Market-friendly Duque is Colombia's next president

Market-friendly politician Iván Duque will be tasked with uniting a country still divided by the peace accord signed with the former Farc rebel group 18 months ago and improve a sluggish economy after being elected Colombia's president on Sunday.

In a runoff vote, Duque obtained 54% of the vote to beat the leftist former mayor of Bogotá Gustavo Petro, who was voted by 42%.

Duque, a former senator for the Centro Democrático party of former president Álvaro Uribe, was the spokesperson for the No campaign that defeated President Juan Manuel Santos' peace plan in 2016, forcing the government to make concessions to the right-wing movement headed by Uribe that was opposed to the deal with the country's largest guerrilla group.

Duque has since moderated his criticism of the peace deal, saying he only wants to tweak some aspects of the agreement and not "tear it up." Instead, his message has been one of economic growth and unity.

"I want to govern with and for everyone, I want to unite the country," he said after casting his ballot.

In a sign of how far the country has come from the peak of the drug-fueled violence in the 1980s and 90s, when several presidential candidates were murdered and rebels made voting in rural areas all but impossible, Sunday's runoff went off smoothly, just like the first round in late May.

Duque - who will be sworn in on August 7 and hold office until 2022 - has a pro-business agenda that includes plans to cut corporate taxes and create new incentives for oil and mining companies.

As for his political capital, the managing editor of influential daily El Espectador, Fidel Cano, said Duque does not have "an absolute mandate."

"The country expects him to govern not only thinking about the 10 million people who supported him, but to also include the 8 million who voted for Gustavo Petro, the 800,000 who cast blank ballots and that immense mass of compatriots who did not turn out to the ballot box," he wrote in an editorial.