FROM THE EXHAUSTION OF LEGISLATIVE GOVERNABILITY TO CONGRESS IN ELECTORAL MODE
Introductory Political Analysis the exhaustion of legislative governance
The 2022-2026 four-year term shows a curve of progressive depletion of legislative governability. The government began with a broad coalition, composed of the Historic Pact, green, liberal, and conservative sectors, the U party, and other forces that allowed it to approve a substantive part of its initial agenda. However, that majority did not manage to transform itself into a stable architecture of power. As social reforms progressed, especially the health reform, the coalition fractured, and the Executive shifted from negotiating with parties to negotiating with factions.
The result was a sustained drop in legislative effectiveness. During the first legislative session, the government succeeded in passing 15 of 45 government-sponsored bills, for a rate of approximately 33%. During the second session, it maintained a similar rate but with a lower absolute number: 8 bills passed out of 24 introduced. In the third, the rate fell to 22.6%, with 7 laws passed out of 31 bills introduced. In the fourth, the decline worsened: of 28 bills introduced by the Executive, only 3 became law. The decline is not due to a lack of government initiative, but rather to a progressive loss of the ability to build majorities, set priorities, and translate the agenda into legislative results.
This trajectory contrasts with previous experiences. Juan Manuel Santos achieved peaks of high legislative effectiveness, especially in his first government, when he managed to turn 43 out of 53 bills submitted into law in the 2011-2012 legislative session and 37 out of 47 in the 2012-2013 legislative session. Iván Duque, although he governed with a fragmented Congress and amidst political and social crises, maintained intermediate approval levels. Petro, on the other hand, shows a downward curve throughout his four-year term: he began with a broad coalition but ended with intermittent governability, dependent on partial agreements, appeals, urgent messages, and plebiscitary pressure.
The fundamental difference is not just procedural. Santos had a coalition designed to process a government agenda and, subsequently, an exceptional architecture to accelerate the regulatory implementation of the Peace Accord. Petro had a broad initial coalition, but it was heterogeneous, built more on incentives for power sharing than on robust programmatic agreements. When the agenda moved from initial projects to social reforms, that coalition ceased to be functional.
In that context, the Government attempted to sustain its agenda through three strategies: negotiation with internal factions of traditional parties, plebiscitary pressure, and intensive use of procedural tools from Law 5 of 1992, which is the internal regulation of Congress and defines the rules for legislative proceedings, the functioning of committees and plenary sessions, summons, appeals, votes, and discussion times. Appeals to shelve projects, urgency messages, and the threat of a popular consultation ceased to be exceptional instruments and became part of the toolkit of a deteriorating governability. In summary, Congress did not completely block the Government, but it did force its agenda to be moderated, fragmented, or postponed. Legislative governability did not disappear, but it became more costly, more unstable, and more dependent on electoral calculations.
Congress in numbers: accumulation, congestion, and low normative conversion
The quantitative balance of the four-year term shows a persistent gap between the introduction and approval of bills. Congress was highly active in presenting initiatives, but had a low capacity to convert that activity into effective regulatory output. The 2025-2026 legislature confirms this trend: 792 projects were introduced, but only 5 became law of the Republic. The majority remained trapped in the early stages of the process or ended up being shelved with the close of the legislative period.
A comparison by legislative session shows that the problem is not merely temporary, but rather a trend of progressive decline in Congress’s legislative output over the four-year term. In 2022–2023, 644 bills were introduced, of which 117 became law and 527 were shelved. In 2023–2024, the volume increased to 665 bills, with 116 laws passed and 549 shelved—a ratio relatively stable compared to the previous year. The break occurred in 2024–2025: although the number of bills introduced reached a peak of 910, only 59 became law, while 851 were shelved. The decline deepened in 2025–2026, when of 792 bills introduced, only 5 were successfully enacted and 787 were shelved. In percentage terms, the approval rate fell from 18.2% in 2022–2023 to 17.4% in 2023–2024; then fell to 6.5% in 2024–2025 before finally plummeting to 0.6% in 2025–2026. More than a simple decline in productivity, the graph illustrates the closing of the legislative window: Congress maintained a high level of legislative initiative but rapidly lost its ability to bring matters to a close.
