MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Historic Pact and Democratic Center lead Colombia’s Senate race after legislative vote

Petro's Historic Pact was taking 22.84% of the Senate vote, ahead of Uribe's Democratic Center’s 15.70%

Historic Pact, the left-wing coalition linked to President Gustavo Petro, and the Democratic Center, led by former president Alvaro Uribe, were on Sunday emerging as the two main forces in Colombia’s Senate for the 2026-2030 term, according to preliminary pre-count results. Colombia’s electoral authority, the Registraduría, was publishing official real-time results on its election portal, while local media reported that Senate bulletin 25 showed Historic Pact with 3,599,411 votes and Democratic Center with 2,473,529.

Under that same bulletin, Historic Pact was taking 22.84% of the Senate vote, ahead of Democratic Center’s 15.70%. They were followed by the Liberal Party with 1,840,821 votes, Alianza por Colombia with 1,566,822, the Conservative Party with 1,516,850, and the Party of the U with 1,272,697. Cambio Radical-ALMA, Ahora Colombia and the National Salvation Movement were also on course for representation, with the latter clearing the 3% threshold on 555,632 votes, or 3.52%.

If confirmed in the official scrutiny, the outcome would keep the governing coalition as the largest force in the Senate and restore Uribe’s movement as the main opposition bloc in the upper chamber. Before counting was complete that analysts expected a fragmented Congress split among roughly two dozen parties, a result likely to force the next president to assemble coalition support to pass legislation.

The legislative vote took place alongside primary-style coalition contests to choose presidential candidates ahead of the May election. With more than 86% of those votes counted, Senator Paloma Valencia was leading the right-wing primary, former senator Roy Barreras the leftist contest, and former Bogota mayor Claudia Lopez the centrist race.

Election day unfolded peacefully. Reuters said more than 246,000 members of the military and national police had been placed on alert amid fears that illegal armed groups could disrupt voting, while National Registrar Hernan Penagos defended the integrity of the process after Petro raised concerns about the vote-counting software.

Colombians were electing a new Congress while also taking part in coalition primaries, in a vote widely seen as an important test ahead of the presidential election in May and as a measure of the relative strength of the country’s main political currents.