2023 Colombian local elections results: General conclusions
Some general conclusions about Colombia's local and regional elections held on October 29, including the winners & losers.
The 2023 Colombian local elections were held on October 29. Over 20,500 offices and seats were elected, including 1,102 mayors and 32 governors of departments, as well as some 12,000 municipal councillors and over 400 deputies in departmental assemblies.
For more information about the context of these elections and the main local races, I encourage you to read my pre-election preview as well as my posts focusing on the mayoral elections in Bogotá and Medellín.
General conclusions
It’s hard to accurately paint a national picture of the results because these are local elections, with primarily local considerations and political configurations differing from place to place. Nevertheless, national politics do influence the election, particularly in major cities and departments. In addition, these elections are a very early test before the 2026 congressional and presidential elections.
Overview of results
I’ll dive deeper into local results in later post(s) in the next few weeks. Compared to my pre-election preview, the results in major cities and departments were quite as expected, with a few surprises.
In Bogotá, Carlos Fernando Galán (centre) won outright, avoiding a second round, with 49% of the vote and nearly 1.5 million votes—the best result for a mayor-elect in Bogotá since Antanas Mockus’ landslide in 1994. Juan Daniel Oviedo (centre) finished second, with 20.1%, while the Pacto Histórico’s Gustavo Bolivar finished third with only 18.7%, even worse than expected. Oviedo’s strong result, which gives a seat in the city council (by virtue of the constitution and opposition statute), makes him a ‘winner’ as well, promised to a bright political future. Galán’s landslide squeezed out all the other minor candidates—Rodrigo Lara won only 2.3% while former defence minister Diego Molano got only 2.1%.
In Medellín, as expected, Fico Gutiérrez (right) was returned to his old job in a landslide, winning 73.4%. Former mayor (and now 2026 presidential candidate) Daniel Quintero’s candidate, Juan Carlos Upegui, won only 10.1%, a stinging rebuke for quinterismo, which can find no silver lining in the result. The crowded field of other candidates all ended up with less than 3%. Fico’s mix of anti-quinterismo, anti-petrismo and nostalgic longing for a ‘united’ city that never really existed (i.e. Medellín before Quintero) proved to be very effective, as anticipated.
After two defeats in 2015 and 2019, uribismo finally won Antioquia’s gubernatorial election, with uribista Andrés Julián Rendón winning by over 13 points over former governor Luis Pérez, 36.8% to 23.4%, a much larger margin than expected. Rendón benefited from Fico’s support and Gustavo Petro’s unpopularity in Antioquia, defeating Pérez, whose strategy relied on his name recognition and his alliances with political machines. Outgoing governor Aníbal Gaviria’s candidate, Luis Fernando Suárez, won 13.9%, while Quintero’s candidate Esteban Restrepo won 9.1%.
In Cali, one of the few competitive races, Alejandro Éder (centre-right) won by a much clearer margin than expected: he won 40.4% against 28.2% for Roberto ‘El Chontico’ Ortíz, the populist businessman-politician who had lost the two previous mayoral elections. Éder, the scion of one of the wealthiest business families in the region and the favourite of Cali’s influential business elites, capitalized on the unpopularity of outgoing mayor Jorge Iván Ospina (he claimed that his opponent was the implicit continuity candidate). Ortíz, for the third election in a row, was unable to ‘close’ his campaign successfully after having started as the frontrunner. The Pacto’s Danis Rentería won 11.1%, while Éder’s success squeezed out Miyerlandi Torres, who finished with just 4.4%.
In the gubernatorial election in Valle del Cauca, former governor Dilian Francisca Toro won comfortably, benefiting from her opponents’ division and disarray, with 42.2%. Not quite as big a victory as that won by her acolyte in 2019, but a clear victory nonetheless. The blank vote finished second with 27.6%, the bulk of it coming from supporters of the man who had been her strongest rival until he was ruled ineligible, Tulio Gómez (still on the ballot, but having called for a blank vote days earlier, he won 7% himself). The Pacto’s candidate Ferney Lozano won 12.6% while the right’s candidate Santiago Castro won just 5.7%.
In Barranquilla, Alejandro Char reconfirmed charista hegemony, returning to office for a third term (after 2008-2011 and 2016-2019) with 73.2% and 415,000 votes—his highest vote yet. Antonio Bohórquez, the local left’s token standard bearer, won only 9.3%, behind the blank vote (10.4%). In the gubernatorial election in Atlántico, charismo proved its authority as well: former Liberal governor Eduardo Verano, a charista ally, won 48.8%, 18 points ahead of his rival, Alfredo Varela (30.6%). A much bigger victory than the last time the two men met, in 2015, when Verano had won by less than 7,000 votes. Verano owes his victory to charismo, and celebrated his victory hand in hand with Alex Char. In spite of their judicial problems and scandals attached to their names in national (Bogotan) public opinion, charismo rules quasi-unchallenged locally—now for five successive terms in Barranquilla!
