Colombia’s new Congress met for the first time on 20 July, and the first thing it did was hold a vote that the incoming president lost. Abelardo de la Espriella takes office on 7 August, having won June’s runoff by less than a point. His preferred candidate for the presidency of the Senate, Alfredo Deluque of the Partido de la U, was beaten by Honorio Henríquez of the Centro Democrático — the party of former president Álvaro Uribe, and, according to Colombian press accounts of the manoeuvring, Uribe’s candidate rather than de la Espriella’s.
The Senate publishes its own account of the session, and the numbers in it are precise. One hundred and three senators were sworn in at the Salón Elíptico of the Capitolio Nacional; the chamber then moved to a secret ballot, as its rules require, for the leadership board. Henríquez took 56 votes and Deluque 45, with one blank ballot — 102 of the 103 senators voting. An absolute majority of the chamber is 52, so Henríquez cleared it by four.
This site reported on 19 July, the day before the session, that the Congress elected in March gave de la Espriella “a working majority assembled with the support of the traditional parties.” That needs refining in the light of what the chamber actually did. The traditional parties were indeed with him — the Partido de la U is the archetype of the category, and Deluque was its man. They lost. What assembled a majority on the day was the Centro Democrático, and El Tiempo’s account of the session credited votes from the Pacto Histórico, the left-wing bloc of the outgoing government, with putting it over the line.
The lower house went the other way. The House of Representatives elected Nicolás Barguil of the Conservative Party as its president, a congressman for Córdoba whom the Colombian press reported as having de la Espriella’s backing. So the president-elect enters office having won one chamber’s leadership and lost the other, to a party that is nominally his ally.
The composition of both leadership boards carries the same signal. In the Senate, Henríquez is joined by Manuel Virgüez of MIRA as first vice-president and Jorge Alejandro Ocampo of the Pacto Histórico as second. In the House, Barguil is joined by Simón Molina of Creemos and Erick Velasco, also of the Pacto Histórico. The movement of the outgoing president, Gustavo Petro — which our earlier reporting noted remains the largest single bloc in both chambers — has a seat on the leadership board of each, on the day it went into opposition.
One further number from the same session is worth setting beside the presidency vote. Having split 56 to 45 on who should preside, the Senate re-elected its secretary general, Diego Alejandro González, with 101 votes drawn from across the political groups, and returned the Conservative Party’s Saúl Cruz as deputy. The chamber is divided on power and close to unanimous on administration, which is the usual shape of a Colombian congress and a caution against reading the presidency vote as a durable bloc.
The arithmetic also has a clock on it. Under the Ley 5 rules the Senate publishes, the leadership board is renewed every year for the legislature beginning on 20 July, and no member of it may be re-elected within the same four-year constitutional term. Henríquez will therefore preside over the whole of de la Espriella’s first year in office and then cannot return to the post; whoever presides over the second year will be chosen in July 2027, by a chamber that will by then have seen what the new government actually does.
De la Espriella is due to be sworn in at Bogotá on 7 August with a programme that includes a tax package, a security agenda and a foreign-policy reversal — restoring relations with Israel, severed by Petro in May 2024, and opening an embassy in Jerusalem. Each of those needs a legislature. The one he inherits has now shown, in the only vote it has taken, that it will not simply be handed to him.