Across the country, elections will be held on Sunday October 29th to choose city mayors, city councils, department governors and department assemblies.?
Results are critical for further modeling the game (the strengths and weaknesses of the President and the Government, their strategies, their leverage in Congress, their ability to pass legislation, and their alternative strategies in case of legislative failure).?
Keep in mind the following about local elections in Colombia:
- They’re a test of the actual power of national political forces. You can be a national figure, but if you’re unable to propel candidates in cities and regions, that reveals a significant weakness.?
- They could change the game in Congress. A poor performance by government-backed candidates is likely to translate into a reduced Government leverage.
- Going into the future, local elections will show to what extent the left was able to build a solid, stable structure beyond the 2022 presidential election.
- They’ll have symbolic value. A poor performance by the government-backed candidates, especially in the closely-watched bigger cities, will hurt the President, and this translates into an actual loss of political capacity.
Apart from the obvious (that is, results) there are a couple of things I’ll be watching:
- It seems to me the result obtained by Gustavo Bolivar, a close ally of the President who’s running for Mayor of Bogotá, will allow us to measure the core size of the left-wing vote in the city, and estimate it on a national level. The point is, and I mean no disrespect, I frankly don’t think anybody (in terms of statistical significance) will vote for Gustavo Bolívar because they think he’ll be a good mayor. People who vote for him will do it because they want to support the President, because they want to support the broader project of the left, or because they strongly reject right-wing or center-right candidates. That will reveal the size of a core left-wing vote on which the left will be able to rely for future elections, and which could form the basis of its future strategies.?
- Sunday elections will allow us to estimate the extent to which division among center-right and right-wing sectors benefits the left, and the laboratory will be Bogotá. Think of it this way: the left comes into this election with significant weaknesses (the President’s low approval ratings, a weak candidate); if still they manage to do better than expected, that probably means they benefited from the split in the opposing camp.?
- Why is this so important? Because it’s a situation that will very likely be repeated in the 2026 presidential election. Sectors critical of Petro are almost certain to split into a number of different candidacies, which will create an opportunity for the left (if it manages to unite behind a single candidate). This holds even in the context of the two-round system that applies in the presidential election (and will for the first time be applied in Bogotá): even if, in theory, the second round creates an incentive for cohesion, the acrimony, the wounds, and the fractures that emerge during the first-round campaign weaken that possibility.?
