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elections
Will Colombia Be the Next Country to Embrace Right-Wing Authoritarianism?
The pattern set by Trump in the US, Milei in Argentina, Bukele in El Salvador, Noboa in Ecuador, and now Asfura in Honduras, seeks to replicate itself with Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia.
Jun 01, 2026
The results that began to surface around 5:30 pm Sunday May 31 of this year in the first round of the Colombian presidential elections left many perplexed, as Abelardo “El Tigre” de la Espriella, won an uncanny number of votes, 10,359,902 as of this writing, over 670,000 votes above the front-runner Ivan Cepeda and his vice-presidential partner Aida Quilcué, with 9,687,508 votes. Paloma Valencia and her running mate Daniel Oviedo came in a distant third, much weaker than expected with 1,639,421 votes. Sergio Fajardo, the perennial symbolic centrist candidate, came in with 1,008,864 votes. The blank vote came in fifth with 406,955 votes, while Claudia Lopez, the neoliberal former Bogotá mayor, scrounged 225,480 votes, just above Santiago Botero’s 206,128. Mauricio Lizcano came in eigth with a handsome 53,839 votes. The remaining 50,000 votes were shared among a handful of remaining candidates.
Ivan Cepeda questioned the results shortly after the first round was called: “There is a discrepancy that we want to verify with respect to the electoral results. This isn’t just any old discrepancy. We are talking about 885,000 people or ID numbers.” He added, “There is information that indicates atypical votes from an undetermined number of tables. [...] Let us emphasize that only when the commission analysts clarify this discrepancy clearly and rigorously, will we share our conclusions on the results of this election.”
The electoral commission is required to clarify the situation within 72 hours. Similar concerns were raised after the March primaries and congressional elections, when 600,000 votes were recovered by Cepeda's party after they flagged irregularities, leading to 20 additional congressional seats.
Out of approximately 24,000,000 votes cast in the first round, the challenge will be how to get the 3 million or so votes in play, while also mobilizing new voters for the second round. Paloma Valencia, formerly the chosen successor of Alvaro Uribe, has already endorsed Uribe’s new horse (tiger?) Abelardo de la Espriella for the second round of the race, presumably giving him close to 11,000,000 votes for the second round. However, Valencia’s running mate, Daniel Oviedo, has indicated he will not support de la Espriella. Where his nearly 1,000,000 voters from the march primaries will align remains uncertain. He was a kind of neoliberal semi-progressive centrist before aligning with the heiress of the paramilitary political tradition in Colombia. Ironically, Valencia, in her attempt to appear centrist, seems to have lost more votes to de la Espriella than she gained from Oviedo. In the immediate aftermath of the first round results, Sergio Fajardo was coy about where he would try to direct his million-plus votes. If they were to go to Cepeda, he would be in striking distance of de la Espriella. Claudia Lopez’s votes would be an additional boost to whomever she endorses, while Santiago Botero’s 200,000 votes will likely go to de la Espriella, due to his narrow political profile as a businessman accused of domestic violence.
In the background, questions lurk about US intrusion, after threats made by President Trump and Colombian-born Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) toward Colombia as a whole if they vote the left back into office.
In 2022 Gustavo Petro won 8,542,000 votes in the first round, more than 2,000,000 votes behind the combined right-wing frontrunners, Rodolfo Hernández and Federico Gutiérrez. In the second round, he increased his vote count to 11,281,013, an increase of more than 2,700,000 votes from the first round. This means the focus over the next three weeks will be on turnout, beyond the jostling and backroom negotiations for support from the rest of the first-round candidates. Whoever can increase their turnout more dramatically will be the victor, assuming a clean election.
Abelardo de la Espriella is a Jekyll and Hyde character construction: imagine Alan Dershowitz wrapped up in the Batman comic book version of The Joker, in a bipolar bind with billionaire Bruce Wayne.
Of the current right-wing authoritarian archetypes, de la Espriella fits neatly between the evil clown, represented by President Donald Trump and Argentinian President Javier Milei, and the sadistic heir represented by presidents Nayib Bukele and Daniel Noboa (and Trump) in El Salvador and Ecuador (and the US), respectively. You could also say he is a non-senile version of Rodolfo Hernandez, the “outsider” right-wing real estate tycoon candidate who “surprised” the right-wing establishment by coming in second for the first round of the 2022 elections, which Petro ultimately won.
De la Espriella became wealthy while representing the dregs of Colombian high society, paramilitaries, cocaine capos, money launderers, pyramid schemers, mass murderers, and the like. In the carefully produced image de la Espriella has cultivated over the course of the campaign, he flaunts his lavish lifestyle, always with a twist of misogyny, while promising Nayeb Bukele-style policies, including persecution of the left, 10 new maximum security prisons, and Mileiean cuts of 40% of the public sector.
The pattern set by Trump in the US, Milei in Argentina, Bukele in El Salvador, Noboa in Ecuador, and now Asfura in Honduras, seeks to replicate itself with de la Espriella in Colombia.
