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Four years after Gustavo Petro’s historic electoral victory as the first left-wing president to be elected in the history of the country , Colombia is now facing the question of whether the changes set in motion by Petro’s election should continue, or be reversed.
The polls paint a relatively clear picture. All five of the polling agencies authorized by Colombia’s Electoral Council are predicting first place for Iván Cepeda, a left-wing senator and the ruling coalition’s presidential candidate. The weighted average of the polls estimates support for him at between 38 and 40 percent. This puts Cepeda clearly in the lead, but a long way from an absolute majority. It is safe to assume there will be a runoff election.
In second and third place are Abelardo de la Espriella and Paloma Valencia, each with around 21 to 23 percent of the vote. Which of them will make it through to the runoff is crucial, because the simulations of a second round of voting put Cepeda ahead in the event that he faces off against De la Espriella — but slightly behind against Valencia.
Polling agency predictions have, on occasion, been significantly wide of the mark, so their results cannot be taken as an authoritative prognosis. At any rate, there is a realistic possibility that the progressive governmental project will prevail — in a country with a structurally conservative character, and in spite of the rightward trend across Latin America.
Colombia’s Unique Developmental Path
Columbia can look back over a long tradition of formal democratic institutions. While Argentina, Chile, and Brazil suffered under years of military dictatorship, Columbia — except for the period of General Rojas Pinilla’s rule, from 1953 to 1957 — has had formally democratic elections and civilian — if oligarchic — governments and parliamentary institutions. All of this looks like a model of success that runs counter to the regional tendency.
But appearances can be deceptive. What democracy in Colombia has effectively meant is decades of rule by a small elite. The so-called Frente Nacional, a sharing of power between liberals and conservatives from 1958 to 1974, laid the foundations for further decades in which left-wing forces were excluded from the institutions. There was no peace; instead, formal democratic rule was simultaneous with constant armed violence. Left-wing guerilla movements, right-wing paramilitaries linked to the economic ruling class, and the Colombian state all participated in one of the longest armed conflicts in the Western Hemisphere.
Colombia will be choosing between two fundamentally different visions of what the state is and should be: a transformative project to bring social justice and government services to even the most remote areas, or a law-and-order state that promises security and economic stability for the upper classes.
The country is hardly peripheral geopolitically. Strategically located, Colombia is the only NATO ally in Latin America, and gives the USA access to seven military bases. With its border to Panama, it is also the largest transit corridor for northbound migration. Colombia is the most populous and economically strongest state in the Andean Community, and yet, until the 2016 peace treaty and the change of government in 2022, was barely seen as a fully-fledged actor on the world stage.
Petro in Government
A historic breakthrough came with the election of Gustavo Petro in 2022 — the former guerillero was to be Colombia’s first left-wing president. He promised a cambio: social transformation, peace-making, a new narcotics policy, dignity for the marginalized. What came of it?
The record is better than Petro’s opponents are willing to admit, and more limited than the hopes invested in him by his supporters. At the end of his term, unemployment is the lowest it has been in a century, poverty has been reduced to below ten percent for the first time, and, as part of a land reform, a total of 1.8 million hectares has been given to smallholders. Inflation fell from 13.3 percent in March 2023 to around five percent; the currency remained stable, and the much-feared flight of capital did not transpire. Driven by private consumption, record remittances from the diaspora, and a dynamic coffee market, economic growth stood at 2.6 percent in the last calendar year. There has also been real progress in terms of diversifying the economy. For the first time, foreign exchange earnings from tourism exceeded those from exports of coal, and the installed capacity from unconventional renewable energy sources jumped from 200 megawatts to more than 3,600 megawatts.
The structural problem lies on the spending side. The budget deficit rose to around 7.5 percent of gross domestic product, forcing the government to suspend its own fiscal rules; this will also put the incoming government under considerable pressure to consolidate its budget.
Petro has not banked on the redistribution of revenue from primary industries, but on a project of social-ecological reform, with the aim of transforming the extractivist export model itself instead of “merely” redistributing the returns.
Yet Petro’s economic policy also differs from the other approaches taken in Latin America. Unlike the left-wing governments in Venezuela or Bolivia in the 2000s, Petro has not banked on the redistribution of revenue from primary industries, but on a project of social-ecological reform, with the aim of transforming the extractivist export model itself instead of “merely” redistributing the returns.
