President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo stated that Mexico will await the official results of the Colombian elections before issuing congratulations, after a preliminary count gave the far-right an advantage in that country.
The president emphasized Mexico’s tradition of waiting for the final results in international elections during her daily press conference, “La Mañanera del Pueblo,” on Monday, June 22, 2026.
Sheinbaum explained that the preliminary count does not yet represent an official conclusion, so no statement will be issued until the final results are known: “We are going to wait for the count to finish. This is a preliminary count.”
President Claudia Sheinbaum clarified that there will be no official message while only preliminary figures are available in the Colombian elections.
The president added that sometimes the final results may not be known until the first days of August. She insisted that, “as we always do in Mexico, we are waiting for the final count.” He concluded that, once the result is confirmed, he will congratulate whoever wins.
After being declared the winner of the Colombian presidential elections, Abelardo de la Espriella received congratulations from various political figures, both Colombian and from other countries, prior to the official announcement of the results.
In Mexico, critics of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration, the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), celebrated the results of the Colombian elections starting on the night of Sunday, June 21.
Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas, leader of the PRI, posted on his official Twitter account congratulating Abelardo de la Espriella, highlighting that Mexico and Colombia are strategic allies and expressing confidence that “this new stage will contribute to the strengthening of democracy.”
While the PAN (National Action Party) stated that “in Colombia, authoritarian and corrupt populism was defeated” and affirmed that “it will be defeated in Mexico as well,” it published in ‘X’.
The official preliminary count of the second round of the presidential elections in Colombia, with 99.9% of polling stations reporting, confirmed the victory of lawyer and businessman Abelardo de la Espriella with 12,959,542 votes (49.66%), compared to Iván Cepeda, who obtained 12,708,712 votes (48.70%). The difference between the two candidates was 250,830 votes, equivalent to 0.96%, in a close race.
According to the closing bulletin from the National Registry, the result remains subject to the final official count, due to requests for review and challenges at approximately 33,000 polling stations. The final declaration will depend on the corresponding legal validation.
In light of these results, President Gustavo Petro accused Abelardo de la Espriella of buying votes and winning the election irregularly. “The superiority of the far-right vote is crumbling because it can only be sustained through deceit; only dirty money, of foreign origin, and coercion of workers could legitimize the next presidency,” Petro wrote on his official Twitter account.
The president insisted on the need to know the final results of the vote count before proclaiming the next president: “The final result is even more fragile, and Abelardo’s victory would only be based exclusively on bought votes, evident on election day, and on the coerced votes of workers who voted against themselves. More than 400 companies have been reported.”
Petro called on all democratic lawyers to attend the public vote count in Colombia. However, Colombian political scientist José Fernando Flórez Ruiz believes it is almost impossible for the vote count statistics to change the outcome of the presidential runoff.
According to his analysis, the differences between the preliminary count and the official count in recent elections have been minimal, and the margin of more than 250,000 votes recorded in this race far exceeds the margins observed in previous elections.
Source: imfobae