In Bucaramanga, evangelical pastor and ‘Bucaramanga Bukele’ Jaime Andrés Beltrán won a clear victory with 34.6%, far ahead of his closest rival, centre-left Green ‘alternative’ candidate Carlos Parra (14.7%). Beltrán captured voters’ support with his mano dura platform on criminality and immigration. Fabián Oviedo, seen as the implicit candidate of outgoing unpopular mayor Juan Carlos Cárdenas, won 12.9% while Horacio José Serpa, the son of a late Liberal political leader, won only 8.9%. Consuelo Ordóñez, the candidate supported by Rodolfo Hernández (and Nuevo Liberalismo) won 8.6%. In Santander’s gubernatorial election, retired General Juvenal Díaz Mateus, whose campaigned focused on security and criticizing Gustavo Petro, was elected with 39% against 19.2% for his closest opponent, Héctor Mantilla, widely seen as the candidate of the Aguilar clan and outgoing governor Mauricio Aguilar. Rodolfo Hernández, who was still on the ballot despite his candidacy having been revoked because of the disciplinary sanctions against him, finished fourth with 12.5%, behind Green candidate ‘Profe Ferley’ (16.7%).
In Cartagena, former governor Dumek Turbay won comfortably with 42.9%. The Pacto’s Javier Julio Bejarano finished second (15.3%), ahead of former centre-left mayor Judith Pinedo (10.3%) and William García Tirado (9.6%). With Dumek Turbay, the traditional political class returns to power in Cartagena, four years after their stunning defeat at the hands of William Dau, but this year voters preferred a familiar face and experienced politician. The gubernatorial election in Bolívar was a walkover for former representative Yamil Arana, supported the quasi-entirety of the department’s political clans (including outgoing governor Vicente Blel Scaff): he won 70%.
In Cundinamarca, former governor Jorge Rey won in a landslide, with 57.3%, proving his power as the top political boss of Cundinamarca. The blank vote finished second with 12.8%, ahead of uribista candidate, former interior minister Nancy Patricia Gutiérrez (10.7%). The Pacto did a tiny bit better than expected with 6.7%.
In Cúcuta, Jorge Acevedo, who previously ran in 2015 and 2019, won a narrow victory, with a majority of less than one percent, with 28.5% against 27.7% for Leonardo Jácome, the candidate of most of the department’s strongest political machines and of former mayor Ramiro Suárez, who is under house arrest serving a 27 year sentence for homicide. Acevedo had been Suárez’s candidate in 2019, but lost unexpectedly to Green outsider Jairo Yáñez, and has since distanced himself from ramirismo. In addition to his failed mayoral candidacies, he also unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2014 and 2018: his campaign’s theme was ‘perseverance’. Uribista candidate Juan Carlos García-Herreros finished third with 14%.
In Norte de Santander, former governor William Villamizar was elected to a third term with 37.7%, benefiting from divided opposition. Villamizar, whose group has held the governorship since 2008, had the support of most of the leading political machines. He has faced several corruption scandals during his two previous terms. Diego González, a former ally of Villamizar who turned against his former political group after failing to get their support for his candidacy, finished second 21.3%, presenting himself as an alternative to Villamizar’s hegemony. The right’s candidate, retired Major General Jorge Eduardo Mora, placed third with 16.8%.
Petro and the Pacto’s bad day
The elections were a clear defeat for Gustavo Petro and the Pacto Histórico. The governing left-wing coalition failed badly in Bogotá, one of the few major cities where it had a viable candidate (although he never had a chance to win). The Pacto did not win any major cities and only won two governorships (Nariño and Amazonas), three if you include Carlos Caicedo’s allied Fuerza Ciudadana in Magdalena.
The defeat in Bogotá stings quite hard because the city had heavily voted for Petro last year and because Petro couldn’t help himself but interfere with the election (with the large pro-government proselytizing rallies in late September).
However, as I wrote in my preview post, this defeat was to be expected, a combination of Petro’s unpopularity, weak candidates, internal divisions and local factors. Petro’s unpopularity clearly contributed to the results and hurt the Pacto’s candidates, but was only one factor among several.
I’d still hesitate to consider these elections a ‘referendum’ against Petro, as the media has concluded, given the predominance of local issues and the different nature of local elections (including turnout differentials). However, there was a clear voto castigo (punishment vote) against Petro in larger cities and departments, most notably in Bogotá but also in Medellín, Bucaramanga, Antioquia and Santander, among other places.
Gustavo Bolívar was one of the few Pacto leaders to do any kind of introspection or self-criticism after the result, admitting that there was a voto castigo against the Pacto and has said that the Pacto is now ‘broken’ in many parts of the country.
The current national mood is also unfavourable to the left. Security was the most important issue in most major cities, favouring right-wing mano dura rhetoric. Candidates competed to see who could come up with the most catchy, tough-sounding ‘solutions’ (drones, AI, facial recognition cameras, armoured cars, new jails etc.), and many right-wing candidates proclaimed their admiration for Nayib Bukele. While incumbent mayors were often those blamed for rising criminality, security is also one of the Petro administration’s weakest points and an easy target for criticism. The Pacto’s candidates largely campaigned on the government’s ‘humane security’ policy, a vague concept which hasn’t really moved past the stage of rhetoric and which is quite unappealing when voters largely want ‘tough on crime’ responses.
Compared to 2022, security has replaced socioeconomic issues (jobs) as voters’ main preoccupation. According to the Oct. 2023 Invamer poll, security ranked as the main problem for 29% of respondents, just ahead of unemployment/economy (28%). In July 2022, when Petro was elected, the economy was the top concern for 34% while security was the top concern for only 14%.
