Colombia’s June 21 second-round presidential election between leftist candidate Iván Cepeda, of the incumbent Historic Pact party, and right-wing businessman Abelardo de la Espriella, of his own Defenders of the Homeland movement, fit into the pattern of recent elections in South America.
Following de la Espriella’s endorsement by U.S. President Donald Trump, and with his victory on Sunday, Colombia now joins Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, and quite likely Peru in a growing Trump-adjacent political wave in the region.
There are reasons to worry that this new wave of Hispanic Trumpistas will consolidate executive power at the expense of the checks and balances of democratic government, as has occurred already under Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and President Daniel Noboa in Ecuador.
But these leaders will eventually leave office, either through term limits or defeat at the ballot box. The longer-term threat to democracies in Latin America is that the center in many countries’ politics has disappeared.
De la Espriella won by a whisker (49.7 percent to Cepeda’s 48.7 percent), and his inability to even secure a majority highlights a rough road ahead—not just for the new president-elect but also for Colombian governance and political comity as well. Such a close-run, right-turning race is not unique to Colombia and “El Tigre,” as he likes to refer to himself.
In two other recent elections—Chile’s and probably Peru’s, which remained too close to call at time of writing—voters chose the far-right option. Yet the elections were also tight and deeply polarizing, pitching relatively far-left candidates against far-right candidates. Parties and presidential candidates of the center were largely irrelevant.
The absence of a center has rendered the victors political orphans. Chilean President José António Kast, elected in December 2025, has already been hemmed in by party fragmentation and popular opinion. The future president of Peru, no matter who it is, will encounter the same frustrations. De la Espriella faces a more difficult task still, and one that may play into his authoritarian tendencies.
Such volatile public opinion—marked more by anti-incumbency sentiment than a wholesale ideological shift—does not bode well for the region. For one, it will make electoral contests more combative. As the ideological options become more extreme, space for compromise over difficult issues of institutional reform will become more difficult to construct and sustain. The risk of social and political violence may rise. And the task of finding and maintaining a consistent foreign policy—all the more important in an era of intense geopolitical competition—is made more complicated.
Twenty years ago, the outcome of this weekend’s Colombian election would have been unthinkable: an untested outsider such as de la Espriella eking out a surprise win with a brand-new party amid a crowded field. In the first round of elections, the flashy, flamboyant lawyer and businessman surpassed the centrist former governor of Antioquia, Sergio Fajardo, as well as the center-right candidate Paloma Valencia of the Democratic Center party.
Unthinkable, too, would have been the notion that Valencia, a candidate anointed by former President Álvaro Uribe, would be considered the centrist option. It’s a sign of how much Colombian politics have moved to the extremes.
De la Espriella pulled off his win by capitalizing on citizens’ concerns over rising crime and violence after outgoing President Gustavo Petro’s plan to negotiate peace with criminal groups and former guerrillas who control roughly 40 percent of Colombia’s rural areas failed. Crime and insecurity now rank high among Colombian voters’ main concerns. De la Espriella played into those fears, promising an iron-fisted approach that would build new maximum-security prisons; launch military strikes in territory held by criminal groups, presumably with U.S. support; and wipe out criminals like “cockroaches and rats.”
Nonetheless, Colombian voters are largely unimpressed with both de la Espriella and Cepeda, the candidate of the incumbent Petro government. In a survey conducted before the election, 51.7 percent of voters disapproved of Cepeda and 46.6 percent disapproved of de la Espriella. The disapproval will hang over the future resident of Casa de Nariño, the Colombian presidential palace.
Additionally, the lineup in Congress spells deadlock; the established party that backed de la Espriella, the National Salvation Movement, won only one seat in the 183-seat Chamber of Deputies in legislative elections in March, while in the Senate, it earned only four seats in a grouping with another party.
Given his high levels of popular disapproval, his movement’s slender representation in Congress, and the growing trend of volatility not only in Colombia but across the region, de la Espriella’s four-year term will bring pitched battles with the legislature. The more conservative and centrist parties in the previous Colombian Congress became a thorn in the side of Petro, thwarting or severely weakening his pet social initiatives, including healthcare reform and an initiative to strengthen labor rights.
The March congressional elections gave Cepeda and Petro’s Historic Pact 24 percent of the seats in the upper chamber and nearly 20 percent in the lower house. There will likely be payback.