The main manifestation of this backlog was the accumulation of bills at the first reading stage. Of the bills introduced during the 2025–2026 legislative session, 576 remained at that stage at the end of the session and were ultimately shelved because they failed to pass the first reading by June 20. This means that 72.7% of the bills in the current legislative session did not even manage to pass the first legislative hurdle. The data shows that the problem was not solely the number of bills filed, but Congress’s inability to transform them into an agenda with a real chance of progress. The situation was even more critical for bills carried over from the 2024–2025 legislative session. Of that backlog, 202 bills were in the second debate, 85 in the third, and 77 in the fourth. As the four-year term came to a close, those 364 bills were ultimately shelved, even though they had already passed at least one stage of the legislative process. In other words, not only was a significant portion of the new bills lost, but also a substantial portion of the agenda that had survived from the previous legislative session.
This distribution confirms that the bottleneck was not solely in the radiation, but in the capacity to transfer projects to the final stages of processing. The backlog in the first debate shows a Congress with low capacity to filter and prioritize; the backlog of inherited projects in the second, third, and fourth debates shows an additional difficulty: even initiatives that managed to advance did not necessarily find political conditions, legislative timing, or sufficient majorities to complete their process.
The result is a massive loss of the legislative agenda. In practice, a good part of the work of introducing, presenting, discussing, and partially approving bills ended up without any normative effect. This is especially relevant in a legislature marked by the electoral calendar, the fragmentation of blocs, and the government's loss of capacity to set priorities. In a Congress in electoral mode, the incentives to approve politically costly projects decrease, while initiatives for positioning, regional visibility, or individual calculation increase. By committees, the accumulation follows a clear political pattern. The First Committee concentrates projects with the highest institutional density: legislative acts, statutory laws, justice, fundamental rights, and the structure of the State. The Sixth Committee acts as a critical hub for transportation, infrastructure, education, communications, and ICT. The Seventh Committee was the epicenter of the political desgaste of the four-year term, due to the processing of social reforms: health, pensions, and labor. And, the Fifth Committee, for its part, concentrated a large part of the environmental, mining-energy, and agricultural agenda. The end of the four-year term also revealed a decline in administrative agility after the legislative process. Effectiveness does not end when Congress approves a text. It also depends on the Executive's capacity to promptly sanction laws, enable their entry into force, and prevent regulatory output from being bottlenecked at the final stage. In that sense, the four-year term not only showed legislative congestion but also a loss of administrative speed in closing the normative cycle.
The end of the four-year term turned congestion into a massive archive. In the 2025-2026 legislative session, 576 out of 792 projects were archived for failing to pass the first debate before June 20th. Added to this is the loss of 364 projects inherited from the 2024-2025 legislative session that were in their second, third, or fourth debate. Taken together, the data shows that Congress had low legislative output and closed the period with a significant loss of accumulated agenda.
Legislative success: Authors, speakers, and parties with the greatest capacity for processing
In a Congress with high bill introduction rates and low regulatory conversion, individual legislative success gained greater relevance. It is not enough to introduce bills: true legislative capacity lies in getting initiatives to pass committees, plenary sessions, conciliation committees, and to receive presidential sanction. Therefore, success can be measured from two complementary angles: authorship and reporting.
Authorship demonstrates a congressman's ability to turn their own initiative into law. Alfredo Deluque and Fabián Díaz stand out in this ranking, with 11 laws as authors, followed by Angélica Lozano, Lorena Ríos, and Nadya Blel, with 10. In a context of low legislative productivity, these results suggest negotiation skills, persistence in the process, and the ability to build consensus around viable projects.