The weight of machines and traditional parties
The results showed that traditional political groups and their maquinarias (machines) remain strong at the local level, particularly in smaller cities and towns. Political groups or clans need a strong base of aldermen, councillors, deputies and mayors to maintain their machines and ensure their success in the next congressional elections—as the 2022 congressional elections showed, having an allied governor is a major asset for congressional candidates.
While maquinarias are now weak and ineffective in presidential elections, they remain important in local elections. This year, most political clans reaffirmed their power in their regions—charismo in Barranquilla and Atlántico, Dilian Francisca Toro in Valle, Jorge Rey in Cundinamarca, William Villamizar in Norte de Santander, the Blel clan and others in Bolívar, the Gnecco clan in Cesar and (on the left) Carlos Caicedo in Magdalena. However, not all machines did well: Luis Pérez relied heavily on his alliance with different groups’ machines in Antioquia but lost to uribismo, the Aguilars’ candidate lost in Santander and the Merheg clan lost in Risaralda.
Up against established parties and the well-oiled machines of different political groups, it’s hard for new movements to make their way through at the local level. The uribista Centro Democrático (CD) has had a difficult time breaking through locally: even though they’re one of the major parties in national elections since 2014, the CD’s local presence remains quite weak outside of certain regions.
The Pacto is facing similar challenges, compounded by Petro’s unpopularity, the left’s historical weakness in Colombia and the fact that the Pacto is a coalition of a dozen different legally recognized parties (with the inevitable divisions and infighting this brings). This is one argument used by the Pacto’s supporters in the wake of the results: they’re a new movement, only beginning to build up a base nationally. They argue that the Pacto’s performance should be compared to 2019, not 2022. If compared to the last local elections, it is true that the Pacto’s component parties have made gains, but these are extremely modest gains from a very low level.
The Pacto’s poor performance shows that the left-wing coalition has largely been unable to build a base and find strong leaders at the local level, beyond Petro’s personal appeal and a few prominent leaders (all in Congress). Without the unifying leadership of Gustavo Petro (i.e. once he is term-limited after 2026), it will be even more difficult to keep this coalition together.
Disappointment and disillusion
One of the stories of the 2019 elections had been the unexpected success of ‘outsiders’ (or quijotes), campaigning against traditional politicians and corruption, scoring impressive victories in Medellín, Bucaramanga, Cartagena, Cúcuta, Manizales, Villavicencio, Palmira, Buenaventura and many smaller cities. Four years later, most of these experiences ended in disappointment—because they needed to govern through incredibly difficult times (pandemic and recession, unrest, increase in criminality), because good intentions can’t do much against the hard realities of governance in Colombia and because some ‘outsiders’ turned out not to be all that different from the traditional politicians they campaigned against (like in Medellín, Bucaramanga or Manizales). None of these major ‘outsider’ mayors from 2019 were able to elect successors.
The disappointment with these ‘outsiders’ and disillusion with promises of ‘change’—at both the local and national levels—is a key explanation for this year’s results. The wave of political change, which began in 2019 and continued in 2022, came to a brutal halt. One of the best analysis of the election in English, from El País, concluded that “the political wave of change comes to a halt”—this is a much better conclusion on the elections than the simplistic ‘referendum against Petro’ headlines.
After disappointment and disillusion with ‘change’ (in 2019 and 2022), many voters preferred familiar faces—más vale malo conocido que bueno por conocer (better the devil you know than the devil you don’t). Former mayors returned to office in Medellín, Barranquilla and Manizales, while a former governor won in Cartagena. Candidates who unsuccessfully ran in 2019 won in Bogotá, Cali, Cúcuta, Bucaramanga, Villavicencio and Pereira. Atlántico, Valle, Cundinamarca, Boyacá, Huila and Norte de Santander (re-)elected former governors, while Magdalena elected the former mayor of Santa Marta.
With many voters preferring familiar faces, several controversial candidates were elected. According to Fundación Paz & Reconciliación (Pares) 30 candidatos cuestionados (‘questioned candidates’)—candidates with open investigations (criminal, fiscal, disciplinary), corruption allegations, alleged ties to illegal groups and any ‘heirs’ of parapolíticos, political clans or politicians implicated in the Odebrecht scandal—were elected. This list includes the infamous former representative (2010-2014) Yahir Acuña, who was elected mayor of Sincelejo (Sucre). Acuña, who grew politically as a protégé of former governor Salvador Arana (sentenced to 40 years in jail for the murder of a mayor in the 1990s and his ties to paramilitary groups), enjoyed a meteoric political rise in the 2000s and early 2010s, famous for distributing cash and whisky to supporters. His political career stagnated after his wife’s defeat in the 2015 gubernatorial election (he was detained with 480 million pesos in cash 48 hours before the election) and his own defeat in 2019. Acuña faces several corruption scandals, allegations of ties to paramilitary groups and criminal organizations and his very questionable political practices, which were again on full display this year. His campaign gave cash to supporters at rallies and he’s said to have given 2 billion pesos ($500,000) to departmental deputies.
Who won?
The increasingly fragmented party system (35 legally recognized parties by the time candidacy registrations closed) and loose (and often incoherent looking) coalitions makes it nearly impossible to aggregate national results. This, in turn, allows for a battle of conflicting narratives where everyone can claim to have won.
