Iván Cepeda begins his second week heading into the presidential runoff with no money and time running out. His campaign team, deployed across several regions of the country for the final push, is convinced that the race will be decided in two cities: Bogotá and Barranquilla. The ruling party candidate has renewed his bet on social media: he now appears in more personal videos with voters, painting murals and even playing soccer. And he has the math clear: he needs at least 2.5 million additional votes to overtake his opponent Abelardo de la Espriella and cross the threshold into the Casa de Nariño presidential residence.
Since the results of Sunday, May 31, his campaign coordinators have concluded that relying on a first-round victory was an error. “That was the first mistake. The second was trying to deny it was a mistake and saying what we experienced was not a defeat,” one of his advisers says. Since then, the campaign has been shaken. The problem is there is little time left and they have little money to right the ship. The plan now is to present a more empathetic, more accessible, fresher candidate and to fight vote by vote in parts of the country that still have growth potential.
The left has run out of funds for the runoff. Cepeda knocked on the doors of two major private banks, Grupo Aval and Bancolombia. Both financial groups have lent to other candidates in these elections, but, according to three people on his staff, they refused Cepeda. His team requested 25 billion pesos (about $6 million). By contrast, De la Espriella has received more than 35 billion pesos (about $8.3 million) from the banks.
The private banks’ rebuff to the ruling party candidate is not insignificant. One of his regional coordinators says they were also denied the chance to put up more campaign billboards in public spaces. “When we said which candidate it was for, they refused to rent them to us,” he says. The funds the campaign has managed to secure for the runoff came through Cooperativa Financiera Confiar, a smaller organization whose electoral lending cap is 15 billion pesos (about $3.6 million).
Finances are not the only problem. The communications strategy arrived late. Too late. It was only this week that the campaign decided to change: bright colors, reels, Cepeda in the streets painting murals, speaking with K-pop fans and kicking soccer balls about. The candidate once associated with reading speeches in public squares is now mingling more with people in working-class neighborhoods. The shift was necessary, but it began after an entire week had already been lost before the runoff.
But the costliest mistake was not the delay: two people on his team say the most damaging misstep in the first post-electoral week came when Cepeda publicly asked his supporters not to wear the Colombia national team jersey — an idea that, according to these sources, came from the communications leadership — and which none of his advisers endorsed. Amid World Cup fever, his team tried to fix the error quickly, and although his activists have since embraced the garment, the false step was costly.
Cepeda’s image overhaul, however, is not merely cosmetic. It is also political: he has sought to distance himself from President Gustavo Petro, who continues to intervene in the campaign without restraint and to contradict his party’s candidate. One of the initial conclusions reached by the president and Cepeda was that they had to abandon the idea of a Constituent Assembly. That had been one of Petro’s major obsessions, but Cepeda never fully agreed.
On Wednesday, three days after the election, the committee collecting signatures to call for a constitutional change abandoned its project. The strategy to mobilize votes, Cepeda’s inner circle says, is easier to activate with a message that does not have Petro as a protagonist, or in the shadows. And although the distance between them seemed clear until then, the truth is Petro refuses to leave his successor’s campaign alone. This Sunday, while Petro insisted on his theory of fraud in the first round, Cepeda publicly broke with him and, hours later, explicitly acknowledged the election results.
Meanwhile, Cepeda’s team is now looking to gain at least 2.5 million new votes. Those are their calculations for victory. Barranquilla is the most contested front; the city where far-right candidate De la Espriella built much of his electoral base and from which he has reaped the reward has become a priority target for Cepeda.
The country’s northern region has not proven fertile territory for the left in these elections, although the Caribbean coast has a progressive memory. That is why a large part of Cepeda’s campaign team traveled there on Saturday to establish a permanent base to campaign for more votes in the Caribbean region before time runs out. De la Espriella, meanwhile, threatens with the hand of Donald Trump those who campaign for Cepeda in the Caribbean.
In Bogotá the approach is different. The priority is not persuading undecided voters, rather mobilizing those who are already convinced but stayed home on election day. Cepeda’s team estimates that nearly half the voters in the southern districts of the capital — historically left-leaning territory — did not go to the polls in the first round. If they can move that mass, internal calculations point to at least one million additional votes in Bogotá alone.
That is why Cepeda’s appearances in localities such as Bosa, where he shared a soccer ball with Antonella Petro, the president’s youngest daughter, are no coincidence. It is in those neighborhoods where they expect electoral growth. The idea is repeated especially in rural Colombia, which has historically voted for progressive candidates but did not make it to the polls on May 31.
The other front Cepeda needs to close is alliances with the political center. In the first round, Sergio Fajardo and Claudia López together won just over 1.2 million votes that could tip the balance. Talks with them, and with Juan Daniel Oviedo, have progressed quietly, but not everyone wants to make their support public for fear of losing their own political capital. Oviedo, for example, set conditions that have already been met: abandoning calls for a Constituent Assembly, a thorough review of the total peace policy, and recognition that there was no fraud in the first round. Other actors added their own demands.
On Thursday there is a meeting in which Cepeda’s team hopes the sought-after photo will finally be taken. “The idea is that if they decide not to make their support public, they will make their teams available to join the campaign,” says one of his closest aides.
And while the campaign presses in Bogotá and on the coast, Cepeda will also contest a terrain the far right has already conquered: votes abroad. More specifically, Colombians in the United States. According to a member of his team, the candidate plans trips to New York and Washington in the coming days. The internal reading is simple: if the right‑wing leader Cepeda faces at the polls has Donald Trump as an ally, the left‑wing candidate needs to show up in that country and meet with Democrats. Organizers say he will also meet with some Republicans.
With several fronts open to win the election, Cepeda knows that distancing himself from the president is the hardest strategy of all. Not because he does not want to, but because Petro refuses. The idea of contradicting Petro does not sit well with several members of Cepeda’s team. But outside advisers are convinced victory — or defeat — depends largely on the president of the Republic.
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