The proliferation of Colombian political parties
Colombia had 14 political parties in 2017. Today, there are 33. Why has there been a rapid explosion in the number of recognized political parties?
In 2017, there were 14 legally recognized political parties in Colombia. Today, in 2023, there are 33 legally recognized parties, with more probably on the way. What’s behind the sudden, rapid proliferation of political parties in Colombia and what are the implications?
Please subscribe to Colombian Politics and Elections to read more about the latest news in Colombian politics!
A brief history of political party rules
After the closed two-party system of the Frente Nacional (1958-1974), Colombia slowly ‘democratized’ its political system (to an extent). A combination of factors—the effects of the Frente Nacional (increased internal factionalism and weakened party system), socioeconomic changes, increasing dissatisfaction with the political system, the electoral system and rules (parties were allowed to run multiple lists) and the democratization of the political system after the mid-1980s and the 1991 Constitution —led to the hyper-fragmentation of the party system. Fragmentation reached a peak in the 2002 elections, a realigning moment in Colombian politics, as the share of seats held by the two traditional parties (Liberals and Conservatives) in Congress fell below 50%. In addition, for the first time, the presidency that year was won by someone who ran outside the two traditional parties: Álvaro Uribe, a Liberal dissident.
The first law regulating political parties, Law 58 of 1985, had very lax requirements to obtain and maintain legal recognition as a party: having at least 10,000 members, or having won at least 10,000 votes in the 1982 elections. The 1991 Constitution, which democratized Colombia’s ‘closed’ and illiberal political system, largely maintained those relatively easy requirements: parties required 50,000 signatures, or 50,000 votes or seats in the previous congressional elections to obtain and maintain legal recognition. The Constitution also allowed candidates to run outside the parties as independents or with their own unrecognized movements, obtaining ballot access by collecting signatures (legally known as grupos significativos de ciudadanos, or ‘significant group of citizens’).
As alluded to, the electoral system allowed parties to run multiple lists in the same constituency, and parties—most notably the Liberals—took advantage of these rules. Popular wisdom holds that running multiple lists allowed parties to win more seats than they otherwise would have, a tactic that became known as operación avispa (operation wasp), though academic analysis has somewhat disproven these ideas (Gutiérrez 2007).
By 2002, the party and electoral system had become both hyper-fragmented and extremely personalistic: the ungodly number of lists were identified on the (insanely long) ballots by the pictures of their top candidate, rather than the party name or logo. In 2002, 96 of the 319 lists, and 41 parties, won seats in the Senate. A lot of parties were little more than personalist shells, regional caudillista structures or meaningless labels—pejorative terms such as microempresas electorales (electoral small businesses), partidos de garaje (garage parties) and partidos de bolsillo (pocket parties) expressed how these ‘parties’ were perceived. Moreover, given the criminal infiltration of the political system in the 1990s and 2000s, most blatantly with the parapolítica scandal, many of these new parties were connected to illegal groups and criminality.
Following the hyper-fragmentation, the 2003 political reform sought to put order in the system and strengthen political parties. The 2003 reform established a 2% threshold (raised to 3% by the 2009 political reform) to retain legal recognition and win seats in the Senate, required parties to run only a single list per constituency (but it could be a closed or open list), modified the electoral system (from Hare quota with largest remainders to d’Hondt method), banned membership in more than one party (known as double militancy or doble militancia) and began regulating parties’ internal organization and behaviour as congressional caucuses (bancadas). The 2003 political reform led to a reorganization of the party system, with smaller parties and individual legislators allying to form stronger parties – the creation of the Partido de la U as a new uribista party in 2005 or the creation of the Polo Democrático Alternativo on the left in 2005, for example. In the 2006 congressional elections, only 10 parties won seats in the Senate (12 including the indigenous seats), out of 20 lists. Yet, the effective number of parties in Congress in 2006 was quite similar to 2002: the 2003 reform didn’t end the fragmentation of the party system, but merely put some semblance of order in it.