The report, for its part, shows another form of legislative power. It's not just about presenting bills, but about guiding them through the process, coordinating texts, negotiating amendments, and managing discussion times. Juan Camilo Londoño, Norma Hurtado, and Soledad Tamayo lead in this indicator, each with 12 laws as rapporteurs. They are followed by Marelen Castillo, Erika Sánchez, Germán Rozo, Gloria Flórez, José Luis Pérez, Víctor Manuel Salcedo, and other congress members with a high capacity for procedural leadership.
The case of Iván Cepeda allows for a nuanced reading of this. His legislative career shows high exposure, with 224 bills introduced between 2010 and 2026, but few regulatory closures compared to the volume of initiatives. His best period is concentrated between 2022 and 2026, when, as part of the government coalition, he managed to have 5 laws approved. This confirms a common trend among other congressional leaders: formal effectiveness increases when there is proximity to government majorities or coalitions capable of supporting the legislative process. However, Cepeda's legislative impact was not limited to turning his own projects into law. His successful initiatives have been mainly associated with agendas concerning peace, victims, historical memory, human rights, and the recognition of political subjects, where he managed to articulate broader consensus.
Instead, his projects with greater transformative ambition or structural reform of the State faced greater difficulties in closing. Therefore, his legislative weight must be read in a double dimension: low relative conversion compared to the number of projects filed, but high capacity for agenda setting, political control, public positioning, and articulation around programmatic causes.
Methodological Note: This graph sums up congress members' participations as authors or sponsors of successful projects. It does not mean that each party has approved that number of unique laws, but rather that their congress members have accumulated successful participations as authors or sponsors.
The reading per game confirms that legislative success was not a monopoly of the ruling party. The Conservative Party, the Historic Pact, the Liberal Party, the Green Alliance, and the Party of the U concentrated a good part of the successful participations as authors or rapporteurs. This shows that, even in a period marked by confrontation between the Executive and Congress, the traditional parties and the swing blocs retained their ability to process, lead, and negotiate.
Political control Success as visibility, cost, and information
Political oversight was one of Congress's most active functions during the four-year term. Its success should not be measured solely by the approval of no-confidence motions or the removal of officials, but by its capacity to introduce topics, produce information, raise reputational costs, and pressure subsequent decisions by the Executive.
This report distinguishes between unique events, political control debates, and entity mentions. Unique events correspond to distinct legislative spaces, such as political control debates, public hearings, motions of no confidence, technical committees, or other mechanisms. Entity mentions, on the other hand, record each appearance of a cited portfolio or entity. Therefore, a committee is best analyzed through unique events, while an entity can be analyzed by the number of mentions or the number of distinct spaces in which it appeared.
During the four-year term, Congress did not limit itself to formal debates. It also used public hearings and no-confidence votes as mechanisms to highlight sectoral conflicts, demand information, and pressure the Executive for responses. The database records 209 political oversight mechanisms, 306 public hearings, and 13 no-confidence votes. This distribution shows that the oversight function was broader than direct confrontation with ministers. It also served as a space for public deliberation, the production of technical information, and political positioning.
Methodological Note: The political oversight data used in this section was compiled by ORZA through the processing and analysis of 8,126 gazettes submitted by the 14 secretariats of the permanent constitutional commissions of Congress and the two plenary secretariats. This database allows for the identification of mechanisms such as oversight debates, public hearings, no-confidence votes, and other legislative oversight spaces. To avoid duplication, the analysis distinguishes between unique events and entity mentions: unique events correspond to distinct legislative spaces, while mentions record each appearance of a cited entity within those spaces. Therefore, the same hearing or debate can be counted as a single event but generate multiple mentions if it involves different ministries, superintendencies, or state agencies.
During the four-year term, Congress did not limit itself to formal debates. It also used public hearings and no-confidence votes as mechanisms to highlight sectoral conflicts, demand information, and pressure the Executive for responses. The database records 209 political oversight mechanisms, 306 public hearings, and 13 no-confidence votes. This distribution shows that the oversight function was broader than direct confrontation with ministers. It also served as a space for public deliberation, the production of technical information, and political positioning.
