On August 7th, in a sports arena in Cali rather than in Bogotá, Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in as president of Colombia for the 2026-2030 term, with King Felipe VI and at least eight Latin American heads of state as witnesses to a ceremony the new Government described as a gesture of decentralisation. Behind the protocol lies a margin of less than one percentage point over Iván Cepeda, just over two hundred and fifty thousand votes, which public discourse has spent two days treating as what it is not, an irrevocable verdict on the country's fate. Thousands of people who voted for something else are reading the result as the definitive closing of a cycle. The numbers say something different, a technical tie that the law translates into absolute power without translating it into real consensus. That leap, from electoral arithmetic to a sense of historic defeat, deserves scrutiny before being accepted as diagnosis.
The permanence that never was
Every power that arrives presents itself as the end of a story. Petro did so in 2022, speaking of irreversible change; de la Espriella does it now, with the vocabulary reversed but the same grammar, promising that what came before will not return. No Colombian government of recent decades has passed that test, and the one making the promise today has no reason to believe it will be the exception.
Three consecutive elections make the pattern plain. In 2018, Iván Duque arrived backed by uribismo, promising to tear up a peace agreement barely signed with the FARC, an agreement that ended up, instead, outliving his entire term. Four years later, Petro arrived announcing the end of uribismo as the dominant force. Now de la Espriella arrives announcing the end of petrismo. Each of the three described his predecessor as an anomaly overcome for good, and all three, without exception, governed a country still split almost down the middle, with the other half already organising for the next fight before the inauguration speech had even ended.
The Stoics taught a distinction this cycle illustrates better than any treatise, some things depend on us and others do not. The outcome of an election, who occupies the Casa de Nariño, how many votes separate one candidate from another, does not depend on any single citizen, and treating it as a personal defeat means accepting a burden that was never individual. What does depend on each person is the decision to keep organising after the result, a decision that, unlike the count, closes on no election night. A river does not announce its course, it imposes it, and nothing it carries disappears entirely, it settles further down, feeding ground that has no name yet. The leaf that falls does not know the winter waiting for it, and winter itself does not know that beneath the bark the sap of a spring that has not begun is already at work. Applied to a country, the principle is less poetic and considerably more uncomfortable, no electoral defeat alone exhausts the organisation that preceded it, and no victory, however sweeping it declares itself in an inaugural speech, carries within it any guarantee of its own continuity.
The memory that survived extermination
Colombia has already lived through a defeat that no comparison with a percentage point can describe. Between 1984 and the early two-thousands, the Colombian State tolerated, and largely carried out, the systematic murder of thousands of members of a single party, the Unión Patriótica, reducing it from an emerging electoral force to a name nearly erased from the official record. Two of its presidential candidates, Jaime Pardo Leal in 1987 and Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa in 1990, were assassinated in the middle of campaigns, and neither killing stopped the party, only the exhaustion of its own surviving members, years later, did that. It took the Inter-American Court of Human Rights nearly forty years to say so with the authority of a ruling.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights declared, on 30 January 2023, the Colombian State responsible for the systematic violence exercised against more than 6,000 members of the Unión Patriótica since 1984, over more than twenty years, including disappearances, extrajudicial executions and torture.
Colombia's Special Jurisdiction for Peace reached its own figure in 2022, 5,733 members killed between 1984 and 2016, a different calculation from the Court's but of the same magnitude, and both agree on the essential point, a plan sustained over time, carried out with the tolerance or direct participation of state agents. That figure is not a distant precedent, it is the yardstick against which any current talk of definitive defeat should be measured. If an extermination of that scale failed to erase the Colombian left, which governed until four days ago and will contest power again, claiming that two hundred and fifty thousand votes settle anything requires a remarkably short memory.
A ceremony that needs to look bigger than its result
The staging of the inauguration, with a European king among the guests, does not fix that numerical fragility, it disguises it. A government born of an unambiguous majority would not need to move the ceremony to another city to narrate itself as a historic break, nor multiply the presence of foreign heads of state to manufacture, before the cameras, a sense of inevitability the ballot boxes did not deliver so clearly. Petro was sworn in 2022 before a packed Plaza Bolívar, at the country's symbolic centre; de la Espriella is sworn in inside a sports arena in Cali, far from a capital where his margin was even narrower, and the contrast between the two stagings says more about the solidity of each mandate than any speech delivered that day.
Abelardo de la Espriella was certified as president-elect of Colombia after beating Iván Cepeda by a margin of 0.96 percentage points, according to official results of the 2026 runoff.
Cali replaces Bogotá in the protocol, not in the result. Two hundred and fifty thousand votes remain the real margin, and no diplomatic display, however striking on a front page, multiplies it. When power needs this much staging to sustain its own story of a clear mandate, it is usually because that mandate, examined closely, is not so clear after all. The decentralisation invoked as motive is real as gesture and false as complete explanation, no government moves its founding act away from the symbolic centre of power unless that centre makes it uneasy.