Subsequent reforms have sought to further strengthen political parties. For example, never-ending debates about mandatory closed lists, most recently in Petro’s failed political reform, revolve a lot around the idea that closed lists would strengthen parties’ internal cohesion and reduce the personalism and clientelism (ostensibly) encouraged by open lists. However, in the opposite direction, the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC stipulated that a political reform would “remove obstacles” to obtain and maintain party recognition, including separating party status recognition from the electoral threshold (demanding instead a minimum number of members) and designing a system of “progressive acquisition of rights for parties” based on their electoral performance at the local and national levels (point 2.3.1.1 of the peace agreement). The political reform required by the peace agreement has never been adopted…
In a country obsessed with laws, a lot of politicians and commentators seem to believe that the problems with Colombia’s party system come from bad laws (e.g., the 1991 Constitution is unfairly blamed for having led to the hyper-fragmentation of the 1990s) and could be simply fixed through a bit of ‘institutional engineering’. However, it’s unclear if the weakness of Colombia’s party systems and its problems—clientelism, personalism, weak ideologies etc.—can be fixed simply with new rules.
To summarize, political parties in Colombia currently obtain and maintain legal recognition by winning 3% of valid votes nationally in elections for the Senate or the House of Representatives (article 108 of the Constitution).
The ‘ethnic’ parties or groupings competing for the special minority seats (indigenous seats in both houses and Afro-Colombian seats in the House) are exempted and automatically obtain legal recognition by winning a seat, which then grants them all the prerogatives of other political parties (such as endorsing candidates for any elected office). Legally recognized political parties and movements, however, may not run candidates for the minority seats. The minority seats have become a poorly regulated and legally ambiguous loophole to obtain party status.
The 2016 peace agreement with the FARC granted legal recognition to the ex-FARC’s new party (now known as Comunes) and exempted it from meeting the threshold requirement until 2026.
The explosion of political parties
Since 2021, 17 political parties have been granted legal recognition by the National Electoral Council (CNE), bringing the total number of recognized parties in Colombia to 33. Very few of these newly recognized parties meet the 3% threshold requirement in article 108 of the Constitution. What happened? The CNE’s interpretation of a series of court rulings, legal ambiguities or gaps and other legal arguments have led to a rapid proliferation of political parties with no end in sight.
The CNE is the body in charge of recognizing and revoking parties’ recognition, certifying election results, regulating campaign finance and generally regulating the activities of parties. Though its members are recognized as magistrates, the CNE is not an electoral court but rather a very political body: its nine members are elected by Congress for a four-year term, broadly concurrent with the presidential term, proportionally between candidates proposed by parties or coalitions in Congress. The current CNE was elected in August 2022 and is made up of two members of the Pacto Histórico, two Liberals and one member each from Cambio Radical (CR), Centro Democrático (CD), the Greens, the Conservatives and the Partido de la U. Few of the magistrates are experts in electoral law or experienced legal professionals—in fact, three of them are former members of Congress and all owe their spot to the support of a party and/or a powerful figure.
The Constitutional Court opens the way
Two decisions by the Constitutional Court in 2021 ‘softened’ the legal and constitutional requirements for party status, creating new routes for movements to obtain legal recognition as political parties.
In October 2021, the CNE was forced to grant legal recognition to Gustavo Petro’s movement Colombia Humana following a decision of the Constitutional Court (SU-316 of 2021). Petro argued that his party should be legally recognized given that he had been granted a seat in the Senate by virtue of finishing second in the 2018 presidential election, as established by the 2015 constitutional reform and the 2018 opposition statute.1 On the basis of the fundamental right to political opposition, the Constitutional Court ruled in Petro’s favour and ordered the CNE to grant his party legal recognition. The Court answered a big legal gap left by the 2015 reform: what happens when the runner-up in the presidential election is a candidate endorsed by a movement without legal recognition?
