Caracas, Venezuela — Colombia is preparing to elect President Gustavo Petro’s successor on Sunday in a race that has generated significant regional interest, especially next door in Venezuela.
As sister nations, Colombia and Venezuela’s relations — which have been strained for years under former President Nicolás Maduro — play a key factor in everything from politics, migration, the economy, security and the fight against drug trafficking.
Interim president Delcy Rodríguez will undoubtedly be keeping an eye on which candidate succeeds, given the vast differences in how the presidential hopefuls say they’ll interact with Venezuela’s government.
Of the three leading candidates, two — the Centro Democratico’s Paloma Valencia and Defensores de la Patria’s Abelardo de la Espriella — have signaled they’d follow Washington’s lead on Venezuela while the current leader in the polls, leftist Iván Cepeda (Pacto Histórico), has remained quiet despite his past support for Chavismo.
The elections are also shaping up to be the most polarizing in recent memory.
“Of all the societies I have studied, Colombia is perhaps the one with the most extreme positions—people who identify more strongly with the right or those who identify more strongly with the left,” Carmen Beatriz Fernández, a political consultant and professor of public communication, political systems and electoral campaigns, told Latin America Reports.
Colombian news outlet La Silla Vacia’s poll rankings have Cepeda ahead by 8 percentage points, followed by de la Espriella and Valencia. According to pollster AtlasIntel, if elections were to go to a run-off between Cepeda and de la Espriella today, the hard-right de la Espriella would win.
“Cepeda is the candidate who, in theory, would have the strongest ties to Chavismo, but it’s no less true that de la Espriella has never denied his close relationship with Alex Saab, right? So, that’s where the extremes perhaps meet,” said Fernández
De la Espriella, a lawyer by trade, famously represented Maduro’s alleged money launderer and also allegedly received payments from Saab’s front companies, according to an investigation by journalist Daniel Coronell.
Venezuelan political columnist and international affairs expert Beatriz de Majo, told Latin America Reports, “I have my reservations about de la Espriella, because for us he could be a huge surprise. He is a man who does not seem to be entirely above board in every aspect of his conduct, and God only knows what kind of surprise he might have in store for us now. However, it feels as though that battle will undoubtedly be decided between Cepeda and de la Espriella.”
De Majo said it’s hard to gauge where Colombia is heading following four years of Petro’s administration.
“The electoral process in Colombia’s case is particularly interesting because the country’s compass has been turned off during the four years of Petro’s administration. It really wasn’t possible to tell from the outside where the country was headed,” she said. According to De Majo, Petro’s only defining project, his “Total Peace” plan, “was never even close to being achieved.”
Should his political successor Cepeda win, said de Majo, we could see an outflow of capital from Colombia to Venezuela and elsewhere.
“Capitalism in Colombia is deeply entrenched; it is an enormously industrious country, and it is highly likely that if Cepeda wins, there will be a massive migration of capital from Colombia to Venezuela,” she commented.
While Colombia’s wealthy had threatened to move their money abroad when Petro was first elected, Spanish newspaper El País recently reported on companies setting up now to help Colombians move their assets should Cepeda win, saying that Panama, Spain, Costa Rica and the United States were the most sought after countries for relocating Colombians. Venezuela wasn’t listed.
On the other hand, De Majo thinks that if de la Espriella is elected, he’ll follow the U.S.’s lead for the most part and will not prioritize relations with Venezuela.
“If de la Espriella wins, he has said on more than one occasion that he will align with the United States, and moreover because that has been the Colombian trend in recent decades. They have been under the control and protection of the U.S. Armed Forces, and things went very well for them—until the Petro administration—in everything related to drug control,” she said.
Since September 2025, the U.S. has killed nearly 200 alleged drug traffickers by bombing boats in the eastern Pacific ocean and Caribbean, including Colombians. The Trump administration sanctioned Petro for allegedly allowing “drug cartels to flourish” and in March The New York Times reported that prosecutors were investigating Petro — the administration later assured him he faces no current charges.
What about Venezuelan migrants?
According to data from Colombia’s migration office, there are more than 2.8 million Venezuelans in Colombia, by far the country that has received the highest number of Venezuelans fleeing poor economic conditions.
Despite the gravity of the issue, de Majo doesn’t see the election outcome impacting migrants, who are more likely to be watching what happens in Venezuela to see if they can return home.
“The situation of Venezuelans in Colombia will not depend so much on what Colombia does to help them, but rather on what happens in Venezuela, because if a democratic process and freedoms are truly restored in Venezuela and the economy takes off again, the first Venezuelans to return to the country will not be those in Europe or the United States; they will be those in Colombia,” she said.
Featured image: Colombian President Gustavo Petro met with interim President of Venezuela Delcy Rodríguez on April 24, 2026.
Image credit: Gustavo Petro via X.