Outgoing Marxist President of Colombia Gustavo Petro on Monday announced that a lawsuit has been filed seeking to nullify the election of conservative President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella.
Petro, Colombia’s first leftist president ever and a proud former member of the Marxist M19 terrorist group, is set to leave office on August 7, when he will be succeeded by President-elect de la Espriella, the winner of the June 21 presidential runoff election.
Over the past weeks, Petro has repeatedly claimed that “algorithmic fraud” was allegedly committed during the election, in which de la Espriella defeated Petro’s chosen successor, far-left Senator Iván Cepeda. According to Petro, who has also accused the state of Israel of being behind the purported “fraud” plot, de la Espriella “did not win” the election and thus Senator Cepeda is the “president of Colombia.”
This combination of photos shows presidential candidates Abelardo de la Espriella, left, on May 6, 2026, and Ivan Cepeda on May 31, 2026, in Bogota, Colombia. (AP Photo)
On July 7, the far-left Historic Pact Coalition led by Petro announced that it would soon present a lawsuit demanding the annulment of the election, citing the alleged “fraud.”
Colombians mark July 20 as their national Independence Day to celebrate the start of the nation’s 1810 uprising against Spanish colonial rule. Petro availed himself of the national holiday to hold rallies in support of his leftist administration in several Colombian cities and to hold what he described as his “farewell” speech as president of Colombia.
Speaking to his followers in Bogotá, Petro announced that a lawsuit against the election was presented and that he would soon make a copy of its text publicly available. Hours later on Monday night, the outgoing Marxist president posted a link to a copy of the lawsuit presented before the Council of State, Colombia’s highest administrative tribunal, on July 17.
According to Petro, the document’s “technical language” will be explained in “videos that translate towards the popular communication.”
Petro further explained that the lawsuit was presented by 70,000 “digital witnesses” – a group that, he claimed, were able to “uncover in the traces left by the metadata of the documents uploaded to the internet by the electoral scrutiny software, the algorithmic manipulation of the real vote of the Colombian citizenry.”
The 61-page lawsuit document made public by Petro lists Colombia’s National Electoral Council (CNE), the National Civil Registry, President-elect de la Espriella, and Vice President-elect José Manuel Restrepo as defendants.
The lawsuit seeks the annulment of de la Espriella’s proclamation as president-elect of Colombia on the grounds that Colombian electoral authorities allegedly “degraded, without sufficient technical justification, the controls regarding identification, authenticity, integrity, and digital traceability” of electoral forms used in Colombia.
The alleged modification, the lawsuit further argues, “prevents or hinders citizens and judges from reconstructing, with the rigor required by electoral case law, the correspondence between the file, the polling station, the physical tally sheet, the sequence of publication, the integrity of the document, and the election results.”
As such, the claimants listed in the document demand the annulment of CNE’s proclamation of Abelardo de la Espriella as president-elect, while also requesting a new scrutiny of the votes, audits, and inspections of the original documentation and registries related to the presidential election.
Colombia’s Council of State has not publicly commented on the lawsuit shared by Petro at press time. Similarly, none of its listed defendants — the National Electoral Council, the National Civil Registry, President-elect de la Espriella, and Vice President-elect Restrepo as defendants — have publicly commented on the lawsuit at press time.
Contrary to President Petro’s claims that “fraud” was committed in the election and the arguments presented in the lawsuit shared by the outgoing president, the United States and numerous other countries of the free world have recognized Colombia’s 2026 presidential election as a free and fair one — acknowledging Abelardo de la Espriella as the next president of Colombia. Similarly, international organizations that observed the election, such as the Organization of American States (OAS), have endorsed the results and expressed that no irregularities were detected by their electoral observers in the free and fair election.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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