Other governments in the region that have come out of polarized presidential contests have had to grapple with an opposition legislature and a fickle electorate. Kast, the conservative Chilean president, has already seen his popular approval drop to 29 percent, with 55.6 percent of those surveyed expressing disapproval about five months after he won a second-round election in December. This trajectory tracks with that of his predecessor, the center-leftist Broad Front President Gabriel Boric, who also saw his approval plummet to 39 percent months after being sworn in. It remained in the doldrums throughout his four-year term.
The pro-Trump Kast had triumphed over a candidate at the further end of the ideological spectrum than Boric. Jeannette Jara, the Communist Party leader, represented the Broad Front coalition to the left of much of the grouping.
The close second-round race between ideological extremes in Peru is similarly contentious. Whoever loses—the right-wing Keiko Fujimori or the leftist congressman Roberto Sánchez—is almost guaranteed to reject the results. At last count, less than 40,000 votes separated the two candidates, with Fujimori slightly ahead; the official result will be announced in July, after Peru’s electoral authorities finish their close count.
This time, it is Sánchez, the left-wing candidate, who has mobilized his base to denounce the elections. In the last election—which Fujimori lost to Sánchez’s mentor Pedro Castillo—Fujimori, the daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori, denounced the election results and mobilized protests. No matter what end of the ideological spectrum, candidates in Peru seem to default to claims of electoral fraud in close contests.
To get ahead of potential electoral instability, the government implemented a number of reforms ahead of this latest election. They worked—somewhat. To check the power of the formerly unicameral national legislature, the government revived the upper body Senate. Electoral authorities also placed a floor on the vote required to gain representation in Congress to reduce partisan dispersion.
Though these reforms were intended to reduce the number of viable parties, more than 30 candidates competed in the presidential race, and the congressional elections held in April seated a total of six parties in the Chamber of Deputies and in the newly reestablished Senate.
Now, Fujimori’s Popular Force party occupies 32 percent of the seats in the lower house and 37 percent in the upper house. Sánchez’s party, Together for Perú, claims 25 percent in the lower house and 23 percent in the Senate—essentially placing both parties in a dead heat in the bicameral Congress.
In a political system that has burned through nine presidents in 10 years—largely due to impeachment, including President Pedro Castillo, who was impeached and removed after an attempted self-coup he carried out by dissolving the pesky legislature—this spells trouble for whomever dons the presidential sash after the official, final vote count. The last elected president to finish his full term was Ollanta Humala, who completed his term in 2016. He left office with a 15 percent approval rating and is now in prison on corruption charges.
Electoral polarization comes at a particularly delicate time as Chile, Colombia, and Peru confront deep challenges of slowing economic growth, stagnant productivity, and citizen discontent. The lack of a center precludes the sorts of technocratic policymaking, long-term planning, and policy consistency that are the key ingredients to success.
Efforts to reform election laws and create incentives for coalition, as done in Peru and in Colombia via a voluntary presidential primary, have been too little, too late. Citizen frustration with the failure of past elected governments to deliver on improved social services, greater social mobility, and reduced crime and greater security, combined with highly publicized cases of corruption, have turned voters away from traditional political parties and their leaders.
Worse, as citizens’ concerns over crime and insecurity grow, the divergent offerings of the leaders and parties have created a zigzagging effect. The left proposes negotiated peace and addressing the root causes of crime; the right puts forward an increasingly hard-line approach to suspected criminals, with all the accompanying threats to human rights. Oscillating between the two accomplishes neither short- nor long-term objectives. It also complicates sustained, cross-border, regional cooperation as cartels and criminals become transnational illicit enterprises. Trump’s recently created “Shield of the Americas” initiative—while correctly identifying the problem—remains a partisan alliance of governments that share the U.S. president’s politics.
Electoral paralysis may well be the best outcome. A bigger risk may be the accretion of executive power by presidents who are ill-suited to negotiating with uncooperative legislatures, tolerating wide swings in popular opinion and a political culture that is increasingly trending toward a zero-sum politics. The best outcome would be a rediscovery of the center and a shared agenda across the political spectrum for resolving pressing socioeconomic and security challenges.
As Trump intervenes to boost his allies, that level of consensus building is unlikely. But if recent electoral history is any indication, then most of those allies will be out in another wave of anti-incumbency. Perhaps then pragmatic, apolitical problem-solving will prevail.
