Gustavo Petro’s election as president of Colombia in 2022 brought hope and fear. For the majority of Colombians who supported Petro in the election’s second round, there was hope that the country’s first left-wing president would deliver the changes the country needed to progress in terms of economics, politics and security. The president played a role in generating those hopeful expectations, promising massive economic overhauls of the country’s health and pension system. He outlined a “Total Peace” plan that would resolve the armed conflicts with various criminal, terrorist and insurgent groups around the country. He promised an expanded role for Colombian diplomacy globally that would lead to the end of fossil fuels and a rethinking of the war on drugs.
Petro’s critics, in contrast, feared he would lead the country down the path of neighboring Venezuela. They viewed his economic policies as breaking Colombia’s free-market model, hampering foreign investment, and dragging the country’s growth engine down. They saw a president who was a former M-19 guerrilla who wanted to give a sweetheart deal to other left-wing insurgent groups operating in the country. They were concerned about Petro’s authoritarian allies abroad, including his close relationship with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. They also worried that Petro’s had his own autocratic tendencies and wasn’t fully committed to democracy. In a worst-case scenario, they feared Petro would enact constitutional reforms to maintain power even as he mired the country in economic decline.
Petro’s first two years in office have followed neither the most optimistic nor the most pessimistic paths. The change promised by Petro never came. Instead, Petro’s term has been defined by stagnation and political gridlock. The economy, instead of surging or collapsing, weakly plods along. Promised overhauls of the healthcare system and labor rules have stalled while a watered-down pension reform narrowly passed after years of debate. Given the lack of progress, Petro has proposed to implement major governance reforms via referendum or constitutional rewrite. While his critics fear those proposals will lead the country down an authoritarian path, Petro has done none of the legwork to actually move those changes forward, suggesting they are empty threats.