflict is having a profound impact. Armed groups and criminal organisations dominate much of the region, control river routes and facilitate illicit economic activities including illegal mining, drug trafficking and logging, which are accelerating deforestation and putting Indigenous people at risk.

Civil society in a polarised field

Colombian civil society, including Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities, environmental defenders, human rights groups, peace advocates and victims’ groups, has the most at stake in the election’s outcome. They’ve operated under significant pressure throughout the Petro years. Violence has continued despite the government’s progressive rhetoric and Colombia has remained the world’s deadliest country for environmental and land rights defenders. A de la Espriella government would only make things worse with its explicit commitment to extractive expansion and military offensives and contempt for negotiated solutions.

The runoff is about more than who becomes president. It will determine whether Colombia’s painstakingly built peace architecture survives, its global climate leadership continues and the civic space for environmental activists, human rights defenders and peace advocates contracts or expands.

Unsubstantiated fraud allegations by Petro and, more briefly, by Cepeda raised a further concern about the erosion of trust in Colombia’s democratic institutions at precisely the moment when those institutions matter most. It will be critical for civil society to monitor the runoff and hold both candidates accountable to democratic norms regardless of the result.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org