President of Colombia Gustavo Petro speaks after casting his vote during the presidential election on May 31, 2026 in Bogota, Colombia. Photo: Andres Rot/Getty Images.
The outgoing president has suggested that election software was compromised and called for a full recount.
Outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro has accused “Israel” of hacking the presidential election, claiming that changes to election servers allowed outsiders to manipulate voting data.
He made the remarks after right-wing candidate Abelardo De La Espriella declared himself the victor in the presidential election on Sunday by a narrow margin. Preliminary results showed that De La Espriella defeated leftist Senator Ivan Cepeda; confirmation of De La Espriella’s victory will signal a shift away from President Petro’s progressive policies.
With nearly all ballots counted, De La Espriella secured 49.66% of the vote against 48.7% for Cepeda, according to the National Registry. The 47-year-old lawyer and businessman De La Espriella, who was endorsed by US President Donald Trump, campaigned on promises to crack down on crime, end peace talks with armed groups, and restore ties with the Zionist entity after Petro severed diplomatic relations.
President Petro, a longtime critic of Western powers, has accused the US of perpetuating global inequality and consistently condemned the Zionists for carrying out their genocide in Palestine.
In a post on Sunday on X, President Petro said he had warned that election software developed by the Bautista brothers was vulnerable, citing a 2018 ruling by Colombia’s Council of State, and had called for it to be replaced with publicly owned software and subjected to an independent audit.
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President Petro said there was evidence that the IP addresses of several servers belonging to Colombia’s National Registry were changed, indicating that the software was breached and that “others entered data for polling stations and voting centers.”
“The only entity in the world with the capacity to do that is the state of Israel,” he added.
President Petro said he would provide judges with details of the allegedly altered servers and called for a full recount and an investigation into vulnerabilities in the election software.
De La Espriella, who pushed for closer ties with the US, has already received congratulations from Trump and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. De La Espriella has pledged to restore diplomatic relations with the Israeli entity and open a Colombian Embassy in Jerusalem, reversing President Petro’s severing of diplomatic ties.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar congratulated De La Espriella on his “impressive victory” and said that Israel looks forward to strengthening bilateral ties.
The close ties between De La Espriella and the Zionists were on display throughout his campaign. During a meeting with Sa’ar in November, De La Espriella said that “a strategic alliance with the State of Israel and the US government will not only make us stronger but will place us on the right side of history.”
(RT)
