Colombia has elected Iván Cepeda president, keeping the political left in power after Gustavo Petro and challenging the assumption that Colombia’s 2022 turn to the left was simply a temporary reaction against the traditional establishment. Cepeda, a senator and long-time human-rights campaigner from the Historic Pact, defeated conservative candidate Abelardo de la Espriella after a campaign shaped by insecurity, inequality, Petro’s controversial reform programme and the unresolved problem of armed groups operating across parts of the country. The result is historically significant because Colombia spent much of its modern democratic history governed from the centre or right, partly because decades of conflict with the FARC made left-wing politics vulnerable to association with armed insurgency. Petro broke that barrier in 2022; Cepeda’s victory suggests the breakthrough may be becoming a durable part of Colombia’s democratic competition. But continuity creates a different standard of judgement. The Colombian left can no longer explain the country’s major failures principally as the inheritance of governments that came before it. Once a political movement governs repeatedly, structural problems gradually become its responsibility too.
Security is the clearest test. The 2016 peace agreement with the FARC ended the country’s largest insurgency and brought thousands of fighters into civilian life, but it did not create a state monopoly on violence across all Colombian territory. ELN guerrillas, FARC dissident organisations, drug-trafficking groups and other armed actors expanded in some areas where the old FARC withdrew faster than the state arrived. Petro attempted to address this through his “Total Peace” strategy, negotiating simultaneously with several armed organisations. The philosophy was understandable: if decades of military confrontation had failed to eliminate insurgency, political negotiation could reduce violence at lower human cost. The weakness was assuming that every armed organisation possessed enough political character to be negotiated into ordinary politics. Some groups derive substantial income from cocaine, illegal mining and territorial control, meaning peace can threaten their business model rather than fulfil their political objectives.
This distinction between political rebellion and organised predation matters. A group fighting principally for ideological objectives can potentially exchange weapons for political participation if institutions make peaceful competition worthwhile. A criminal organisation earning enormous rents from controlling territory may have no equivalent incentive. Negotiation can even strengthen such groups if ceasefires reduce military pressure while allowing recruitment and economic activity to continue. Cepeda therefore needs a more discriminating peace strategy: negotiate where organisations possess credible political demands and willingness to demobilise, while maintaining coercive pressure against actors using negotiation principally to consolidate territorial power. Peace is not the absence of state force; durable peace requires a state capable of making private violence less rewarding than lawful politics.
This is where Colombia demonstrates a fundamental point about political authority. Weber famously defined the modern state through its claim to the legitimate monopoly over physical force. The important word is not merely “force” but legitimate. Armed groups can possess weapons; the state distinguishes itself by exercising coercion through publicly authorised rules and institutions. But legitimacy without capacity is insufficient. A government can possess constitutional authority over a rural region while an armed organisation determines who travels, which businesses pay taxes and whether candidates can campaign. Formal sovereignty then exceeds effective sovereignty.
Colombia’s challenge is therefore partly geographic. The central state is much stronger in Bogotá, Medellín or major commercial centres than in remote areas where roads, courts and government services remain weak. Armed organisations flourish where the state appears primarily through occasional military operations rather than continuous public administration. This means counterinsurgency and development cannot be separated neatly. A road allows soldiers to move, but it also allows farmers to reach markets. A functioning court punishes criminals, but it also resolves property disputes. A school provides education while establishing a visible relationship between citizens and the legitimate state. State-building occurs through mundane institutions long before it appears as political loyalty.
Land inequality sits underneath part of this conflict. Colombia has historically had one of Latin America’s more unequal patterns of land ownership, and rural dispossession contributed to the grievances from which armed conflict developed. Petro attempted land reform and redistribution, and Cepeda is likely to continue elements of that programme. Yet redistribution needs to be judged by what happens after land changes hands. Giving a household legal title can increase security and wealth, but a small farmer without credit, irrigation, roads or market access may remain poor. The objective should therefore be productive ownership rather than redistribution measured only in hectares.
The same principle applies to inequality more broadly. Colombia remains a highly unequal society, giving the left a genuine political constituency for stronger social provision and progressive taxation. But redistribution is sustainable only when the productive economy generates enough income to redistribute. A government can increase taxes on high earners and businesses, but rates eventually encounter behavioural responses: investment can decline, avoidance can increase and capital can move. This does not make progressive taxation ineffective. It means the relevant question is not simply how much government extracts, but how much social welfare each additional peso of taxation produces after accounting for effects on investment and growth.