Ivan Cepeda is a philosopher and politician, whose father was assassinated in 1994 as a senator for the Union Patriotica during a genocidal purge of the left-leaning political party by the same mafia elite that de la Espriella made his name defending. Cepeda has spent much of his time as a congressman, revealing the crimes of de la Espriella’s forebear, ex-president and paramilitary boss Alvaro Uribe, and aligning with popular President Gustavo Petro’s political economic program, which has initiated the process of land restitution to victims of Colombia’s decades-long civil war, and raised minimum wages in a country with the fifth most extreme wealth disparity on the planet. That is down from the third most extreme wealth disparity Colombia claimed leading out of the previous (Uribista) Duque administration into the Petro administration.
Cepeda recognizes that the road out of extreme wealth inequality requires the long-term continuity of a political project that makes solving this most fundamental of socioeconomic problems its top priority. Cepeda’s proposals build on the groundwork laid by the Petro coalition, seeking to expand public education and healthcare, while continuing the redistribution of land to millions of Colombians displaced by decades of the armed conflict promoted for so many years by Uribe and his mafia.
In the background, questions lurk about US intrusion, after threats made by President Trump and Colombian-born Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) toward Colombia as a whole if they vote the left back into office. The recordings released by HONDURASGATE and Red Diario of former Honduran president and convicted drug and weapons trafficker, Juan Orlando Hernandez, paint a picture of a US-Israel backed plan to topple left-wing governments in the region, with a particular focus on Colombia and Mexico, to pave the way for mafia states to ensure easy access by US and Israeli multinational corporations to oil and gas and key minerals for the construction of their rapidly expanding techno-fascist infrastructure.
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Report Details Trump Effort to Quietly Lay Groundwork to 'Steal Future Elections'
"It seems one of the ways this effort will take shape is, as with DHS's deportation efforts, to racially profile voters and try to invalidate their votes by pretending they're not citizens," said one critic.
Apr 28, 2026
President Donald Trump is using the US Department of Homeland Security to quietly assert federal control over elections in at least eight states, according to an investigation out Monday from Reuters.
Under the US Constitution, elections are run by states, rather than the federal government. But under Trump, who has called on Republicans to "nationalize" voting in Democratic strongholds, DHS—which typically handles issues of counterterrorism, immigration, and national security—along with other executive agencies, has launched what Reuters described as "a wider-than-known federal push into the machinery and conduct of US elections."
"Trump administration officials and investigators have fanned out across the country, seeking confidential records, pressing for access to voting equipment, and reexamining voter-fraud cases that courts and bipartisan reviews have already rejected," the report continued.
Branko Marcetic, a writer for Jacobin, said that the revelations showed that "Trump's push to steal future elections by taking federal control of them is quietly gaining steam."
In Ohio, DHS agents have called local boards of elections in at least six counties, requesting immediate access to data about specific voters, including registration forms, voting histories, and other confidential data, citing unspecified "investigations." Though Ohio leans red, all of the requests were made in counties that either had competitive elections coming up in 2026 or were solidly Democratic.
The Nevada secretary of state received a request from the FBI for voter information as part of an investigation into the 2020 election, which Trump has continued to claim was marred by fraud that cost him a victory despite evidence to the contrary. He never fulfilled the request because those records did not exist.
In Arizona, the state senate complied with a similar subpoena for records related to its report on an audit of the 2020 election, while DHS requested information related to the state attorney general's fraud probe.
In Colorado, Jeff Small, a lobbyist with connections to the White House who claimed to be working on behalf of Stephen Miller, the president's homeland security adviser, called 10 county clerks to request access to Dominion voting machines, which were at the center of Trump's fraud conspiracy theories.
Later, some of those clerks received the same request from a person who identified themselves as a senior official at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which oversees election security. The clerks said they did not comply with these requests, which some said would violate state law.
These efforts follow a high-profile January raid by the FBI on an election facility in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize hundreds of boxes of ballots, tabulator tapes, and voter roll information from the 2020 election. Trump has directly influenced the investigation, speaking with FBI agents about it the day after dispatching Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, to take part.
According to Reuters, election officials in many other states are bracing for similar investigations and raids into their operations.
“There is an intimidation factor,” said Amy Burgans, the Republican clerk and treasurer of Douglas County, Nevada. “It puts the question in the back of your mind... Who’s going to be next?”
As Republican chances of prevailing in the 2026 midterms appear grim, Trump has suggested on multiple occasions that elections be "canceled," something he has no power to do.
He has thus far failed in his efforts to pass the SAVE America Act through the Senate, which would require every voter to reregister and provide documents proving their citizenship, a measure experts say would likely disenfranchise millions of eligible voters.
But Reuters' investigation has revealed efforts to achieve similar ends by contacting states to compare their voter rolls with federal citizenship databases.
This happened in Missouri, where Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins shared publicly available voter roll data with federal authorities, who handed back lists of potential noncitizens flagged for removal.
Clerks in several of Missouri's counties said that most of the individuals flagged in the federal screenings were US citizens who'd been naturalized.
