Key Points
— The Invamer Colombia Opina #21 poll released Sunday April 26 by Noticias Caracol and Blu Radio puts Pacto Histórico candidate Iván Cepeda at 44.3% in the May 31 first round, far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella at 21.5%, and Centro Democrático senator Paloma Valencia at 19.8%. Cepeda jumped 7.2 percentage points from his 37.1% reading in February, his strongest result of the campaign and the largest single move recorded by any candidate.
— Both runoff scenarios go to Cepeda. Against De la Espriella, Cepeda wins 54.6% to 42.6% — a 12-point margin. Against Valencia, Cepeda wins 51.2% to 46.6% — within striking distance but still outside the 1.89% margin of error of a 3,800-respondent sample with 95% confidence across 149 municipalities.
— The poll lands at the peak of Petro’s approval rebound — 49% favorable in February, holding at 48.9% disapproval in April — and amid a wave of southwest Colombia violence that left 19 dead in 10 attacks the week before fieldwork. Half the electorate (50.2%) prefers an opposition candidate, but the right’s 41.3% combined De la Espriella-plus-Valencia total cannot beat Cepeda alone, and second-choice transfers favor Valencia (25.1%) far more than De la Espriella (4.7%).
Five weeks from the May 31 first round, the largest pre-election Colombia election poll has produced the clearest picture yet of the race — and the picture is a Cepeda first-round dominance that the fragmented right is now mathematically incapable of overturning without consolidation.
A Sunday-evening poll release at the close of a violent week has reset the Colombia presidential race. The Rio Times, the Latin American financial news outlet, reports that the Invamer Colombia Opina survey commissioned by Noticias Caracol and Blu Radio puts leftist Senator Iván Cepeda at 44.3% in first-round voting intention, double-digit margins ahead of right-wing lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella on 21.5% and Centro Democrático Senator Paloma Valencia on 19.8%. The Colombia election poll is the largest sample of the campaign — 3,800 face-to-face interviews across 149 municipalities — and arrives 35 days before the May 31 first round.
Cepeda’s 7.2-point jump from February’s 37.1% reading is the largest single move recorded for any candidate during the campaign. De la Espriella climbed modestly from 18.9% to 21.5%.
Valencia roughly doubled from 10% to 19.8%, the second-largest move of the cycle. The remaining ten candidates split single-digit support: Claudia López 3.6%, Sergio Fajardo 2.5%, Santiago Botero 1.4%, with the rest below 1%.
The Methodology and the Sample
Invamer S.A.S. fielded the survey between April 15 and April 24, using probabilistic stage sampling drawn from the 2026 DANE post-COVID population update. The total sample was 3,800 respondents (3,826 by some Caracol counts), with face-to-face interviews in respondents’ homes.
The design margin of error is 1.89% at 95% confidence — among the tightest in any Latin American polling exercise this cycle.
The non-response rate was 72.5%, which Invamer addressed through ISO 20252:2019 weighting protocols and compliance with Colombia’s Law 2494 of 2025 polling regulations. Coverage spanned all regions defined under Article 45 of Law 2056 of 2020. The voting-intention base for first-round simulation was 2,741 respondents who confirmed they would vote May 31.
For comparison, the AtlasIntel digital poll from February that put De la Espriella in a near-tie with Cepeda used a 2,200-sample online methodology. The GAD3 phone poll cited in earlier Rio Times Colombia election poll coverage put Cepeda at 35% with a three-point margin. The Invamer instrument is the largest, the most methodologically rigorous, and the closest to the vote.
The Runoff Math
Both runoff scenarios go to Cepeda. Against De la Espriella, Cepeda wins 54.6% to 42.6% with 2.8% blank votes — a 12-point margin well outside the error band. Against Valencia, Cepeda wins 51.2% to 46.6% — a 4.6-point margin that is statistically significant but within striking distance for a high-turnout June 21 runoff.
The transfer-of-support data explains the gap. If Valencia is eliminated in the first round, 25.1% of her voters name a second choice within the data — a substantial reservoir for the right.
If De la Espriella is eliminated, only 4.7% of his voters transfer cleanly elsewhere. The right’s most-electable candidate in a runoff against Cepeda is therefore Valencia, not the front-runner of the right’s own first-round contest.
Rejection rates reinforce the asymmetry. Only 1.3% of respondents say they would never vote for Valencia, against 16.5% who reject De la Espriella outright.
Among voters who recognize each candidate, Valencia’s favorability runs at 47.7% versus De la Espriella’s 42.1%. Cepeda himself sits at 51.1% favorability — high for a left candidate in Colombia, where the Petro government’s disapproval has run consistently above 50% during most of his term.
The Petro Approval Floor
President Gustavo Petro’s approval recovery is the unstated foundation of Cepeda’s surge. Invamer measured Petro at 38% favorable in November 2025, climbing to 49% in February, and registering at 49% favorable / 48.9% unfavorable in April — the highest sustained approval band of his term. The recovery tracks the Petro government’s selective adoption of opposition-favored measures: the 23.7% minimum wage increase declared early 2026, the energy-emergency declarations, and visible foreign policy wins including the November 2025 Trump meeting that defused the trade-war threat.