Petro’s record also leaves Cepeda with a difficult energy debate. Colombia is a significant producer of oil and coal while the left wants to accelerate the transition towards cleaner energy. The environmental case is strong, but hydrocarbons generate export revenue, taxes and foreign exchange. Ending exploration faster than alternative sectors expand can therefore reduce the fiscal resources needed to finance the transition itself. This creates a sequencing problem: a country cannot diversify away from a revenue source merely by deciding it dislikes dependence on that revenue source. It needs replacement exports and tax bases first.
A mature climate policy should therefore use existing resource wealth to finance diversification rather than treating extraction and transition as entirely contradictory. Investment in renewable electricity, grids, education and infrastructure can reduce future dependence while hydrocarbons continue generating revenue during the transition. Norway provides an extreme example of this logic: fossil-fuel wealth can finance a state preparing for a less fossil-dependent future. Colombia obviously has different institutions and resources, but the underlying principle remains useful.
Relations with the United States will matter because Washington remains Colombia’s most important strategic partner and a major trading relationship. The two countries cooperate extensively against narcotics, but Petro repeatedly criticised traditional American drug policy and questioned whether decades of eradication and interdiction actually solved the underlying cocaine economy. Cepeda is likely to maintain some of that scepticism. He has a point: if demand for cocaine remains profitable internationally, eliminating production in one Colombian region can simply move cultivation elsewhere. This is the balloon effect of prohibition.
But abandoning enforcement would create its own problems because cocaine revenue finances precisely the armed groups undermining Colombian sovereignty. Drug policy therefore needs both demand reduction abroad and alternative livelihoods inside Colombia alongside targeted enforcement against trafficking organisations. The United States and Colombia should judge success not simply through hectares of coca destroyed but through whether criminal organisations lose revenue and rural communities gain legal economic alternatives.
The political transition from Petro to Cepeda also provides an important democratic test. A democracy becomes more mature when ideological breakthroughs stop feeling existential. Colombia’s first left-wing presidency in 2022 generated fears among some conservatives that Petro would fundamentally transform institutions; his supporters feared entrenched elites would prevent him governing. Four years later, another left-wing candidate has won through the electoral system. The next achievement would be ensuring that a future conservative victory is accepted just as normally. Democratic consolidation occurs when alternation in power becomes disappointing to losers rather than frightening to them.
Cepeda’s human-rights background gives him particular responsibility here. A government committed to social justice should be especially careful about protecting institutional rights for opponents because liberal rights matter most when exercised by people the governing majority dislikes. Freedom of speech, due process and judicial independence are not favours granted to politically sympathetic citizens. They are restraints a democratic state accepts precisely because temporary majorities cannot be trusted to define justice for everyone permanently.
That principle also applies to the right. Colombia’s conservative opposition needs to distinguish opposition to left-wing policy from treating left-wing government as inherently illegitimate. The historical association between the political left and guerrilla violence made this difficult for decades. But once peaceful left-wing movements can win elections and lose them under ordinary rules, armed revolution becomes less defensible as a route to political change. Democratic inclusion can therefore be a security policy because it lowers the political return to violence.
Cepeda inherits a Colombia that is neither the failed state sometimes portrayed abroad nor the fully consolidated peace imagined after 2016. It is a middle-income democracy with substantial institutional capacity, sophisticated cities and enormous economic potential, while parts of its territory remain governed imperfectly and violence continues to distort political life. The next government’s success should therefore be measured less through ideological ambition than through whether ordinary state authority becomes more predictable.
If fewer communities depend on armed groups, farmers can reach markets, courts function, inequality declines without sacrificing productive investment and political opponents remain able to compete freely, Cepeda will have strengthened the project the Colombian left began in 2022. If negotiations allow armed groups to consolidate, fiscal ambitions outrun economic capacity or institutions become more partisan, continuity will become a liability rather than an achievement.
The important democratic change has already occurred: Colombia has shown that the left can govern without the political system collapsing. The next task is more demanding: showing that the left can govern effectively enough that its legitimacy rests not on being historically excluded from power, but on what it does once exclusion is no longer the explanation for its failures.