Using this precedent, the CNE granted legal recognition to Rodolfo Hernández’s movement, the Liga de Gobernantes Anticorrupción, in August 2022. The Liga had not even run a list for Senate in 2022 and ran only a single list for the House, in Santander (where it won two seats).
In December 2022, the current CNE used the precedent of SU-316/2021 to grant party status to Fuerza Ciudadana, the party of Magdalena governor Carlos Caicedo, an ally of Gustavo Petro. The CNE granted it party status because it had been part of Petro’s coalition in the 2018 presidential election and Caicedo had participated in the 2018 presidential primary along with Petro, arguing that it would make no sense to grant party recognition only to the movement of the candidate and not to all other movements that also supported him. Fuerza Ciudadana ran for Senate in 2022, and its list won 2.5%, falling short of the 3% threshold (it did win a seat in the House, in Magdalena). The CNE’s decision was written by Fabiola Márquez, a magistrate of the Pacto Histórico, with two dissenting opinions (by the Green and CD magistrates).
In October 2021, the CNE was also forced to grant recognition to the Nuevo Liberalismo following another decision of the Constitutional Court (SU-257 of 2021). The Nuevo Liberalismo was the political movement of the late Luis Carlos Galán, a politician and presidential frontrunner assassinated on the orders of Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel in August 1989. In the years following his death, his widow and sons (former senators Juan Manuel and Carlos Fernando Galán) and other former political companions led a long legal battle to revive the party. After losing in the CNE and the Council of State, the Court ruled in their favour.
The Constitutional Court, with a broad and inclusive interpretation of the Constitution, ruled that the party and its political project, because of circumstances totally beyond their control (violence and systematic violations of their rights), had effectively ceased to exist and this violated their constitutional right to create, organize and maintain political parties without any limitations (article 40.3).
The Court pointed out an antinomy between the basic constitutional principles and right to organize parties without any limitations and, on the other hand, the rules to obtain and maintain legal party recognition. The CNE, judges and other institutions must consider the purpose of relevant legal requirements (such as article 108) against the context and specific circumstances of the parties. Article 108, according to the Court, must be understood as a principle and not as a “pure and simple rule.”
The door had already been opened in 2013, when the Council of State revived the Unión Patriotica (UP). The UP, a left-wing party founded in 1985 as part of a peace process with the FARC, was nearly exterminated by the mid-1990s following a campaign of systematic violence and assassination (with the complicity, connivance and participation of state agents) against its elected officials and members that left over 5,700 victims. The genocide of the UP has since been declared a crime against humanity and the Colombian state was found responsible for the crimes against the UP by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in February 2023. In its 2013 decision restoring the UP’s party status, the Council of State ruled that the threshold is not applicable when serious, extraordinary circumstances beyond the control of the party arise and place it in an unequal position to compete against other parties.
The Constitutional Court’s decision not only ordered the CNE to grant legal recognition to the Nuevo Liberalismo but also had inter comunis effects for the 2022 elections, that is, extending to other parties who had faced the same or similar acts of violence affecting their electoral participation after 1988. The Court also called on Congress to “remove obstacles” to allow parties to obtain and maintain legal recognition, based on the terms of the 2016 peace agreement. Finally, the Court sentence exempted Nuevo Liberalismo (and, by extension, others who would benefit from the same ruling), from meeting the 3% threshold in 2022.
The Court’s decision opened a floodgate. In December 2021, the CNE, using the precedent of SU-257 and its inter comunis effects, granted legal recognition to three former parties: the conservative Movimiento Salvación Nacional (MSN), Íngrid Betancourt’s Verde Oxígeno party and the Communist Party (Partido Comunista Colombiano, PCC). The MSN was the movement of Conservative politician Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, who was assassinated in 1995, and it lost its party status in 2006 (the revived party is led by his nephew, Enrique Gómez Martínez). Verde Oxígeno was the party of 2002 presidential candidate Íngrid Betancourt, who was kidnapped by the FARC while campaigning in 2002 and held hostage until her rescue in a military operation in 2008. The Communist Party, which formed part of the UP in the 1980s, suffered a similar fate and has been recognized as a collective victim of the conflict.
