Colombia's leftward shift: Petro dominates as political landscape transforms

Colombia held primary elections on March 13, 2022, and the results sketched a political map the country had never seen before. Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla fighter turned senator and ex-mayor of Bogotá, emerged not merely as the frontrunner but as a transformative force—his Historic Coalition pulled in 5.7 million votes, more than double what the center and right coalitions combined could muster. Petro himself received 4.5 million votes, the largest internal primary vote total in Colombian history. For a nation that had been governed almost exclusively by the right for decades, the sight of a leftist candidate with this kind of momentum was genuinely unprecedented.

What made Sunday's voting so electrically charged was that it functioned as something more than a routine primary. The internal party consultations had dominated media coverage for months, transforming what should have been a procedural exercise into what amounted to a first round of a three-stage election that would determine who holds power through 2026. The actual presidential vote would come May 29, with a likely runoff on June 19. But the primary results already suggested the shape of that contest: a polarization between left and right, even though the legislative races revealed a country far more fragmented and ideologically complex than any simple binary could capture.

Petro's coalition, the Historic Pact, would now hold 16 Senate seats and 25 seats in the Chamber of Representatives—the largest left-wing bloc ever to enter Congress. This positioned them as the majority force in the legislature regardless of who won the presidency, though Petro would need to build bridges with other parties. The question hanging over everything was whether he could win the first round outright, as he suggested he might. He would need roughly five million additional votes beyond his primary total, a steep climb even with overtures toward the Liberal and Green parties. Only Álvaro Uribe, the most popular politician in recent Colombian history, had ever won a presidential election in the first round. The political terrain had shifted so fundamentally that observers were already speaking not of uribismo versus anti-uribismo, but of petrismo versus anti-petrismo.

The second striking development was Francia Márquez. She finished third overall in the Historic Coalition's primary, losing to Petro by 65 percentage points, yet she became the day's most genuinely novel phenomenon. At 39, Márquez came from the kind of place that had rarely produced nationally influential politicians in Colombia: the rural countryside and Afro-Colombian culture. She was born in Suárez, in the Cauca region of the southwest, a territory ravaged by drug trafficking, illegal mining, and armed conflict. She herself had survived multiple assassination attempts. A lawyer and feminist, she had won international recognition for her successful battles against major mining corporations. That someone with her profile could draw 800,000 votes—making her the third-most-voted candidate of the day—represented a historical opening in Colombian politics. She was already being discussed not merely as a potential vice president or cabinet minister in a Petro government, but as one of the country's most influential political figures in the decades ahead.

The third revelation concerned the persistence of what many had written off as relics. For months, observers had discussed the so-called maquinarias—patronage machines through which local power brokers delivered votes in exchange for favors or, sometimes, cash. These were supposed to be dying artifacts of a past Colombia wanted to leave behind. Instead, the traditional parties that had dominated twentieth-century politics showed they remained formidable. The Liberal Party secured 15 Senate seats and the Conservative Party 16, positioning both as crucial players in whatever coalition would govern next. Their machinery still worked. Their local power still mattered.

Meanwhile, other machines that had been heralded as vigorous new forces sputtered. Alejandro Char, a former Barranquilla mayor who owned supermarkets and soccer teams and was known to control the Atlantic coast, lost the right-wing primary by 40 points to Federico Gutiérrez, the ex-mayor of Medellín. Gutiérrez emerged as the right's strongest card and the most probable opponent for Petro in a runoff. The Nuevo Liberalismo, a party attempting to revive the legacy of the late presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán and featuring personalities from media and academia, won only a single Chamber seat—a stunning underperformance given the media attention it had received.

Perhaps most striking was the decline of Álvaro Uribe's Centro Democrático. Once the largest bloc in the Senate, it fell to fifth place, dropping from 19 seats to 14. Uribe himself, worn down by decades in politics and various scandals, and shadowed by the unpopular outgoing government of Iván Duque, had played only a muted role in the campaign so far. The votes that had once gone to Uribe and Duque had migrated to Gutiérrez, who was being described as a "shadow" candidate of the right—a de-uribista version of conservatism. Yet declaring uribismo dead in a country that had elected Uribe or his chosen successor in four of the last five elections would be premature. What was clear was that the old strategy—built around Uribe's person and his "democratic security" doctrine—no longer held the same power. In a nation accustomed to choosing the uribista option, that shift alone was extraordinary.