Traditional (or ‘neo-traditional’) parties—Conservatives, Liberals, La U and Cambio Radical—with strong, established machines and political groups remain dominant at the local level. According to the admirable work done by Demos-UR (the Universidad del Rosario’s democracy study group), the Conservative Party, Partido de la U, Cambio Radical (CR) and the Liberal Party elected, by far, the most mayors, alone or in coalition.
According to their calculations, the Conservatives elected the most mayors, 324, alone (95) or in coalition (229), quasi-identical to their 2019 result. The Partido de la U elected 296 (67 alone, 229 in coalition), down 20 from 2019; the Liberals elected 286 (69 alone, 217 in coalition), down 33 from 2019 and CR elected 242 mayors (35 alone, 207 in coalition), down 83 from 2019. The small centrist Alianza Social Independiente (ASI), a party with the reputation for being an unscrupulous fábrica de avales (endorsements factory, i.e. endorsing many candidates in need of ballot access), without much ideological coherence, stand outs with 139 mayors, all but 15 in coalition with other parties (often the four largest traditional parties). The Greens, who have consolidated a local base in certain parts of the country, behaving differently at the regional/local level than it does nationally, won 127 mayors (32 alone, 95 in coalition), down 13 from 2019. The CD won only 108 municipalities, all but 16 of them in coalition, down 84 from 2019, a number which contrasts with the party’s apparently good results in several major cities and departments.
The nature of the Pacto and different strategies makes it difficult to count how many municipalities the Pacto won. Not all members of the Pacto consistently played the coalition game locally—parties like MAIS, AICO, ADA, Roy Barreras’ new Fuerza de la Paz and adjacent ‘satellite’ allies like Daniel Quintero’s Independientes and Carlos Caicedo’s Fuerza Ciudadana largely followed their own strategies, running alone or forming coalitions with non-Pacto parties. Demos-UR considered only those Pacto parties which more consistently formed coalitions with one another (Petro’s Colombia Humana, the Polo, the UP and Clara López’s Todos Somos Colombia) and counted only 18 mayors elected alone or in coalition by those parties. La Silla Vacía, counting all the Pacto’s parties, calculated that the Pacto won 140 municipalities, 56 alone and 84 in coalition. Most of them were won by MAIS, AICO and ADA—parties which followed their own strategies, independent of the Pacto (the MAIS allied both with left-wing parties and traditional parties), and in some cases do act as fábrica de avales.
The largest city won by a Pacto candidate identified as such is Duitama (Boyacá), which is the 58th largest city with a population of about 130,000. In departmental capitals, the Pacto’s best performance was Popayán (Cauca) with 26.2%, trailing by just 579 votes in the preliminary count, followed by Riohacha (La Guajira) with 25.1%. The table below shows the results for Pacto candidates (officially identified as such) in departmental capitals.
The best indicator of parties’ strength has usually been results of the municipal council elections. This has been made more complicated by coalition lists which, since 2015, may be formed by parties which won up to 15% of the vote in the last election to that body. According to data from the Registraduría, the Liberals remained the largest party with 11.8% of valid votes (2.44 million votes), followed by the Conservatives with 9.2% (1.91 million), the Greens with 7.2% (1.49 million), the CD with 7.1% (1.48 million), CR with 7% (1.46 million) and La U with 6.5% (1.34 million). All these parties’ results are down from their 2019 performances, affected by new parties which won significant results in council elections, like Nuevo Liberalismo (2%, 422,000 votes) and Fico Gutiérrez’s Creemos (2%, 420,000 votes). The Pacto is conspicuously absent from the data because the Pacto as a coalition ran rather very few lists for councils (47) and the Pacto’s parties often competed against one another in most municipalities. Calculations by Demos-UR to take into account the Pacto (including any coalition which is made up by parties which are all Pacto members nationally) concluded that Pacto coalition lists won slightly under 1 million votes. If the results of all the Pacto’s member parties, like the MAIS and AICO (which have a significant presence locally), are added together, then this Pacto won over 3 million votes, more than what the Pacto coalition won in the 2022 congressional elections.
While Petro is said to have scolded his cabinet ministers for the election results, Petro spent the next few days tweeting claiming that the Pacto’s results had actually been good, seeking to counter the dominant media narrative that the elections were a defeat for him. For example, he celebrated the Pacto’s gains in Nariño, Cauca and the Valle (where they now have 3 councillors in Cali and 4 departmental deputies). He claimed that the ‘governing coalition’ won nine governorships, a number which soon increased to ten, eleven, twelve and now fifteen—a number which sharply contrasts with the ‘generally accepted’ figure of 2-3 governors for the Pacto. Petro includes in his numbers all ‘the forces that won the first round of the presidential election’—the Pacto, ‘satellite’ allies (Quintero and Caicedo) and pro-Petro factions of the Greens, Liberals and ASI. He claimed that they didn’t lose Bogotá, Barranquilla and Bucaramanga because they didn’t hold them to begin with. On November 2, Petro posted a map of the governors elected divided into government and opposition camps. On Petro’s map, 15 governors are counted as ‘government’, plus another six ‘independents close to the government’, against six for the opposition and six ‘independents close to the opposition’.
Petro’s numbers game underscores just how complicated it is to classify just 32 governors (imagine trying to do the same for 1,102 mayors!). The four maps below show four ways of categorizing governors—by partisan affiliation, by ideological orientation (as per La Silla Vacía) and by political alignment (according to Noticias Caracol and to Petro).