The ranking of cited entities shows that the Ministry of Finance was the main institutional node of political control, with 104 citations. They are followed by the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Environment, and Ministry of Energy. This centrality of the Treasury confirms that the tension between Congress and the Government was not solely focused on social reforms, but also on their fiscal viability, budget execution, and the financing of the government program. Even when debates were sectoral, Congress returned to the question of resources, spending, and budgetary impact.
The distribution by committee shows that political control was organized by institutional arenas. The First Chamber Committee led widely with 141 summons, followed by the Second and Fifth Chamber Committees. In the Senate, the Seventh appears as one of the most active, reflecting the weight of social reforms on the legislative agenda. This distribution allows us to see that Congress did not act as a homogeneous bloc and that each committee processed different conflicts according to its thematic jurisdiction.
The most attended sectors show that political control functioned as a thermometer for national and territorial conflicts. Agricultural affairs, environment, mines and energy, transportation, taxation and finance, security, health, and education concentrated a large part of the registered spaces. This demonstrates that Congress not only reacted to the government's major reforms but also to sectoral and regional pains: tariffs, infrastructure, environmental crisis, security, health, budget execution, and institutional presence.
Political control leadership is not explained solely by opposition. The Liberal Party appears as the bloc with the most participations, followed by the Historical Pact, the Conservative Party, the Democratic Center, and the U Party. This shows that political control fulfilled different functions, depending on each party's position: for the opposition, it was a tool for desgaste; for independents, a mechanism for pressure and differentiation; and for sectors close to the Government, a space to defend agendas or establish sectoral achievements.
The success of political control can be measured in four dimensions:
VISIBILITY
The debates allowed for issues that would otherwise have remained scattered in technical or sectoral discussions to be put on the agenda. The crisis in medicines, budget execution, infrastructure, the energy crisis, and foreign policy were put before Congress as scenarios for public exposition.
PRODUCTION INFORMATION
Questionnaires, citations, and hearings forced the handover of data on execution, funding, regulatory decisions, and sectoral operations. This was especially relevant in health and budget, where the dispute was not only political but also technical.
Political cost
Although no-confidence motions have never removed ministers, they do increase the cost of tenure for some officials and weaken the government's position in subsequent negotiations. The absence of officials also caused wear and tear: in 2023-2024, Foreign Minister Álvaro Leyva was recorded as the minister with the most absences, with 15 no-shows out of 25 summonses.
ELECTORAL POSITIONING
At the close of the four-year term, political oversight also served as a showcase for congress members campaigning. The summoning of ministers and agency directors allowed senators and representatives to present themselves as overseers, regional defenders, or sector spokespersons.
Therefore, the reading of political control must avoid a formalistic conclusion. The fact that it did not end in removals does not mean it was irrelevant. In a fragmented Congress and in an election year, political control functioned as a tool for visibility, wear and tear, and differentiation.
Regional banks: Territorial pains also order the agenda
The regional cross-section shows that political control is not solely based on the ideological stance of parties or the relationship of each caucus with the government. It is also shaped by territorial agendas that reflect productive, social, environmental, and infrastructural issues. In other words, congress members act as members of a party caucus, and also as spokespersons for departments and regions with specific demands.
This reading is particularly relevant for understanding the end of the four-year term. In a fragmented Congress in election mode, regional issues gain importance because they directly connect with the congress members' political base: public works, tariffs, security, health, education, housing, agriculture, environment, and energy. Therefore, political oversight also functions as a tool for territorial representation. Through summons, hearings, and questionnaires, regional blocs scrutinize the Executive Branch, seeking to demonstrate their effectiveness to their constituents and pressure for solutions to specific problems in their departments.
