With Colombia’s presidential first round barely a week away, the progressive camp has consolidated sharply. Carlos Caicedo, the former governor of Magdalena who had mounted a breakaway bid critical of President Gustavo Petro, withdrew from the race on Monday and endorsed Iván Cepeda, the governing Pacto Histórico’s official candidate. Cepeda has now absorbed three former rivals—Caicedo, Clara López, and Luis Gilberto Murillo—into a broad left-wing alliance, signing a programme that pledges agrarian reform, deeper equality, and expanded citizen participation. The manoeuvre, unveiled in the Caribbean city of Barranquilla, transforms a fragmented field into a formidable bloc capable of prevailing in a likely runoff.

Yet the vote’s integrity remains in doubt. British press accounts from the southwestern village of Potrerito describe residents paralysed by fear: Gladys Marín, who lives just a hundred metres from a police station repeatedly targeted by drone-dropped explosives, may not cast a ballot at all. Across the country, more than 400 attacks against candidates and political figures have been recorded, adding to the unease. In response, 228,000 soldiers have been deployed under ‘Plan Democracia 2026’, an operation Argentine news agencies describe as the largest electoral security mobilisation in recent memory, intended to guarantee that polling stations can function from the Amazon to the Andean highlands.

The campaign’s closing rallies laid bare a country cleaved by ideology. In Bogotá, right-wing candidate Paloma Valencia packed a sports arena with supporters; in Medellín, the conservative lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella summoned his base; and in Barranquilla, Cepeda staged a mass gathering that President Petro amplified by posting a clip on social media alongside a cryptic fable comparing opponents to mice and cats. Petro’s open partisanship drew swift condemnation from the opposition for blurring the lines between head of state and party activist, deepening an already poisonous atmosphere.

Yet the contest also marks a subtle shift: for the first time, several women are credibly vying for the presidency, among them Valencia, Edna Carolina Prada, and Claudia López’s would-be successor. Valencia’s meeting in Panama with Nobel laureate María Corina Machado signalled an effort to unite the fractured anti-left vote under a banner of democratic defence, a gambit that will be tested as soon as the ballots are counted.

Colombian law requires an outright majority to win on Sunday, a threshold no candidate is expected to reach. Viewed from Washington and Brussels, the runoff scenario will hinge on whether the right can coalesce behind a single figure—most plausibly Valencia—or whether factionalism allows Cepeda to marshal the combined strength of the left. Meanwhile, security forces brace for potential post-election unrest, acutely aware that the ghosts of a decade-old peace accord, rejected by armed factions still active in the countryside, threaten to haunt the democratic process itself.