Trump admirer’s surprise first-round win is a blow to Colombia’s traditional conservatives

Success of far-right presidential candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, suggests some voters are ‘fed up with politics’

The far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella and the leftwing senator Iván Cepeda have just under three weeks to compete for the roughly 3.6m votes that did not go to either of them in the first round of Colombia’s presidential election on Sunday.

That is no insignificant margin, given that De la Espriella’s lead over Cepeda amounted to little more than 670,000 votes – 43.7% against 40.9%.