Petro’s map seeks to minimize the left’s poor performance by including several governors presumed to be close to the government by virtue of the congressmen they were backed by or the parties they were endorsed by and ends up including governors whose coalitions included opposition parties (CD and CR). His map includes governors-elect like Yamil Arana (Bolívar), a Conservative backed by the traditional political clans (like the Blel clan) and co-endorsed by the Liberals (among others); Nicolás Gallardo (San Andrés), a Liberal co-endorsed by the Conservatives, CR and CD; Yeison Rojas (Guaviare), a Conservative; Henry Gutiérrez Ángel (Caldas), whose coalition includes Gente en Movimiento, the new party of ICT minister Mauricio Lizcano, which also won Vaupés. In many of these departments, the Pacto had its own candidates. Petro’s map has several inaccuracies and makes very bold assumptions to support his narrative, but he’s not entirely wrong: new Liberal governors like Nicolás Gallardo (San Andrés) and Nubia Carolina Córdoba (Chocó) have both said they’re close to the government, while the Greens Carlos Amaya (Boyacá) and César Zorro (Casanare) have certain ties to the government, even though Amaya didn’t vote for Petro in 2022.
Petro’s narrative is not only spin, but also has a political purpose: not talking only about the Pacto alone, he’s brought up again the idea of the Frente Amplio (broad front)—a broader coalition with like-minded politicians and factions in other parties, an idea which so far hasn’t had much traction. Petro wants to turn those 15-21 new governors into allies and build the territorial base of support for his policies that he lacked with the outgoing governors and that he failed to win with the Pacto. Once again, it’s unclear how successful he’ll be: the Conservatives tweeted that nowhere did they ally with the Pacto in gubernatorial elections, while Rafael Martínez, Carlos Caicedo’s successor in Magdalena, said that it was Fuerza Ciudadana and not the Pacto that won in Magdalena.
A swing to the right?
If the Pacto did badly, then was there a swing to the right in these elections?
In major cities, it’s quite clear that the right is strengthened from these elections. Prior to the elections there were left-wing or centre-left mayors in Medellín, Cali, Villavicencio, Manizales and Cartagena, and all of these cities have swung to the right or centre. Of the largest cities in Colombia, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Cúcuta, Bucaramanga and Villavicencio (among others) will have right-wing or centre-right mayors, while Bogotá will have a centrist mayor. Yet, while Fico Gutiérrez (Medellín) and Jaime Andrés Beltrán (Bucaramanga) campaigned against Petro and benefited from a voto castigo against the government (in right-leaning cities which didn’t vote for Petro in 2022), in these and other cities, local factors, like the unpopularity of outgoing mayors, were a bigger factor in the results (notably in Cali).
In gubernatorial elections, the swing to the right isn’t quite as obvious—in part because most outgoing governors were already notionally right-of-centre. The Pacto gained Nariño, which had elected left-wing governors for 18 years until 2019, and Amazonas, in alliance with the Liberals. In Antioquia, uribismo’s Andrés Julián Rendón comfortably defeated (by 13.5%) former governor Luis Pérez, tarnished by his petrista sympathies in a conservative department where Petro is extremely unpopular. In Santander, Juvenal Díaz won thanks to a mix of anti-petrista conservative security rhetoric and machine support.
For the uribista CD, the results are, on the surface, quite good, despite having rather few candidates of its own: a major victory (finally) in the uribista heartland of Antioquia after two defeats in 2015 and 2019, substantial gains in Bogotá’s city council (up two seats to seven) and victories in coalition in Meta and Santander. However, as the numbers presented above show, the CD actually fell from 192 municipalities in 2019 to 108 (only 16 of them alone, the rest in coalitions), and only 12% of its mayoral candidates running alone won. Uribismo’s local bases remain regionally concentrated in the central Andean regions (Antioquia, Tolima, Boyacá) and some parts of the Orinoquía, but is essentially absent from the Caribbean, Pacific and Amazon regions. It remains unable to break through in Norte de Santander, a very uribista region in presidential elections. The CD also lost the governorships of Amazonas, Vaupés, Vichada and Casanare (where the wife of CD senator Alirio Barrera was defeated), and its lead in Arauca was overturned in the final count.
For the other party which has presented itself a right-wing opposition party, Cambio Radical (CR), the results were quite bad, despite their claims to the contrary. CR’s natural leader, former vice president Germán Vargas Lleras, had wanted to use the elections as a way to build a new stature as a national opposition party (the first step towards a potential presidential candidacy in 2026). His mayoral candidate in Bogotá, former police chief Jorge Luis Vargas, won just 1% and CR lost three of its four seats in the capital’s city council. CR lost over 80 municipalities from 2019 and was reduced to 242 mayoralties, 85% of them in coalition with others. The party’s vote in council elections fell from 2.11 million to 1.46 million. CR’s success in Atlántico (where it won the most votes for councils and assembly) is owed to charismo, and hardly to Vargas Lleras’ national strategy. Although he claims 13 governorships for the party, in reality all of them were won in coalitions led by others.
Other winners and losers
The list of losers and winners is quite long.