In March 2023, using the precedent of SU-257 and the factor of political violence, the CNE granted legal recognition to Esperanza, Paz y Libertad (EPL) and Nueva Fuerza Democrática (NFD). Esperanza, Paz y Libertad was a party founded by former members of the Maoist Popular Liberation Army (EPL) guerrilla following its partial demobilization in 1991. It enjoyed some local successes in the region of Urabá (Antioquia), an agro-industrial (banana plantations) region where the EPL guerrilla had built a strong base of popular support since the 1970s, but esperanzados were attacked and massacred by the FARC and EPL dissidents (notably the La Chinita massacre of 1994 in Apartadó).
The Nueva Fuerza Democrática was the political movement of former Conservative president Andrés Pastrana (1998-2002) in the 1990s. Pastrana alleged that he was the target of over 100 failed assassination attempts during his presidency and the victim of persecution by illegal groups, like the FARC, because of his policies as president, that therefore made it impossible for him and his party to continue its political activities. This is a very tenuous argument given that Pastrana was elected president, remained politically active after his presidency and that all Colombian presidents have arguably been ‘persecuted’ by illegal groups because of their policies. Nevertheless, the CNE accepted his argument.
Coalitions, splits and more
The other mechanisms that have been used to obtain legal recognition are coalitions and party splits, two things which are poorly defined in legislation and give way to legal ambiguities and gaps. These ambiguities and gaps have been exploited by politicians in search of their own party.
Since 2015, recognized parties that together won up to 15% of the votes in the respective constituency may run together with a single coalition list for collegiate bodies (like Congress). Coalitions boomed in the 2022 congressional elections, when there were three coalition lists for the Senate, most famously the Pacto Histórico. However, these constitutional provisions for coalition lists have not been thoroughly defined by law (unlike coalitions for single-member positions), leaving it open to litigation and creative legal arguments. The constitution and the law is unclear as to how unrecognized parties and movements can join these coalitions and if a coalition’s success would allow them to seek legal recognition.
To begin with, coalitions have been an easy way for existing small parties to retain their legal recognition when they otherwise may have struggled to meet the 3% threshold on their own. For example, the two parties recognized by virtue of winning the two Afro-Colombian seats in the House in 2018, Colombia Renaciente and the Alianza Democrática Amplia (ADA), saved their party status in 2022 by running in coalition—with the centrist Verde-Centro Esperanza coalition and the Pacto Histórico, respectively.
Now, on top of that, the CNE has very creatively applied the idea of coalitions to extend legal recognition to movements and groups (unrecognized) that supported and participated in those coalitions in 2022. In December 2022, the CNE recognized En Marcha, the movement led by former Liberal senator and interior Juan Fernando Cristo, who supported the Centro Esperanza coalition in 2022 and which won three seats in the Senate (their candidates were formally endorsed by the Alianza Social Independiente, ASI). In March 2023, the CNE recognized Medellín mayor Daniel Quintero’s movement Independientes and later Pacto senator Clara López’s unipersonal structure Todos Somos Colombia. Both Independientes and Todos Somos Colombia are part of the Pacto and won seats through that coalition.
The possibility for recognized parties to split up is cursorily mentioned by statutory law 1475 of 2011 (law on parties and elections) and is left up to individual parties’ statutes without any general regulations. The first party to obtain legal recognition following a party split was Jorge Enrique Robledo’s Dignidad, created in 2020 following his divorce with his old party, the Polo. Dignidad also saved its party status by 2022 by running as part of the Centro Esperanza coalition, winning only one seat in the House. It has now ‘merged’ with Sergio Fajardo’s Compromiso Ciudadano, to create Dignidad y Compromiso—who’s to say that Fajardo, who’s never gotten legal party status for his movement, won’t end up ‘splitting’ to get his own party?