The data shows that each region has a distinct thematic basket. In Antioquia, the main themes are concentrated in the environment, mines and energy, agricultural matters, international relations, and transportation. This suggests a regional agenda marked by environmental conflicts, mining and energy debates, connectivity, and economic insertion. It is not solely about a bloc with national political weight, but a region that uses political control to address concerns associated with its productive structure and its relationship with strategic projects.
Bogotá, for its part, shows a different agenda. Although initially one might expect a greater focus on transportation, mobility, housing, or urban services, the data place mining and energy, environment, agricultural matters, ICT, and taxation as the most recurrent topics. This can be explained by the national profile of several of its congress members: although they represent Bogotá, many of them participate in debates of national scope and not exclusively district-level. Therefore, the Bogotá delegation should be read with caution: it does not solely express city problems, but also programmatic agendas, sectoral interests, and oversight of the central government.
In the Caribbean, the agenda partially confirms a territorial intuition: mining-energy, agricultural, and environmental issues appear among the most relevant topics. This connects with a region marked by debates on energy, tariffs, energy transition, mining, environmental conflicts, rural development, and food security. However, health, social inclusion, family, security, and ICT also appear, showing that the Caribbean bloc is not limited to a single sectoral agenda. Its behavior combines structural demands for regional development with conjunctural discussions on service delivery, state presence, and social conditions.
The Central East presents one of the clearest regional agendas. Habitat and housing, agricultural affairs, and transportation emerge as dominant themes. This combination points to a region where urban growth, housing pressure, connectivity, and the agricultural economy hold central importance. In departments such as Cundinamarca, Boyacá, Santander, and Norte de Santander, political control appears to function as a channel for discussing territorial planning, infrastructure, rurality, and living conditions. In this context, the regional dimension helps to better understand why certain issues gain legislative relevance beyond the national government's agenda. In Central South and Tolima Grande, the agenda is strongly associated with the agricultural sector, followed by health and culture. Although the volume is smaller compared to regions with larger congressional delegations, the thematic concentration is clear: agriculture acts as the axis for territorial articulation. This reading is important because it shows that, even in regions with less quantitative weight, political control can have a very defined sectoral orientation. The Coffee Region combines mining and energy, ICT, agriculture, environment, and international relations. This mix suggests a congressional delegation with more diversified interests, where traditional productive concerns coexist with issues of connectivity, technology, and sustainability. In terms of public affairs, this region should not be viewed solely through the lens of the coffee or agricultural economy, but also through emerging debates on digitalization, infrastructure, and economic transition.
The Llanos and the Amazon region show an agenda consistent with their territorial condition. The most relevant topics are agricultural affairs, transportation, mining and energy, security, taxation, the environment, and health. This combination reflects the region's main dilemmas: rurality, state presence, connectivity, conflicts associated with hydrocarbons and mining, territorial security, and environmental protection. In this bloc, political control operates as a tool to demand infrastructure, discuss resource exploitation, highlight environmental tensions, and claim greater institutional presence.
Finally, the Pacific presents an agenda marked by education, human rights and social inclusion, taxation and public finance, transportation, health, and security. This pattern shows a region where political control is associated with social gaps, connectivity, public investment, and state presence. The strength of education and social inclusion suggests that the Pacific caucus has used these mechanisms to highlight historical deficits in access, territorial inequality, and social vulnerability. Unlike other regions where productive or mining-energy issues predominate, here political control has a more social and institutional component. Together, the two regional visualizations allow us to maintain a central conclusion: Congress does not process the public agenda solely through parties, coalitions, or opposition to the Government. It also does so through territorial caucuses that turn regional problems into mechanisms of political control. For public affairs, this reading is key because it allows us to anticipate where debates may be activated, which issues mobilize each region, and which caucuses can become allies, opponents, or amplifiers of a sectoral discussion. The strategic implication is clear: legislative relations cannot be designed solely by party or commission. They must also consider the political geography of Congress. Energy, environment, and agriculture have high sensitivity in the Caribbean, Antioquia, and Llanos-Amazonia; housing, agriculture, and transportation are significant in the Center-East; education, social inclusion, and taxation are central in the Pacific; and Bogotá operates more as a national-scope caucus than an exclusively district caucus. This forces us to cross-reference any advocacy strategy with three variables: party, commission, and territory.