One of the other big losers is last year’s presidential runner-up, Rodolfo Hernández. Although his candidacy was revoked by the CNE, he remained on the gubernatorial ballot in Santander and won only 12.5% and 135,000 votes, compared to over 780,000 in the first round last year. Even worse, his party, the Liga de Gobernantes Anticorrupción, was wiped out in Bucaramanga and Santander: winning just 2.3% in the municipal council election in Bucaramanga and 3.1% for the departmental assembly in Santander, compared to 13.3% and 8.2% in 2019 respectively, falling below the threshold in both bodies. The results show just how much Rodolfo’s fall from grace over the past year, even in his stronghold. With his own health problems, disciplinary and judicial investigations and his political project in the dumps, this election likely signals the end of Rodolfo Hernández’s political career.
The former mayor of Medellín, Daniel Quintero, wanted to use these elections as a platform to expand his movement, Independientes, nationally (see my post here). He failed badly. In Medellín, his anointed successor, Juan Carlos Upegui (his wife’s cousin and a former cabinet secretary), was trounced by Fico Gutiérrez, winning just 10%. The writing was on the wall, but Fico’s margin of victory (63% or 595,000 votes!) was bigger than anticipated. His party, Independientes, saw their council vote in Medellín nearly halved (to just 33,500 votes or 3.8%). Quintero’s gubernatorial candidate, Esteban Restrepo, won 9.1% in Antioquia. Quintero’s candidates in other cities and departments did poorly: 1.4% in Cali and 6.4% in Cartagena, although it did win in Carepa (Urabá region of Antioquia). His party was in one winning gubernatorial coalition, in Cauca, endorsing a candidate supported by former senator Temístocles Ortega and Vice President Francia Márquez’s movement.
While the results are a cold shower for Quintero, it doesn’t spell the end of his political ambitions.
The other left-leaning regional leader who is preparing a 2026 candidacy, Carlos Caicedo, had a much better election. His gubernatorial candidate, Rafael Martínez, a close ally and former mayor of Santa Marta (2016-2019), will succeed him as governor of Magdalena after winning over 50% of the vote. In Santa Marta, controlled by caicedismo since 2011, Caicedo’s candidate appears to have won by a very small margin (less than 300 votes in preliminary results) under adverse conditions—Caicedo’s original candidate (his sister) was revoked by the CNE and his party scrambled to find a replacement candidate, who was only placed on the ballot by a court order just days before. He still won despite being unknown and campaigning for less than a month. The results confirm caicedismo’s strength in Magdalena—a left-wing movement which poses as an ‘alternative’ to the old ‘mafias and clans’ but which governs with the same clientelistic and questionable political practices as the clans. But we already knew that Caicedo was strong in Magdalena—he won his department (and just that) in the 2018 left-wing presidential primary, when he was the sole (token) opponent to Petro. It remains to be seen how strong he is outside his stronghold: Fuerza Ciudadana’s results elsewhere were unimpressive.
Quintero’s arch-nemesis Fico Gutiérrez returned triumphantly in Medellín but also launched his new party, Creemos, nationally. Fico’s party won a major victory in Medellín’s city council on his coattails, winning 25.6% (223,000 votes) and 7 seats, and it won 14.7% and 5 seats in the elections to Antioquia’s assembly. Creemos won a single governorship, in Quindío (with a candidate backed by the outgoing governor), and won in a few other municipalities (38) alone or in coalition. However, over half of all of the party’s 420,000 votes for councils came from Medellín.
Carlos Fernando Galán’s resounding victory in Bogotá was the biggest win, by miles, for the revived Nuevo Liberalismo, after a poor start last year (its list for Senate won only 2.2% and fell short of the 3% threshold). This year, the party’s lists for local councils won over 422,000 votes nationally, and in Bogotá, its list in coalition with Juan Fernando Cristo’s En Marcha won 14.3% and 8 seats (401,000 votes). The party was also part of the winning coalitions in Cali and Cartagena, and won 60 municipalities, 9 of them on its own. However, besides Bogotá and Manizales, the party’s lists for city councils did rather poorly in most major cities.
Besides Nuevo Liberalismo, these elections were also a baptism of fire for the plethora of new parties recently recognized or revived by the CNE. In 2026, these parties will have to find a way to cross the 3% threshold to retain legal recognition, so having a local base can help in that. Many new parties chose to face these elections by becoming small scale fábrica de avales or joining coalitions with stronger parties (that’ll likely be their strategies in 2026 too). Roy Barreras’ Fuerza de la Paz won nearly 70 municipalities, most notably Tunja (Boyacá), where Mikhail Krasnov, a Russian-born professor who came to Colombia for an academic exchange in 2008 and has since been naturalized Colombian, won. Former president Andrés Pastrana’s Nueva Fuerza Democrática (NFD) won Arauca, having endorsed a right-wing candidate who had failed to obtain the Liberal endorsement. The Gómez family’s right-wing Movimiento de Salvación Nacional (MSN) had many candidates across the country but largely poor results, the lone bright spot being Villavicencio (Meta), where it led the winning right-wing coalition in alliance with uribismo.
A year after the spectacular failure of Sergio Fajardo’s presidential candidacy and the hopeless Centro Esperanza coalition’s disastrous demise, Jorge Enrique Robledo and Fajardo’s Dignidad y Compromiso rank as clear losers. Robledo won just 1.1% running in Bogotá, and the party lost its only councillor in the capital. The list they supported in Medellín fell under the threshold, and the party’s other prominent candidates, like Jorge Gómez in Antioquia (0.7%), all did badly. Fajardo and Robledo, prominent leaders of the centre in recent years, are now more politically irrelevant than ever and their voices largely inaudible.
