A pro-Trump nationalist lawyer nicknamed "The Tiger" just topped the first round of Colombia's presidential election with 43.7% of the vote, and the globalists are going to need a bigger map. Abelardo de la Espriella crushed the field on May 31, 2026, running on a law-and-order platform that sounds an awful lot like a certain American president's playbook.
Populism: it's contagious, and there's no vaccine for common sense.
With 99% of votes counted and more than 23 million Colombians casting ballots, de la Espriella blew past his leftist opponent Iván Cepeda, who scraped together 40.9%. The traditional conservative establishment candidate, Paloma Valencia of the Democratic Center party founded by former President Alvaro Uribe, didn't even crack 7%. The establishment right got steamrolled just as hard as the left.
Sound familiar? It should.
De la Espriella — a Barranquilla-born lawyer who openly admires President Trump — didn't just win. He dominated. His betting odds for the June 21 runoff currently sit at 82%. Cepeda's response was to warn that he "will not hand Colombia over to fascism," which is the international left's way of saying "we're losing and we don't know how to stop it."
Meanwhile, de la Espriella told his more than 10 million supporters he would "defend democracy with reason or with force." That's the kind of line that makes Brussels break out in hives.
The context here matters. Colombia has spent the last few years under left-wing President Gustavo Petro, and the results have been exactly what you'd expect — rising violence, economic instability, and a population that's had enough. Petro coddled Marxist terror groups and the Colombian people responded by voting for the guy who promised to crack skulls instead of negotiate with them.
As reported by The Gateway Pundit, this isn't an isolated event. It's a pattern. Argentine President Javier Milei, who has been taking a chainsaw to big government in Buenos Aires, celebrated the result, saying it "reflects the yearning for freedom and progress of the Colombian people."
Trump won America. Milei won Argentina. Now de la Espriella is about to win Colombia. The populist-conservative wave isn't slowing down — it's accelerating. And every time a country that was supposed to stay in the globalist column flips, the Davos crowd loses another talking point about how this is all just an American aberration.
It's not an aberration. It's a movement.
The left keeps calling it fascism. Voters keep calling it an election. And the guys running on secure borders, law and order, and national pride keep winning. Weird how that works.
The runoff is set for June 21. At 82% odds, de la Espriella isn't just the favorite — he's practically measuring the drapes at Casa de Nariño. The globalists should probably update their crisis playbook, because whatever they've been doing isn't working.
Trump's playbook travels. No translation needed.