Atypical strategies and Law 5: govern with tools of last resort.
The lack of stable majorities led the government and its allies to use procedural tools provided for in Law 5 of 1992 more intensely. Although these mechanisms are legal and are part of the ordinary functioning of Congress, during this four-year term they acquired a politically exceptional character because they were used to keep alive projects that no longer had sufficient consensus in the committees.
The appeal became a central tool. Under the logic of Article 166, the Government's allies sought to have plenary sessions review decisions of archive or rejection adopted in committee, with the aim of reviving strategic initiatives and moving them to new discussion arenas. The labor reform and the agrarian jurisdiction are examples of how a tool intended to ensure political review ended up operating as a legislative survival mechanism for projects with high political costs. The use of urgency messages also had a relevant impact. Although it is a presidential power, its repeated use contributed to saturating the agenda of some committees, especially those responsible for economic and social affairs.
In practice, the accumulation of urgent matters, reforms, and high-impact projects shortened deliberation times, encouraged expedited procedures, and fueled criticism of so-called “desk decrees.” Political control also relied on procedural tools to compel information. The right to intervene, summons, and questionnaires allowed Congress to demand technical answers in sectors where the government faced resistance or low transparency, particularly health, budget, fiscal execution, and reform financing. At this point, Law 5 functioned as a balancing instrument: it not only structured debate but also made political costs a factor in cases of a lack of information. During the third legislative session, the government, in addition to negotiating within Congress, also began to govern with the threat of taking legislative disputes to the polls. The popular consultation regarding the shelving of the labor reform functioned as a pressure mechanism on commissions and plenary sessions: it raised the political cost of closing the process and sought to contrast direct popular will with representative procedure. In this sense, rather than an isolated participation tool, it operated as a form of plebiscitary democracy, where the Executive used the possibility of appealing to the electorate as a means to unblock an agenda that no longer had stable majorities. The core issue is that Law 5 was not a marginal element of the four-year term. It was part of the political conflict. Majorities were disputed not only in votes but also in procedural interpretations: what could be appealed, when a bill could be revived, how an urgent message should be processed, what information Congress could demand, and what leeway the presiding officers had to order or halt the agenda.
The two phases of Government: The social phase that consumed the economic phase.
One of the keys to understanding the end of the four-year term is the two-phase strategy. The Petro government came to power with a promise of transformation, but also with initial signs of moderation to reassure centrist sectors, markets, and institutional actors. The so-called “12 commandments” served as an initial political commitment: respect for private property, institutional stability, and the absence of an immediate constituent path.
That promise allowed for the construction of a broad initial coalition. Traditional parties found incentives to participate in the government and support its first initiatives. However, political capital was concentrated almost entirely in an initial social phase: health reform, pension reform, labor reform, education, equality, and the rural agenda. That phase absorbed legislative time, wore down committees, and strained relations with independent parties. The second phase, which was supposed to be oriented towards productive reactivation, industrial policy, economic growth, and sectoral reforms with greater consensus, never managed to consolidate. This wasn't because the government didn't announce it, but because the social phase consumed the available political energy. The health reform fractured the coalition; the labor reform required plebiscitary pressure and appeals; the pension reform progressed with moderation; the education reform sank; and the agrarian jurisdiction remained incomplete or conditioned by the timing of the process.
The concentration of political control in Treasury, health, agriculture, environment, energy, and transportation shows that the second economic phase was postponed due to a lack of legislative time and also because the first social phase opened up multiple fronts of sectoral pressure. Each reform brought about fiscal, operational, and territorial questions that ended up consuming Congress's agenda and forcing the Government to simultaneously defend its social program, its budgetary viability, and its execution capacity. The result was a Government that managed to introduce the change agenda but failed to stabilize it within a long-term legislative framework. The promise of transformation ended up depending on ad hoc majorities, leaderships that were not always aligned, and parties increasingly concerned about the 2026 election.
