What seemed like a simple path to the unity of the Colombian left and the definition of its candidates for the 2026 national elections has become a serial of political disputes and legal entanglements. The popular consultation this Sunday, in which its bases will define with a clean vote its candidate for the presidency between Senator Iván Cepeda and former Minister Carolina Corcho, as well as its lists for Congress, will be able to reduce the noise by partially clarifying the panorama. The number of people who go to the polls will also have an important political impact, as it serves as a thermometer – although inaccurate – of the enthusiasm of the leftist bases in the electoral cycle of the coming months.
Beyond defining a name, the objective of holding the consultation, which the law offers to any party that wishes it, on a single, pre-established date, was to ensure the union of the different forces that have accompanied President Gustavo Petro since his own campaign, four years ago. And that goal has only been partially met: in addition to the mess to achieve the formal union of the parties and movements that sought to merge into the new Historical Pact party – a name that until now was from a collation, not a single legal entity -, the political tension has been notorious.
It has been especially so for one name: Daniel Quintero, former mayor of Medellín and presidential candidate. Although he does not come from the left, his mandate in the country’s second city was surrounded by scandals, and he is on criminal trial for corruption, the president promoted his entry into the consultation. The reaction was visceral: half a dozen candidates resigned to all support Cepeda and thus face what seemed to be the unstoppable rise of a politician very skilled at capturing the attention of citizens and forging alliances with politicians of all ideologies. Only Corcho refused this convergence, with a stubbornness that was rewarded 10 days ago, when the Antioquian claimed legal uncertainty to renounce his participation in the consultation.
Although that decision relaxed the atmosphere, it did not shield the consultation. On the one hand, there is a very Colombian legal debate about the effects of the announcement, since it was so late that the cards were already printed and the face of the former mayor will be among the voters’ alternatives this Sunday. The Registrar’s Office, in fact, has confirmed that it will count the votes for him. In other words, Quintero can still, theoretically, win. In addition, the legal problem remains, for which he took a step aside: due to the rushed merger process, it is not clear if Sunday’s consultation will be the internal consultation of a party, the new Historical Pact, or one between several parties. And if it were the latter, as Quintero has said he fears, the path outlined for the presidential elections would be damaged, which involves a consultation between the person elected this Sunday and other candidates from the center and the left, on the day of the legislative elections in March, with the so-called Broad Front. This is because many lawyers argue – others have doubts – that an applicant can only participate in an interparty consultation, whether in October or March.
This legal tongue twister, full of paragraphs and jurisprudence, suggests that the specific effects of the results that will be known at dusk on October 26 will follow the coming and going of decisions and legal actions. And to this uncertainty is added the difficult interpretation of the figures, when reading them in terms of the strength or weakness of the left. Since only the Historical Pact participates in the polls, there will be no other forces to compare, and since it is a “cold” day, in which dozens of parties that fill the country with an electoral atmosphere are not competing, it is difficult to project the meaning of any result.
This is demonstrated by the few points of comparison that exist. In September 2009, Rafael Pardo became the liberal candidate with 398,000 votes among the 1.3 million Colombians who went to the polls for that party’s consultation. That same day, the current president Gustavo Petro obtained that of the Polo Democrático, the first unity party on the left, with 234,000 of only 483,000 supports. Eight months later, Pardo fell to 638,000 votes and Peto climbed to 1.3 million, proof that many other factors influence the final result, such as the changing landscape of the parties, the dynamics and the candidates of each period.
However, the Pact has another mirror, more typical: the vote for its Senate list in the 2022 legislative elections. Unlike the votes for president, with fewer abstentions and greater importance of the characteristics of each candidate, many citizens seek to support an ideology, a structure or a party in Congress. That is what mobilizes people on cold days: in 2010, the Liberal Party added 1.7 million votes in the Senate, and the Polo 825,000, in both cases votes around 35% higher than in the 2009 consultations. The Historical Pact obtained 2.8 million votes in the previous legislative elections, which if reduced by the same 35% of those previous cases, would be about 2 million votes. votes. But in 2017, the liberal consultation that Humberto de La Calle won totaled less than 744,000 votes, and the Senate list reached 1.9 million. That proportion would predict around 1.1 million votes for the Pact this Sunday.
These estimated figures indicate a wide range of expected flow. Once again there are significant differences with those cases: this time it is about the president’s party, which has no precedent. There is even less that the vote took place after a week in which that president called for a popular process to reach a constituent assembly, fought and was sanctioned by the president of the United States, and questioned the judicial decision by which his political nemesis, former president Álvaro Uribe, was acquitted. In the end, the factors are so many that the interpretations are probably widely varied, and the name of the presidential candidate will get all the attention.
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