The centre now has new faces: Galán but also Juan Daniel Oviedo, the surprise runner-up in Bogotá. Oviedo’s strong second-place finish in Bogotá with 20.1% gives him a seat in the city council and makes him a new rising star of the centre. It remains to be seen if the centre, infamous for its divisions and internal drama, can unite or otherwise become a strong contender again in 2026.
Turnout
One reason why these local elections can’t really be seen as a ‘referendum’ against the national government is because Colombian local elections have different turnout patterns than national elections.
Turnout in mayoral elections was 59.2%, with 23 million votes cast, down from 60.6% in 2019. This turnout is significantly higher than last year’s congressional elections (48%) and somewhat higher than last year’s very high turnout presidential election (55% and 58.2% turnout in the first and second rounds respectively). There are significant regional variations in turnout between local, presidential and congressional elections. Broadly speaking, local elections draw significantly higher turnout in remote, peripheral regions which tend to have very low turnout in national elections, but turnout in the biggest cities is lower in local elections than in national (especially presidential) elections. The table below compares turnout this year with turnout in 2019 and the 2022 electoral cycle (pres. R1, pres. R2, Congress).
It is noteworthy that there is basically no correlation between turnout in presidential and local elections, and a somewhat stronger but still weak correlation between congressional turnout and local turnout.
Compared to last year’s presidential runoff, turnout increased the most in the remote, peripheral departments of Guainía (+28.5%), Vaupés (+27.5%), Vichada (+24.9%), San Andrés and Providencia (+22.9%) and Chocó (+20%). These departments, largely difficult to access from the rest of the country, are invisible and forgotten in presidential elections (as famously evidenced last year by Rodolfo Hernández having no idea what or where Vichada was). The Caribbean departments also tend to have lower turnout in presidential elections but significantly higher turnout in congressional and local elections: turnout in Córdoba and Sucre increased from around 55% in last year’s runoff to over 70% this year, and last year’s presidential runoff was noted for high turnout in the Caribbean departments.
On the other hand, turnout in Bogotá fell by 13.5% from last year’s runoff (and is also down from 55% in 2019). Turnout in the Valle del Cauca fell by 5.9%, and by over 10% in Cali. Compared to last year, turnout also fell in Antioquia, the Eje Cafetero, Cauca and Santander.
In the 10 largest departmental capitals, turnout was lower than in 2019 in every city except Medellín and Barranquilla. Compared to 2022, the mayoral elections drew higher turnout in the Caribbean capitals of Barranquilla, Cartagena, Valledupar and Santa Marta, but lower turnout in the other cities.
The blank vote was 4.4% in mayoral elections, 10.2% in gubernatorial elections, 7.2% in council elections and 14.9% in assembly elections. The blank vote won in Gamarra (Cesar) with 51.4% and in Maicao (La Guajira) with 30.8%. As per the constitution, because the blank vote won an absolute majority in Gamarra, new elections will be held with different candidates. There were violent protests the night before the election in Gamarra, in which the municipal registrar’s office was set on fire and one civil servant was killed, after a candidacy was revoked at the last minute by the CNE. Nationally, blank votes were lower this year in all elections compared to 2019.
Mayoral and local council elections drive the most interest, while other elections are more secondary in voters’ minds, as can be seen in the significantly higher blank and unmarked ballots in elections for governors, assembly and especially JAL (very few people have any idea what an alderman or edil in a JAL is). In gubernatorial elections, Valle (27.6%) and Cundinamarca (12.8%) had the highest blank votes.
Security and electoral violence
The electoral campaign drove home the idea that security is the main problem in the country. These elections were, by some measures, the most violent elections in several years. According to the MOE, there were 436 acts of violence (threats, attacks, murder, kidnappings, gender-based violence) against political leaders over the 2023 electoral year (11 months from the end of October 2022 to the end of September 2023), compared to 219 in the 2022 electoral year and 227 in the 2019 electoral years. 176 of these acts of violence were against candidates, up from 86 in 2019, and seven candidates were assassinated in this electoral cycle.
Some of this is due to the strengthening of illegal armed groups over the past few years, with the MOE counting 1,352 armed actions or acts of intimidation by illegal groups over the past eleven months (Oct. 22-Sept. 23), compared to 815 in the 2022 electoral year and 596 in the 2019 electoral year. Threats and intimidation by illegal groups has forced 12 mayors in seven departments to govern from outside their municipalities, according to the Ombudsman’s office. According to the MOE’s electoral risk maps, 125 municipalities were at an ‘extreme’ risk for violence, compared to 68 in 2022 and 50 in 2019. However, the total number of municipalities at risk for factors related to violence has remained stable at around 310 since 2018.
The opposition blamed Petro and his fledgling, chaotic total peace policy for the violence, claiming that these were the most violent elections since 1997-1998 (in reality there’s no comparison to the level of violence in those elections). However, nearly all polling locations opened without incident, and there were no violent actions by illegal groups during the day. However, this was overshadowed by the protests the night before in Gamarra. During the day, incidents and protests forced the suspension and postponement of the elections in Ricaurte (Nariño) and Santiago (Putumayo).