A president whose approval bottoms in the mid-30s typically cannot transfer support to a successor candidate. A president holding around 49% can. Cepeda is benefiting from precisely that lift, and the timing — five weeks before the vote — leaves limited room for the opposition to reset the dynamic without an external shock.
Petro himself has converted the recovery into closing-stretch political action. The May 1 Bogotá manifestation he convened in support of his constituent assembly proposal will arrive five days after the poll release, and his April memorandum instructing all ministries and government entities to advertise their major achievements on public, private, and social-media channels signals an executive-branch mobilization unprecedented at this stage of a Colombian campaign.
The Violence Backdrop and the Colombia Election Poll
Invamer fielded the poll during a particularly violent stretch in southwest Colombia. Ten armed attacks across Cauca, Nariño, and Valle del Cauca in the week before April 24 left 19 people dead, including security forces and civilians. The drone attacks documented in Ipiales and the broader Catatumbo region have escalated through April, and ELN and dissident-FARC factions continue to dictate which candidates can campaign in territory they control.
Cepeda’s lead has held — and grown — through that violence. The interpretation that voters might shift toward De la Espriella’s hard-line “bombard the cartels” rhetoric in response to insecurity has not materialized in the data. De la Espriella’s modest 2.6-point gain reflects consolidation among his existing supporters rather than expansion into new constituencies.
The most-mentioned national problems in the survey remain corruption (cited as the top problem by a plurality of respondents) and insecurity. The Misión de Observación Electoral has now classified 170 municipalities as electoral risk for May 31 — a 30% increase from the 2022 baseline — with 81 designated as extreme risk.
The Right’s Mathematical Problem
The combined De la Espriella-plus-Valencia first-round total of 41.3% is below Cepeda’s 44.3% as a single candidate. There is no realistic vote-transfer scenario in which a unified right candidate fielded against Cepeda would win the first round outright at 50%-plus-one — the threshold required to avoid a runoff.
Centro Democrático secured the Conservative Party and the Partido de la U as alliance partners going into the first round. Salvación Nacional, De la Espriella’s vehicle, picked up three Senate seats and one Chamber seat in the March 8 legislative elections. The Pacto Histórico became the largest bench in Congress with expanded representation in both houses, though scrutineering remains under review.
The right now faces a strategic question with five weeks left: continue the De la Espriella-Valencia first-round contest, knowing that whichever survives reaches the runoff weakened by an internal fight; or attempt a late consolidation around Valencia, who polls better head-to-head against Cepeda but commands less first-round enthusiasm than De la Espriella’s 4.6 million signature-collection mobilization base.
Markets and the Capital-Flight Question
Colombia’s Q1 2026 foreign direct investment came in at US$2.13 billion, a 9.1% decline from Q1 2025 and the lowest first-quarter reading since 2021, according to Banco de la República balanza cambiaria data covered in earlier Rio Times reporting. Cumulative FDI has now fallen 30.6% from the US$13.22 billion 2023 peak. The Petro-era pattern is unbroken — every annual FDI reading since August 2022 has been lower than the previous one.
A Cepeda victory extends that trajectory. Both Valencia and De la Espriella have campaigned on investment-climate restoration, including hydrocarbon-permit normalization and rollback of the 2024 labor reform. Pacto Histórico’s continuity platform, by contrast, would maintain the current FDI framework and possibly extend it through new state-control measures in energy and finance.
The Colombian peso has begun pricing the election outcome. With Cepeda now the heavy favorite, foreign portfolio investors are unlikely to commit Q3 2026 capital ahead of clarity, and the Q1 portfolio-investment outflow of US$28 million — versus US$374 million inflow in 2025 — is consistent with that pattern.
What the Final Five Weeks Look Like
No first-round debate among the three frontrunners has yet been scheduled, despite Cepeda’s April 18 challenge. Both Valencia and De la Espriella have added procedural conditions, and centrists López, Fajardo, and Roy Barreras continue to push for inclusion. The likeliest format is a three-person debate after May 1, possibly within ten days of the first round.
External factors carry meaningful weight. The Trump administration’s posture toward Colombia — including periodic sanctions threats against Petro and his family, the November 2025 antinarcotics decertification, and the 10% reciprocal tariffs maintained on Colombian exports — could escalate or de-escalate ahead of May 31. Any Trump-administration action against Cepeda directly would likely consolidate left support further, while an externally-imposed shock such as a Venezuela-related migration surge could reshuffle priorities.
The Invamer poll’s central finding holds: Colombia’s Pacto Histórico governing project is structurally favored to extend itself for another four-year term through Cepeda, the right has not produced an electable consolidator, and the centrists who once could have formed a coalition lever have collapsed below relevance. With 35 days to the first round, the largest, most rigorous Colombia election poll of the cycle has narrowed the question from “who wins” to “by how much.”
Related Coverage: Colombia Economy 2026 Guide • Cepeda Debate Challenge • Q1 FDI Decline • Election Violence Risk