In December 2022, the CNE recognized La Fuerza de la Paz, Pacto senator (and president of the Senate) Roy Barreras’ new mini-party following a ‘party split’ from the ADA, the Afro-Colombian party that had endorsed Barreras’ candidacy on the Pacto’s list just months earlier in March 2022.
In March 2023, the CNE also granted legal recognition to Creemos Colombia, the movement of 2022 right-wing presidential candidate and former mayor of Medellín Federico ‘Fico’ Gutiérrez. The text of this decision has not been published yet, but according to media coverage, Fico’s main argument was that he won 5 million votes in the first round of last year’s presidential election, which would prove significant public support for his movement. This seems like a rather shaky and dubious argument, so it creates a slippery slope that could see others argue that they should get their own plaything party too: Alex Char, maybe?
In the future, a lot of these new parties will find it hard to save their party status on their own (getting over 3% of the vote in the 2026 congressional elections). However, coalitions offer them an easy way out: by simply teaming up with other parties to reach 3% together, they can all save their legal recognition.
Democratic opening?
The CNE’s recent decisions granting legal recognition to all these new parties have cited the Council of State’s 2013 ruling on the UP, the Court’s SU-257 decision and the terms of the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC to support their arguments. For example, the CNE’s decision on Pastrana’s NFD, mentioning the peace agreement, argued that although constitutional rules remain in force, the CNE’s decisions “must have as a parameter of interpretation the democratic opening (apertura democrática) provided for in the final agreement” and that, “given the inactivity of the legislator to materialize what was agreed” the precedents provided by the Court and the Council of State “allow this electoral authority to protect the right to political participation and the expansive nature of democracy” (page 23). The CNE’s decision on Independientes also proclaimed that, as the “guarantor of democracy”, the CNE must ensure that political movements that achieved “significant representativeness” don’t disappear from political life. The nebulous idea of “significant representativeness” is not defined anywhere, and clearly doesn’t limit itself to what the constitution states (the 3% threshold), so the CNE has unilaterally decided that it alone can arbitrarily define this (on a case-by-case basis?). It’s also apparently up to them to interpret the peace agreement’s principles, even what has not been implemented by law.
Certainly, more democratic pluralism and a further opening of Colombia’s political system are desirable and laudable objectives. Colombian institutions, including electoral systems and rules on political parties, are in need of reform. However, it is not clear how the uncontrolled, haphazard proliferation of political parties—many of which are clearly personalist vehicles and makeshift movements in the tradition of pre-2003 microempresas electorales—will benefit Colombian democracy.
To begin with, unlike in other countries, ballot access for candidates without a recognized party isn’t that difficult. As mentioned earlier, the constitution allows candidates to run as independents or with unrecognized movements (grupos significativos de ciudadanos, GSC), by collecting signatures to obtain ballot access (candidatos por firmas). The number of signatures required to obtain ballot access varies depending on the office—50,000 for Senate, 3% of the total number of valid votes in the last presidential election for President and fifth (20%) of the result of dividing the respective electoral roll by the number of seats to be filled for all other offices (and, in any case, no more than 50,000 signatures). These requirements are quite low—except for presidential elections, they’ve remained unchanged since 1994 and reflect the lax standards for parties that existed before 2003.
In recent election cycles, the number of groups registering to collect signatures has increased. In the 2022 congressional elections, 169 GSCs registered to collect signatures for the House and 63 for Senate, up from 117 and 55 in 2018 and 28 and 1 in 2014. For last year’s presidential election, 45 candidates registered to collect signatures and six managed to collect the required number, including Rodolfo Hernández, Fico Gutiérrez, Alex Char and Alejandro Gaviria. So far, this year, ahead of the local elections in the fall, a total of 1,053 GSCs have registered to seek local office (891 of them for mayor). In the 2019 local electoral cycle, 1,253 GSCs registered and 476 made the final cut, up significantly from 2015 (810 and 194 respectively). GSCs have become an attractive way for candidates to get ballot access—they’re a way to pose as ‘independents’ when political parties are seen unfavourably by over two-thirds of voters, and they allow candidates to start collecting money and promote their campaign earlier than they otherwise could (without much serious oversight by the CNE). Politicians who very well could have gotten a party’s endorsement if they so wanted use this mechanism to get on the ballot: Germán Vargas Lleras in 2018 and Alex Char in 2022, for example.