The impact of the elections
Everyone expects that the elections will have a significant impact on the government’s relations with Congress. Both sides feel like they hold an ace in this push-pull, give-take relationship. On the one hand, the government controls most of the money that local governments need (most municipal and departmental revenues are earmarked and transferred from the national government) and local governments need the government’s funding and approval for their big projects. On the other hand, members of Congress (who will have supported or campaigned for many candidates in their regions) will feel emboldened by the message sent by the elections and will be even less likely to go along with the government’s legislative agenda (which is largely stalled at the moment), particularly as they start to focus on 2026. At the same time, congressmen are key intermediaries between local officials and the national government in negotiating funding for local projects, so the government will be playing on these ties to secure support for its legislative agenda.
The government will need to be less maximalist and more willing to compromise if it can hope to have a more productive relation with Congress.
Petro will need to work with several mayors and governors who were elected after campaigning against him and who will likely use their positions to criticize the government: Fico in Medellín, Andrés Julián Rendón in Antioquia, Juvenal Díaz in Santander and Beltrán in Bucaramanga to name the most prominent. Rendón has already made headlines by proposing a referendum to give regions more fiscal autonomy, complaining that Antioquia receives less than it gives out in tax revenue. At the same time, most mayors and governors remain financially dependent on the national government and will need to have at least cordial working relations with the government if they want to get anything done.
Given Petro’s personality and his proclivities to get dragged into arguments (particularly online), we can expect difficult relations with a lot of these opposition mayors and governors and a lot of grandstanding and petty fights. Petro’s continued obsession with the Bogotá metro, and his unwillingness to let go of the underground metro idea, also promises a rocky start to his relations with Carlos Fernando Galán (after a very rocky end to his relations with his predecessor).
With the exception of Gustavo Bolívar, there hasn’t been much soul-searching or self-criticism in the Pacto, who have largely adopted Petro’s rosy spin on the results. Nevertheless, in private, most of the Pacto are likely cognizant that they did poorly and that they have work to do to regain lost support by 2026. Gustavo Bolívar and other petristas in the Pacto (María José Pizarro, David Racero) have called on the Pacto coalition’s dozen or so component parties to merge into a single party (Pizarro had already suggested this back in March), particularly given the difficulties the Pacto as a coalition had in nominating common candidates and satisfying each parties’ ambitions. This idea is unlikely to go very far: it’s unlikely that parties like the MAIS, ADA or AICO but also the Polo and the new ones (Fuerza de la Paz etc.) would have any interest in losing their cherished party status to merge into a unified left-wing party—to say nothing of the ‘satellite’ allies like Quintero’s Independientes and Caicedo’s Fuerza Ciudadana.
The end of these elections also kickstarts the (very early) 2026 presidential campaign. Daniel Quintero announced his presidential candidacy on November 9, following in the footsteps of far-right CD senator María Fernanda Cabal who announced her candidacy back in September. More presidential hopefuls are likely to follow suit in the coming months. Given the current political landscapes and certain politicians’ delusions, I’d expect the 2026 field to start off just as insanely crowded as the 2022 field initially was.
In a sparring round that’s an early preview of 2026, Quintero clashed with Gustavo Bolívar on Twitter, calling him a ‘toxic leader’ who ‘mistreated’ independent supporters of Petro. Bolívar fired back, calling him an ‘opportunist after a ministry or presidential candidacy’ who ended his term with 80% unpopularity.
The elections also make clear the urgent need for a real political-electoral reform: electoral authorities, coalitions, political parties, political financing, ballot access—everything needs major fixes.
The revocation of ineligible candidates by the CNE, in some cases up to the very last minute, created chaos and confusion in many regions. The CNE, an oft-criticized ineffective body of nine magistrates, often with no experience in electoral law, elected by Congress and representing political parties, needed to decide the fate of over 3,500 candidacies challenged for alleged ineligibilities. On October 26, three days before the election, the CNE still had over 500 candidacies left to resolve, long after the ballots had been printed. La Silla Vacía explained how candidates and their legal teams needed to rush to Bogotá to defend their candidacies before the CNE. The CNE revoked the candidacies of leading candidates like Tulio Gómez (Valle), Mauricio Jaramillo (Tolima), Rodolfo Hernández (Magdalena), Samuel Santander Lopesierra (Maicao, La Guajira) and Patricia Caicedo (Santa Marta), among others, significantly shaking up the elections in those places. The CNE’s decisions lack legitimacy and are widely criticized because the CNE is a political body whose magistrates are largely former politicians and other politically-connected people. Obviously, many candidacies are ineligible, and parties and candidates need to be more responsible in not registering candidates who are clearly ineligible according to the law. But a lot of decisions over candidates’ eligibility hinge on interpretation of laws and judicial or disciplinary decisions by other bodies.
The proliferation of political parties, largely courtesy of the CNE, and the lack of legal regulation of coalitions have made the political field even more illegible for many voters. Many candidates abuse the possibility of firmas (ballot access by gathering signatures) to given themselves a false veneer of ‘independence’ and to hide their political origins, and many then form coalitions with parties. Campaign finance remains a very poorly regulated and monitored mess, thanks to the ineffectiveness and inability of the CNE to properly regulate it.
This government’s attempt at a political reform ended in disaster in March, much like all previous attempts at a political reform since 2015, and given this recent painful memory, it’s unlikely that another political reform has much of a chance of being adopted by the current Congress before 2026 (nor is the government showing much interest in wasting whatever political capital it still has on one).
Thanks for reading! Over the next few weeks, I’ll dive deeper into specific results in the major cities, departments and regions.