A continental shift, not a Colombian verdict
What is happening in Colombia is not isolated, and it is worth stating immediately in what sense. Two wider victories in the region do not make this one more solid, they make it look, by comparison, more fragile still. In Argentina, Javier Milei won the November 2023 runoff with roughly 56 points against Sergio Massa, an eleven-point gap. In Chile, José Antonio Kast won the December 2025 runoff with 58.61 per cent of the vote against Jeannette Jara, a still wider margin. Set against those two mandates, wide and verifiable at the polls, de la Espriella's victory by less than a point remains the most fragile of the three, not the most solid, even though the rhetoric surrounding it is identical to that of its neighbours.
That resemblance matters more than the gap in margin. All three governments arrived narrating themselves as a definitive break with a prior cycle, and all three face, or will face, the same test Duque and Petro already faced in Colombia, governing a country that no election, however wide, stops dividing. A 56 per cent or a 58 per cent is not a final verdict either, it is a photograph of one particular day, subject to the same erosion as any mandate once the daily life of those who backed it fails to improve at the pace the campaign promised. The difference in degree, between Colombia's 0.96 and Chile's 58, changes the scale of the task facing the opposition in each country, it does not change its nature.
Patience as method, not as resignation
None of this guarantees a favourable outcome four years from now. Promising an inevitable return would be as dishonest as accepting an irrevocable defeat, both certainties pretend to know what no political cycle can know in advance. What is verifiable is something else, the organisation that carried Cepeda to within a point of the presidency was not born of a campaign and does not depend on one. It was already moving through social networks before the leadership decided to step in, and it has no reason to dissolve simply because the office changes hands on August 7th.
Mistaking waiting for resignation is the error this moment invites. The Stoics did not teach indifference toward everything, they taught precise discernment between what can be changed today and what can only be accompanied while it changes on its own terms. Four years of an adverse government belong, for now, to the second category, they will not be reversed by decree or by outrage, but the organisation running through them, the networks that already existed before this defeat and will keep existing after it, belong entirely to the first. That is the only ground worth spending the energy election night left exhausted.
Statistics do not argue with grief. But grief does not get the final word on what comes next, either.
Whoever voted for Cepeda and feels today that something irreparable was lost is not wrong about the grief, only about the date attached to it. Grief over an electoral defeat has a reasonable span, and denying it with forced optimism would be as dishonest as the catastrophism this text is trying to correct. But that grief also has a useful limit, past which it stops hurting and simply starts repeating itself, taking up space the organisation needs to think through the next four years rather than replaying the last four days. Colombia owes no one a victory in 2030, it owes, at minimum, the same steadiness it already proved capable of against a real extermination, not against a mere change of government.
No one builds a lasting political organisation out of optimism. It is built out of memory, and out of the habit of staying present even when the day's result does not cooperate.
The war is not decided in a single inauguration
A country is not exhausted by one election, it is the sum of the defeats it decides not to forget. Colombia already proved, with the Unión Patriótica, that it can survive systematic extermination without giving up its claim to power four decades later. Surviving a gap of two hundred and fifty thousand votes requires, by comparison, considerably less endurance than what was already exercised, and the same Stoic patience Epictetus taught, that of accepting a change of form without mistaking it for disappearance.
What Colombia has been through each of these cycles does not vanish when the colour of the flag on the presidential balcony changes. It keeps working underneath, like the sap that was already working beneath the bark in the depths of winter, preparing a political spring no electoral calendar has the authority to date in advance. The generation that organised online before an official candidacy even existed did not ask permission to be born, and it has no reason to ask permission either to keep growing over the next four years, with or without the favour of the man sworn in today in Cali. The war that matters is not decided in a single term, not even one opened by a ceremony crowned by a king…
G.S.
Sources
- Hasta cuándo exactamente es presidente Gustavo Petro, esto dice la ley sobre la transferencia de mando a Abelardo de la Espriella
- Colombia alista el cambio de gobierno previsto para este 7 de agosto
- Colombia es responsable por el exterminio del Partido Unión Patriótica (comunicado de prensa)
- La derrota preventiva no se detiene en una segunda vuelta (AcidReport, editorial julio 2026)
- JEP estableció que 5.733 personas fueron asesinadas o desaparecidas en ataques dirigidos contra la UP (comunicado oficial, Auto AT075)
- Exterminio de la UP, los crímenes de Jaime Pardo y Bernardo Jaramillo se resisten a la impunidad y el olvido
- Resultados balotaje elecciones 2023 en Argentina entre Javier Milei y Sergio Massa
- Kast arrasa en las elecciones de Chile y el país da un giro a la derecha, que se consolida en la región
- Así fue la ceremonia de posesión de Gustavo Petro en la plaza de Bolívar, agosto de 2022