2023 may be the local elections with the highest number of GSCs. They’ll come on top of 33 (or more) parties, compared to 16 in 2019. The boom of coalition lists in 2019 and 2022, the growing number of GSCs and now the explosionfcoa of political parties are making the political system increasingly confusing and unreadable for voters. This will be extreme at the local level, given that coalitions vary from place to place (one party allied with another here, but competing with it in another place). Moreover, the CNE’s very creative understanding of coalitions and party status means that GSCs can aspire to party status by forming coalitions with parties.
The proliferation of parties risks recreating the chaotic and broken system that existed before the 2003 reform, with each politician and their small retinue having their microempresas electorales (or partido de bolsillo etc…), with the power to endorse as many candidates as they want and getting public financing. Colombian political parties were already quite weak and personalistic, with only vague ideological principles and internal divisions. The explosion of the number of parties will only worsen this. The CNE is an ineffective politicized body that has had a lot of difficulties to oversee parties’ activities, funding, campaigns and candidates: having to oversee 33 parties will make it even more difficult to ensure proper institutional control of parties and election campaigns.
Where to?
There’s no end in sight to the partiditis. It is likely that the CNE’s festival of parties will continue, with more parties and movements being legally recognized, likely with increasingly far-fetched legal arguments and interpretations.
There is a real need to control the proliferation of parties and establish new rules for the legal recognition of political parties that fills in the ambiguities and voids in the current legislation. Unfortunately, waiting for the Colombian Congress to do this is hopeless.
The issue timidly came up in the last, doomed, text of the government’s failed political reform in March (see my post on it). It proposed to raise the threshold for party recognition from 3% to 5%, all while retaining the 3% threshold for Senate. This would have been a very lazy solution that would likely just have created more legal ambiguities for courts and the CNE to interpret as they see fit.
The unsuccessful 2017 political reform proposal, which was meant to implement the provisions of the peace agreement, would have created a system of “progressive acquisition of rights”, based on both the number of members and the 3% threshold, differentiating between political movements with more limited rights and full-fledged political parties with full rights. This sort of system would respect the spirit of the peace agreement and aspirations for greater political pluralism, while still allowing for some more order than the current explosion of parties (including unipersonal shells and assorted microempresas electorales).
Other possible, ‘stricter’, solutions could include raising the election threshold or raising the threshold for coalition lists (like in some European countries), measures to limit the number of GSCs (requiring more signatures etc.), closing the loophole around ‘ethnic minority’ parties and their unlimited rights and legally regulating coalition lists and party splits. At the very least, a basic legal regulation of coalition lists is more than overdue.
However, there does not seem to be much interest or willingness in Congress to control the explosion of parties. The Pacto Histórico is benefiting from the recognition of new parties like Independientes, Fuerza Ciudadana, Roy Barreras’ Fuerza de la Paz and Clara López’s Todos Somos Colombia. Petro has voiced support for the creation of new parties: in September 2022, when he swore in members of the new CNE, he said that he hoped people can have more freedom to create parties, movements and GSCs “expressing themselves in all their diversity.”
For now, the rapid proliferation of political parties shows no sign of ending anytime soon, further weakening and fragmenting an already weak party syste and all but wiping out any positive effects the 2003-2009 political reforms might have had.
Since the 2015 constitutional reform and the 2018 opposition statute, the runner-up in the presidential election is entitled to a seat in the Senate and his/her running-mate is entitled to a seat in the House. At the local and regional levels, runners-up in mayoral and gubernatorial elections are also entitled to a seat in the municipal council and departmental assembly respectively.