A far-right millionaire backed by Donald Trump has won the Colombian presidential election by the thinnest of margins.

With more than 99.9% of the ballots counted, lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella received 12.96 million votes (49.66%) compared to his leftwing opponent Iván Cepeda’s 12.7 million (48.7%) – a difference of only 250,000 votes.

The margin was smaller than in the first round of voting, in which De la Espriella beat Cepeda by 673,000 votes.

De la Espriella’s victory represents a hard swing to the right for the South American nation after four years of president Gustavo Petro, who had promised to break with the country’s “neoliberal model”.

Petro, a member of the Marxist guerrilla 19th of April Movement (M-19) in his teens, pursued a progressive domestic agenda including strengthening worker protections, an increase in social spending and agrarian reform – redistributing 570,000 hectares to peasant farmers and indigenous communities.

The sitting president was unable to seek reelection, having reached his term limit under the Colombian constitution.

Cepeda, who stood as the leftwing Historic Pact candidate, was one of the key architects of the “total peace” negotiations with armed groups aimed at achieving a permanent end to paramilitary violence in Colombia.

The 63-year-old alleged irregularities in the vote count and said that lawyers for his party were “proceeding to challenge 33,000 polling stations across the country” as supporters demonstrated across the country, The Guardian reported.

De la Espriella has been a US citizen since 2023 after living and working as a lawyer in Miami. He has styled himself as his country’s answer to Donald Trump, with some of his supporters even donning hats reading “Make Colombia Great Again!”

The admiration cuts both ways, with Trump vocally backing  De la Espriella and responding to the Colombian’s electoral victory with a Truth Social post that read: “He Won, BIG!”

During the campaign the US president offered his endorsement to De la Espriella and said he would have the “total support and strength of the United States behind him” while denouncing Cepeda as a “radical left Marxist”.

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