Clinton Jenkins, the Republican clerk for Miller County, said none of the names of people identified by the review had voted illegally. Rather, he suggested that federal authorities were targeting people who seemed to be of Hispanic and Latino heritage.
"It looks like if you have too many vowels in your name, you show up on a list,” Jenkins said.
"They are doing this through DHS, which it's clear by now this administration views as its own personal police force," Marcetic said.
"It seems one of the ways this effort will take shape is, as with DHS's deportation efforts, to racially profile voters and try to invalidate their votes by pretending they're not citizens," he added.
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How Can the Dem Win Back Working-Class Voters? Run Union Candidates
A new report finds that running and electing candidates from the labor movement is one of the most viable and under-explored paths available to both unions and the Democratic Party.
Mar 14, 2026
The Democratic Party’s slow shift away from the working class undoubtedly contributed to its recent electoral defeats. Reconnecting with the party’s foundational working-class base is essential for its survival, and a new report from the Center for Working-Class Politics, Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy, and Jacobin shows that getting more union members and leaders on the ballot could provide a path to doing just that.
The Democratic Party’s loss in 2024 has sparked a wave of soul-searching about how the party can recover support groups of voters they could previously take for granted, such as Black and Latino men. Like so many of the Democrats’ previously assumed voting blocs, union workers are clearly no longer an easy win for the party, with more than 40% of union workers reporting voting for Donald Trump in 2024.
Our new report—which analyzes congressional candidates from 2010 to 2022, union campaign finance data, and interviews with current and former elected officials with union backgrounds—finds that running and electing candidates from the labor movement is one of the most viable and under-explored paths available to both unions and the Democratic Party.
Several key findings illustrate the current state of union candidacy and suggest how the Democratic Party and unions could change their approach to achieve further success in future elections.
Our report identifies all congressional candidates between 2010 and 2022 and reveals that only 5% have any union connection.
First, unions’ donations to candidates now comprise a much smaller slice of total campaign donations. They’ve fallen fivefold, from nearly 15% of total party contributions in the late 1990s to less than 3% by 2022—not because unions are giving less but because individual donations have risen massively.
In recent years, when unions do donate, they’re inclined to play it safe, giving mostly to incumbents rather than pro-union challengers. And in the rare instances they back challengers, they typically back whoever looks most likely to win, leaving the shaping of the candidate pool to the Democratic Party.
Second, candidates with union backgrounds advocate more strongly for the working class—both on the campaign trail and in office—than those without union backgrounds. As candidates, they speak more to worker issues, and as representatives, they advocate more progressive economic legislation compared with their non-union colleagues—regardless of party.
Further, our interviews with candidates and elected officials from union backgrounds highlight that experience they’ve gained specifically through their union involvement gives them an advantage in their knowledge of workplace issues, credibility to speak on labor matters, and an ability to build coalitions and be effective policymakers.
With their ongoing, already established institutional relationships with unions, they’re able to center workers’ rights in their policy plans (strengthening minimum wage laws, paid leave and benefits, worker safety regulations, and card-check laws) and keep open, fluid channels of communication with organized labor. Said relationships also give them a leg up in grassroots organization, inspiring higher turnout and deeper commitment from union members.
Third, despite their strategic value, union candidates and elected officials are not common. Our report identifies all congressional candidates between 2010 and 2022 and reveals that only 5% have any union connection.
That scarcity is not inevitable. Unions have the financial resources, organizing infrastructure, and institutional reach to actively grow a candidate pipeline if they choose to deploy them. Indeed, in critical open-seat races, unions already donate more to Democratic candidates with union backgrounds than to other Democrats.
In addition to donations, unions can lend their organizing infrastructure to directly power union-member electoral campaigns through candidate recruitment, member canvassing, and early financial backing. They can also invest in labor-led candidate schools to build a deep and sturdy pipeline, demystifying the political process for working-class candidates and increasing both the number of union candidates and their electoral success.
The report illustrates two state-level initiatives that show us what can work when unions take a more proactive approach in building a pipeline of candidates. New Jersey’s AFL-CIO Labor Candidate Program has resulted in over 1,300 election victories with a 76% win rate over 20 years. Alaska’s Arthur A. Allman Labor Candidate School has already seen eight of its trainees elected to office since its 2022 inauguration.
The common ground between these two programs: They handle the training themselves rather than leaving it to party consultants and approach candidate development as a sustainable investment for long-term strategy rather than something reserved for election cycles.
Our analysis shows that unions already have an asset they’re not using. Though their membership and formal leverage have weakened, public trust in labor unions has reached its highest point in 50 years, at a time when public confidence in almost all other political structures has essentially collapsed.
Gallup polls show public approval of unions is at its highest rate in over 60 years, with an average of about 70% of Americans expressing their support for unions last year. A GBAO poll conducted on behalf of the AFL-CIO in 2023 found that 88% of Americans under 30 view unions favorably—a record-breaking level of support.
American faith in union politics is there. Will organized labor take up the mantle?
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