At the same time, though, important structural reforms were blocked, or could only get through the parliament in a significantly adulterated form. The government did achieve a reform of the pension system in 2024, after tough negotiations. Private pension funds and the state-run Colpensiones system are no longer forced to compete with one another, but are to work in tandem with the aim of expanding pension coverage — currently, only one in four Colombians of retirement age receives a pension. A central element to the reform is a universal basic pension for those retirees who accrued no pension entitlement under the previous system; this is anticipated to benefit over three million people. Healthcare reform, by contrast, broke down entirely. The plan was to get rid of financial mediation by private health insurers and bring the management of healthcare resources under the control of the state, but the proposal was blocked by a broad coalition of opposition parties, as well as sections of the governing coalition.
The labour reforms, on the other hand, which were passed in June 2025, represent the most significant overhaul of Colombian labour law in decades and restored workers’ rights that were stripped in 2002. Trade unions are protected; collective bargaining has been expanded. Also, for the first time, the reforms require companies that operate online platforms to pay social security contributions — a significant gain in a country where more than half of the workforce is employed in the informal economy. Here, too, however, the power of conservative parliamentary majorities limited the scope of the reforms, and key provisions failed to make it through the congress.
In addition to the labour reforms, increases to the minimum wage under Petro are a separate and substantial advance in terms of redistribution. The minimum wage rose from one million pesos (just under 230 euros) in 2022 to the current 1.75 million pesos (just over 400 euros); a transport allowance has been granted as well. This amounts to a real increase of 75 percent to the minimum wage over just four years.
Beyond the congressional debates over reform, there has been significant progress on education and healthcare. In the university sector, the government massively expanded the availability of de facto fee-free tuition at public universities and enshrined this in law. According to official figures, through to 2025, more than 900,000 students have benefited. The government also significantly expanded access to higher education, creating some 190,000 additional study places. Programmes like Universidad en tu Territorio brought tertiary education to Colombia’s marginalized regions for the first time. In the healthcare sector, the hospital ship Benkos Biohó is emblematic of endeavours to bring state services to structurally disadvantaged areas of the country. Built on the Pacific coast with an investment of over 87 billion pesos (around 19.6 million euros) and operational since March 2026, the ship sails rivers and coastal regions, bringing general medicine, surgery, gynaecology, dentistry, and telehealth services to 22 Pacific communities that can only be accessed by water. These projects are politically significant, because they are doing exactly what peace researchers have been demanding for years — bringing the presence of the state into zones where it has so far largely been replaced by violent actors.
Petro’s peace project, Paz Total, which aimed to carry out negotiations with all armed groups at the same time, failed to achieve a breakthrough. None of the talks with FARC dissidents, the ELN, or the Clan del Golfo went very far; peace agreements were only able to be reached with some of the smaller groups. One month before the elections, FARC dissidents carried out a terrorist attack in the country’s south-west; this is a symptom of the fragmented conflict, which is rooted in economies of violence and is resistant to traditional diplomatic solutions.
Petro has institutionally strengthened the political left to a hitherto unknown degree. But there were rigid limits to his capacity while in government; the congress and the judiciary blocked many of his plans, and the regional elites and security forces also flexed their political might. In this sense, his was an electoral victory of historic symbolic significance, but one that failed to achieve sustainable or structural shifts in Colombia’s balance of powers.
The Candidates
Iván Cepeda Castro and vice-presidential candidate Aida Quilcué stand for the continuation of the wave of change brought in by Petro, absent his charisma and 2022’s energetic mobilization. For years, Cepeda has been one of the most important representatives of the institutional left: the son of a senator who was murdered by a paramilitary fighter, he is a staunch proponent of human rights, conflict resolution, and judicial responsibility who came into the spotlight thanks to the legal complaint he brought against influential ex-President Álvaro Uribe Vélez. This garnered him considerable credibility in progressive milieus. His anti-corruption stance and his distance from the scandals of the current government give him a certain independence from Petro, which is politically useful. Quilcué comes from the Indigenous movement of the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca and embodies a level of access to organized territorial structures that none of the other pairs of candidates can claim.
There are weaknesses to their candidacy, however. Cepeda’s language is calm, intellectual, and precise, but a long way from the popular appeal that enabled Petro to mobilize masses of voters in 2022. The emotional sparks set off by vice-presidential candidate Francia Márquez are absent as well.