Congress 2026-2030: fragmentation, new balance of power, and conditional governability
The effective number of parties shows that power in Colombia is atomized among multiple forces, making it difficult to build majorities and forcing negotiations on every initiative, vote by vote. There is no room for a radical transformation agenda without restraint, negotiation, and process.
Following the elections of March 8, 2026, the Senate is highly fragmented. The Historical Pact remains a relevant force, but far from an absolute majority; the Democratic Center emerges strengthened as the opposition; and the Liberal, Conservative, and "La U" parties, along with new alliances, will retain swing vote power. This distribution indicates that no bloc can impose an agenda without broad agreements.
The new Congress does not eliminate polarization, but it also does not produce a clear majority for any project. The left retains a strong and more territorially consolidated bloc; the right strengthens as a containment bloc; and the traditional parties, although punished in some areas, remain necessary for any majority. In the House, there is no decisive shift to the left, but there is an advantage that forces negotiation. Furthermore, the center grows as a defining space for building majorities.
In this scenario, figures playing a role like Efraín Cepeda's gain symbolic and practical relevance. The thesis that Congress cannot be a notary for the Executive summarizes the change of era: traditional parties are no longer willing to operate as an automatic extension of the government, even when negotiating specific projects. This marks a definitive distancing from the logic of the initial coalition of 2022. The next Congress will have three effects on governability. First, it will raise the cost of structural reforms. Any profound change in health, labor, pensions, taxation, environment, energy, or justice will require multi-party coalitions. Second, it will strengthen swing blocs. The Liberal, Conservative, La U, unaligned Green parties, regional sectors, and centrist parties will have the ability to define procedures, condition reports, and shape texts. Third, it will increase the importance of committees. In a fragmented Congress, majorities are not solely built in plenary sessions. They are determined from the appointment of rapporteurs, control of the agenda, discussion times, and committee presidencies. The main forward-looking conclusion is that the 2026-2030 Congress will not be easier to govern than the 2022-2026 Congress. It will likely be more fragmented, more polarized, and more transactional. This does not prevent the approval of reforms, but it does oblige any government to reduce ambition, modulate timelines, and build agreements from the outset.
The balance of the 2022-2026 four-year term shows that Congress was, at the same time, a limit and a condition for governance. It was a limit because it forced the Executive to moderate its reforms, archive initiatives, accept modifications, and resort to pressure strategies when it lost majorities. But it was also a condition because none of the Government's legislative victories would have been possible without negotiation with traditional parties, swing blocs, and independent factions.
The decline in legislative effectiveness does not mean Congress has stopped functioning. It means the government lost the ability to rally Congress around its agenda. That difference is fundamental. The system did not come to a standstill: there were debates, political oversight, approval of laws, sanctions, dismissals, appeals, and procedural disputes. What was exhausted was the model of governance that the government attempted to sustain after the coalition broke down.
The closing of the four-year term also revealed an additional tension: in projects with high fiscal or institutional impact, part of Congress's deliberative function became increasingly conditioned by the Executive. The need for government approval for proposals with budgetary impact, the repeated use of urgent messages, and the control of technical information reduced the real decision-making margin of the legislative blocs. This does not eliminate the autonomy of the Legislative branch, but it does show that, in practice, the viability of many initiatives depended less on congressional will than on the Government's fiscal, political, and procedural stance.
The four-year term leaves a warning for the next government: in Colombia, the presidential mandate does not replace legislative construction. The government's agenda only becomes public policy when it manages to pass through Congress's rules, timing, interests, and vetoes. Petro tried to govern first with a coalition, then with factions, and finally with plebiscitary pressure. Each stage allowed him to survive, but none managed to replace a stable majority. That is the main lesson of the period: it is possible to govern without a coalition, but sustained transformation cannot be achieved without one.
Congress as a Limit and Condition of Government