Gustavo Petro ends his presidency in Colombia leaving no one indifferent.
Detractors and the disillusioned will celebrate this coming Friday the end of a term, the first left-wing one in the modern history of the country, often chaotic and confrontational.
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Supporters will long for a government that since 2022 defended and gave voice to groups often sidelined: left-wing voters, landless peasants, victims of the armed conflict, and indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities.
Petro will hand over power this August 7 to an antagonistic movement: the new right of Abelardo de la Espriella, a president who made his rhetorical crusade against the left and petrismo a campaign asset.
In the last presidential elections, the country was practically divided in half between De la Espriella (49.6% of votes) and Petro’s ideological successor, Senator Iván Cepeda (48.7% of ballots), in an election seen as a plebiscite on Petro’s administration.
Many believe that antipathy towards Petro led to historic support for De la Espriella, the most voted president. Others point out that support for the president is behind Cepeda, despite the defeat, achieving the best historical result for a left that will now have much strength to oppose.
Whether liked more or less by supporters or detractors, Petro’s term broke molds and leaves legacies as inheritance.
1. A personalist president
Petro and former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) are ideological opposites.
The former is a leftist leader who bet on expanding the state’s role in the Colombian economy and reaching out to armed groups to finally achieve peace in a country marked by violence.
The latter, a right-wing reference who reduced the size of the state and imposed a hard hand against crime.
But both share strong, personalist leadership that transcended their own parties and turned their styles into the two most recognizable currents of this century in Colombia: petrismo and uribismo.
In the era of social media, however, Petro raised the stakes.
“He communicated in a hyperdirect way, maximizing attention like a Twitter or YouTube user. He was the leader of the current moment of the attention economy,” reflects Javier Mejía, Colombian professor of Political Science at Stanford University in the USA, for BBC Mundo.
“The country was four years focused on Petro’s X,” he adds.
With his tweets, Petro exhorted his supporters, criticized the opposition, boasted achievements, set the agenda. He also revealed to Colombians that a single post could create unimaginable consequences.
The best example occurred on January 26, 2025, when at 3:41 a.m. he announced on X that he disauthorized the entry of a U.S. plane repatriating Colombians deported for allegedly treating them as “criminals.”
The message generated a diplomatic crisis with the U.S. and the Donald Trump government, with the threat of a trade war that ended up calming down after hours of efforts by Colombian and U.S. officials.
During that Sunday, businessmen, merchants, and other Colombians with interests in both countries held their breath due to the tension that grew before their eyes with each publication by Trump and Petro.
And that was just one of several controversies the outgoing president starred in during his term.
“He provoked strong opposition and resistance. Politics became tense and the relationship between the president and Congress was strained. It was a battle of legitimacy that led Petro to a certain populism,” analyzes Yann Basset, political scientist at the University of Rosario in Colombia, for BBC Mundo.
“Petro said he represented the people against supposedly illegitimate adversaries. That caused strong tensions in Colombian institutions,” he adds.
Petro polarized and that, in part, gave him both credit and discredit.
A few weeks before the last elections, several polls agreed that his approval and disapproval levels were almost equal, although acceptance was unusually high for a Colombian president at the end of his government.
Professor Mejía believes that Petro’s “partisan” style is here to stay.
“De la Espriella has inherited it. Despite Colombia’s strong and historic two-party system between liberals and conservatives, there was always a way of doing politics with institutionalist logics: governing for everyone, without partisanship,” Mejía comments.
“Petro did it differently and it will be difficult to return to that institutionalism. Governance will be much more for each one’s voters,” he predicts.
2. The change in the conversation
Even among Petro’s fiercest critics, there seems to be consensus that the outgoing president changed the conversation in Colombia.
“The tendency was to talk about the armed conflict and he opened topics: environment and social justice, with the three major reforms he proposed in labor, pensions, and health. These are topics that occupied the present and will surely continue to do so in the future,” says Basset.
Mejía points out that this was partly due to the type of profile Petro surrounded himself with to govern:
“From the typical lawyers and Bogotan politicians from the same old universities, it shifted to environmentalists, philosophers, and anthropologists from other institutions. Other things were talked about because a new bureaucracy arrived that saw the world differently, with other topics and priorities.”
“With Petro, the expectation that other sectors of society, poor and less favored, would have access to power and political weight changed the terms of the conversation,” adds Alejandro Castillejo, Anthropology professor at the University of the Andes.
Castillejo adds that this was favored by a timely moment: “Petro took office when the country was betting on the future after the Havana Peace Agreement.”
That treaty ended more than five decades of war between the state and the FARC, Colombia’s largest and longest-lasting guerrilla, and meant an alternative course.
Many Colombians began demanding more than peace from the government.
In 2021, in the most important social outbreak in Colombian history, tens of thousands demanded more social justice, equal opportunities, and a change in the economic model.
A year later, Petro won the presidency.
“He was at the right moment. There were great transformations and he capitalized on the context. He made a left-wing government viable,” analyzes Mejía.
3. A consolidated left
Before Petro, the left had never governed Colombia.
It was an invisible, stigmatized force, often linked in the collective imagination to guerrillas.
Many of its leaders were assassinated or forced into exile at the end of the last century.
Some analysts point out that part of Petro’s success was due to political and literally vital survival.
“He was the natural leader. He survived a time of extermination,” says Mejía.
In 2016, the Colombian state recognized its role in the so-called “systematic extermination” against several progressive leaders between the 80s and 90s, including presidential candidates like Jaime Pardo Leal or Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa.
It is estimated that more than 5,700 people were disappeared or assassinated in attacks against the left-wing party Patriotic Union between 1984 and 2016, “in events mainly linked to paramilitaries and state agents,” according to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace.
Petro, who was a guerrilla, is credited not only with bringing the left to power for the first time but also unifying and strengthening it.
Despite De la Espriella’s record victory, Cepeda obtained the highest vote for a progressive candidate in Colombia’s history with 12.7 million ballots, more than Petro got when he won in 2022.
And months before the presidential elections, Historic Pact, Petro and Cepeda’s party, became the largest legislative force in the congressional elections.
Petro leaves a strong opposition and a solid left that came very close to repeating government and will aspire to regain power in four years.
What will his role be after the presidency?
The outgoing president will lead the opposition with Cepeda and direct the Historic Pact after the party proposed it to him.
A polarizing and confrontational opposition is expected, a priori.
Since the end of the elections, Petro has raised the flag of electoral fraud, without publishing evidence, and has refused to recognize De la Espriella’s victory.
It is foreseeable that Petro will continue using his social media channels, where he has 14 million followers across X, Instagram, and TikTok. And that means a great megaphone.
Basset warns that, “if De la Espriella tries to forcibly decree legislations that reverse the outgoing government’s social reforms, he will face the possibility of strong mobilization in the streets and institutions.”
Petro has a strong audience and the outgoing president is willing to use it.