Paloma Valencia and Juan Daniel Oviedo are updated versions of the traditional right. Oviedo, former head of the National Administrative Department of Statistics and an openly gay man, represents something of technocratically-coded overture to the urban political centre. Valencia, from a ruling class family and close to ex-President Uribe, stands for hard-line security policy and neoliberal economic policy. Remarkably, her star has risen within a matter of weeks: from around ten percent in February, her approval rating in the polls rose to almost 23 percent by April, the greatest increase across all of the candidates. After the FARC attacks in Cauca she travelled with Uribe to the affected region and cemented her core message around security policy.
Abelardo de la Espriella is the loudest candidate in the field. He is a successful defence attorney who tries to present himself as an anti-system populist despite being a product of the old elites, and has a dubious reputation due to his legal work defending figures from the world of organized crime. His programme essentially consists of anti-Petro rhetoric, demanding all-out war on armed struggle groups, and law-and-order talk that is redolent of Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele: emotively stereotyping perceived enemies, radical oversimplification, and contempt for institutional compromise. Like El Salvador’s Bukele, he touts a security state as the answer to societal crises, without having any recognizably coherent political project. Even if he fails to make it through to the runoff, his candidacy is already playing an important role for the Colombian right: pushing public discourse rightward, so that Valencia comes across as a relatively moderate alternative, while at the same time mobilizing the most radical anti-Petro voters, who will most likely opt for Valencia if she ends up standing in the second round.
Peace as Structural Problem
In the electoral campaign, the right-wing opposition and the private mass media are framing the wave of terrorist attacks that took place at the end of April as a failure of the current government. This is politically comprehensible, but analytically defective.
The fact that to this day the Colombian state has no effective monopoly on the means of violence in many of the country’s rural regions is not due to four years of Petro, but to the decades of state absence in the peripheries and to the wasting of the opportunity that emerged with the 2016 peace treaty. The vacuum that the FARC’s withdrawal left behind was never filled; the political institutions that had neglected these regions systematically blocked the agreements under Duque’s government, or else dragged their feet on implementing them. A different set of armed groups charged in to fill the gap. This latest escalation does nothing to prove that the negotiated path was a mistake, but is rather evidence of how deeply entrenched the structures of violence in some parts of the country continue to be. Offloading the blame onto Petro’s ambitious efforts to make peace — even if there were some mistakes in the details — only papers over the fact that an important driver of the fresh violence lies in the 2016 peace treaty’s deficient implementation, not in the peace negotiations themselves.
The fact that to this day the Colombian state has no effective monopoly on the means of violence in many of the country’s rural regions is not due to four years of Petro, but to the decades of state absence in the peripheries and to the wasting of the opportunity that emerged with the 2016 peace treaty.
There is not a singular conflict in Colombia that one government could simply bring to an end. Instead, there is a fragmentary conflictual field traversed by FARC dissidents, the ELN, the Clan del Golfo, and regional criminal networks, and borne up by economies that are stabilized by violence, international demand, and flows of foreign currency. In regions where the state is barely present, the production of cocaine, illegal mining, and protection rackets offer income, security, and a parallel local order, and these obtain legitimacy for non-state wielders of violence. Military reasoning alone has never changed this material basis, a fact demonstrated by years of violence.
What will structurally help Colombia to progress towards peace is the combination of negotiations and the improvement of the material conditions of life in historically neglected regions — by building schools, hospitals and clinics, and streets, by giving out land titles, guaranteeing land purchases for smallholders, and improving institutional presence overall. This is exactly where the Petro government — despite all of the disappointment over the failure of negotiations with the big armed groups — is making real investments. These investments may not make the headlines, but they can be the most sustainable contribution by the government to development in Colombia’s regional periphery, because they actually deal with the root causes of the cycle of violence.
Less Street, More Parliament
The nearly insurrectionary mass protests that took place in 2021 in advance of the last presidential elections were an exceptional moment — fostered by the pandemic, the Duque government, police violence on a massive scale, and a pile-up of social crises that had already erupted once in 2019. Millions of people took to the streets for weeks at a time — trade unions, collectives of students, feminist groups, organizations of Afro-Colombians, Indigenous people, and farmers, left-wing movement platforms, and also people from impoverished neighbourhoods who were politicizing and going to demonstrations for the first time. New actors emerged — like the Primera Línea, popular self-defence organizations sustained by urban youth from the barrios — and became the face of the uprising. This broad alliance consolidated anti-Uribism as a societal force and broke the ground for Petro’s electoral victory.
This energy has since been institutionalized and attenuated. Leaders from the movement have positions in ministries and seats in the congress. Petro governed with the street and was able to mobilize the masses when the congress tried to block reforms. But this bound the dynamics of the movement more strongly to the government, rather than the inverse. The impulse to spontaneous protest abated, and mobilization began to tend towards parliamentary and electoral politics. This phenomenon is not specific to Colombia, but rather a structural dilemma of left-wing politics in government: force outside of the institutions gets traded for institutional power, and the gains in the latter tend to equate to losses in the former.
The movements of Indigenous people remain the most stable organized force on the broad societal left, but operate from a critical if friendly distance to the government and are much less relevant in terms of voter mobilization than their counterparts are in the neighbouring Andean countries. Whether the networks that emerged in 2021 will be able to decide the outcome of this election without 2022’s historically momentous breakthrough remains the open question. On the other hand, the Colombian left will have better leverage for mobilizing its own voters from within government than from the opposition.
Geopolitics: Sovereignty under Pressure
With the Petro presidency, Colombia has been able to diversify its foreign policy for the first time, without overly straining its relationship with the USA. This has involved pursuing stronger multilateral ties, positioning itself as a voice for the Global South on climate and human rights, and building its relationships with the BRICS states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). Projects such as an interoceanic corridor as an alternative to the Panama Canal, financed by the BRICS Development Bank, exemplify this new direction. Petro has made Colombia more visible on the world stage, but this also makes the country more vulnerable to attack.
The Trump administration is putting Colombia under massive pressure: narcotics policy as a lever for sanctions, demanding migration control as a precondition, and wielding the example of the Venezuela intervention as a geopolitical sword of Damocles. Every government that wants to reform Colombian security policy and shift from a “war on drugs” to a more socio-politically sane approach will come up against massive resistance from Washington. A right-wing government would clear away these tensions and go back to toeing the USA’s line; progressivism would have to endure them within the present structural limits.
Can Petro’s Success Be Repeated?
The left-wing electoral victory in 2022 had structural foundations: entrenched inequality, consolidation of the left within institutions, political normalization of left-wing candidates, crumbling Uribist hegemony, and all accelerated by the mass protests in 2021 and the growing importance of online social media as an alternative to a mass media dominated by right-wing narratives. Then there were the situational and personal aspects: Petro as a charismatic caudillo, the historical significance of the first left-wing president, Francia Márquez as a mobilizing symbol, and a fragmented right wing with its feeble candidate Rodolfo Hernández.
In retrospect, Petro’s most important contribution could be the opening of the political field for the Colombian left in the longer term. The era of unchallenged dominance by the right is over, and this is unprecedented in Colombian history. Cepeda and Quilcué must now show that the left can win without Petro. This will be significantly harder, absent the same emotional energy, without the historic dimension of the upswing leading to the first left-wing president, and, following the latest attacks, in a security environment that plays into the ideological hands of the right.
Colombia will be choosing between two fundamentally different visions of what the state is and should be: a transformative project to bring social justice and government services to even the most remote areas, or a law-and-order state that promises security and economic stability for the upper classes.
One thing is for sure: the spell has been broken, the historical precedent has been set, progressive forces can govern in Colombia. The question now is whether they can do so without Petro.
Should security remain the dominant issue — and the series of attacks a month prior to the election has only reinforced this very reflex — this will work in favour of the candidates from the right. On the other hand, provided that the left succeeds in presenting the tangible social progress of the last four years as an inspiring vision for the future and a prerequisite for peace, it certainly has a chance of winning.
One thing is for sure: the spell has been broken, the historical precedent has been set, progressive forces can govern in Colombia. The question now is whether they can do so without Petro. And if so, whether the structural constraints imposed by economies of violence, financial bottlenecks, and veto powers within the judiciary and Congress will allow the incoming government any more room for manoeuvre than the previous one had.
Even if the political pendulum were to swing back to the right for now, all is far from lost. For in that case, in four years’ time there will be a left with experience of government that is ready and waiting to contest the next election. For a political force that was excluded from power in Colombia for decades, and whose leaders all too often paid for their political commitment with persecution, exile, or even their lives, that situation in itself represents significant historic progress.
]Translated by Samuel Langer and Louise Pain for Gegensatz Translation Collective]
