Four Years of Gustavo Petro: What the Government of Change Actually Changed
Gustavo Petro leaves the Casa de Nariño having done something no President in Colombia’s history before him had done: governing from the left, surviving four years of institutional friction without breaking the institutions, and losing.
Not to a coup, not to a constitutional crisis, not to the street pressure he so frequently tried to generate, but to Abelardo de la Espriella, in a runoff decided by fewer than 251,000 votes.
Colombia’s democracy is, simultaneously, more representative and more fragile than it was when he arrived. That is the most honest summary of what four years of the “gobierno del cambio” actually produced. The rest is considerably more complicated.
The facts cannot be argued against
In 2022, when Gustavo Petro took office, Colombia’s official monetary poverty rate stood at 36.6%. By 2025, that number had fallen to 28%, the lowest level in the country’s recorded history. In the same period, 3.8 million people left poverty and another million left extreme poverty. Unemployment fell from 11.3% to 8%. The minimum wage was raised 23% for his final year in office, in a year when inflation closed at 5.1%, meaning the increase was real in purchasing power terms and benefited 2.5 million formal workers directly.
These are not marginal improvements. In the two metrics Petro most explicitly campaigned on, poverty and unemployment, his government delivered, and delivered beyond what his predecessors had managed. The mechanism was straightforward: sustained public spending, which is also where the complexity begins. The fiscal deficit Petro leaves behind is substantial, and it belongs to the same balance sheet as the poverty reduction. The two cannot be cleanly separated, and the Petro government rarely tried to.
The second unambiguous achievement is representational rather than material. Before August 2022, the standard photograph of a Colombian cabinet was mostly men in suits. Under Petro, Indigenous leaders, Afro-Colombian activists, and LGBTQ+ representatives occupied some of the most senior positions in the executive branch. Francia Marquez, as vice president, was both a symbolic and substantive rupture. The government’s last cabinet, presented in February 2025 as a statement of diversity, represented something real in Colombian political history: the normalization of executive power that does not look like a single demographic.
Did the Petro Administration deliver on its structural promises?
Gustavo Petro’s government arrived with three flagship reforms: labor, health, and pension, intended to constitute, collectively, a restructuring of Colombia’s social contract. The record on all three is complicated enough that both his supporters and his critics can selectively quote it honestly. The labor reform passed. It increased employer obligations for nighttime, Sunday, and holiday work, strengthened worker protections in formal employment, and was signed into law in June 2025. It is the clearest case of a Petro promise that became durable policy.
The pension reform also passed the legislature, albeit in circumstances the Petro government’s own allies made constitutionally questionable. The Constitutional Court subsequently suspended its application pending review of whether congressional approval was procedurally valid, a situation created largely by the rushed tactics of the Pacto Historico itself. As of today, the reform exists on paper and does not exist in practice.
The health reform is the administration’s most blatant administrative failure. Petro made it the central legislative battleground of his administration despite it not being among the primary concerns of Colombian voters, who were more preoccupied with employment, security, and the cost of living. He announced it before the other two reforms, over the objections of his own moderate ministers, and it was rejected by Congress twice.
He then pursued administrative workarounds that can be undone by a single ministerial decree from the next government. Meanwhile, the healthcare system deteriorated on every measurable dimension during his tenure: patient complaints went from 915,000 in 2021 to 2.1 million in 2025; tutelas filed for violation of fundamental health rights rose from 92,000 to 313,000 in the same period; EPS financial losses went from 1.5 trillion pesos to 8.7 trillion pesos. Petro spent his most significant political capital on the reform whose failure coincided with the deepest deterioration of the system it was meant to fix.
The combination is not a paradox. It is a governance failure: choosing the wrong battle at the wrong time, in a way that consumed the coalitional energy that might have been used to secure the pension and labor reforms earlier and more durably.
Paz Total
If the health reform was the Petro administration’s biggest administrative failure, Paz Total is the administration’s deepest political failure, because it was the one he had the most personal credibility to deliver and the one whose failure caused the most measurable harm.
Gustavo Petro came to the presidency of Colombia having argued, convincingly to many, that the Duque government had failed to achieve peace not because peace was impossible but because Duque lacked the political will and personal legitimacy to pursue it. Petro, who had been a member of the M-19 guerrilla, positioned himself as a natural interlocutor for armed groups that had spent decades fighting governments that did not understand them. The logic was not unreasonable. The results were.
After four years, Colombia has zero new peace agreements. The ELN, which Petro promised to resolve in his first 100 days, is substantially stronger than it was in 2022. FARC dissident factions expanded their armed presence by an estimated 70%. The Clan del Golfo grew by 60%. The assassination of social leaders and former FARC combatants, which Petro specifically pledged to stop, continued throughout his term. The kidnapping and terrorism that he had argued were symptoms of a state that refused dialogue returned to major cities. On June 7, 2025, gunmen contracted by FARC dissidents shot senator and presidential candidate Miguel Uribe Turbay, who died months later.
The trajectory of Petro’s own posture toward armed groups traces the arc of the failure. He negotiated. He declared ceasefires, and then, when negotiations collapsed, ordered bombing campaigns and artillery strikes against the same groups, using precisely the military tools whose use under Duque he had condemned for their civilian impact. Petro also appointed a military officer as Minister of Defense for the first time in 35 years. The “gobierno del cambio” ended its peace policy in roughly the same place as the governments it had criticized, with considerably more institutional damage to the peace framework along the way.
The Governance Problem
The deeper pattern across all of Petro’s failures- health reform, peace talks, coalition management- is not ideology. It is administration. Petro named more than 60 ministers in four years, a number without precedent in Colombian presidential history. His predecessor Ivan Duque named 40 across his full term; Juan Manuel Santos named 69, but across two four-year terms. The cabinet was in permanent, visible crisis. The first televised Council of Ministers, in February 2025, triggered the most significant cabinet purge of his presidency, in which ministers publicly criticized each other and senior presidential advisors in front of cameras. Several of the most critical portfolios, Interior, Finance, and Foreign Affairs, cycled through four ministers each. Justice went through six.
The instability was not merely administrative. It reflected a governing style that prioritized confrontation over consolidation, rhetoric over sequencing, and Gustavo Petro’s own interpretation of events over the structural reality of how Colombia’s institutions actually work. When the Constitutional Court ruled against parts of his tax reform, not for political reasons, but for the procedural weaknesses that legal experts had flagged from the moment the bill was introduced, he called it a soft coup.
When courts, the Banco de la Republica, the press, and the congressional opposition created friction, he interpreted each instance as evidence of an organized conspiracy against him, rather than as the functioning of a system of checks and balances that he had spent his career insisting Colombia needed more of.
He published approximately 15,000 posts on X during his presidency, roughly ten per day. He used social media to announce state decisions, carry out Colombia’s foreign policy, to attack domestic and international adversaries, to generate street mobilizations, and, in the period after losing the regional elections of October 2023, to systematically undermine confidence in the electoral system that had brought him to power and that, in his final weeks, produced his successor. The posts are a real-time record of a governing style that was more comfortable with declaration than with execution.
Gustavo Petro leaves a complicated legacy in Colombia
Colombia in August 2026 is not the same country it was in August 2022. In a real number of ways, it is better: fewer people are in poverty, fewer people are unemployed, the executive branch looks more like the country it governs, and the idea that someone from outside Colombia’s traditional political class can reach the presidency has been demonstrated twice in four years, first by Petro himself, and then by De la Espriella, whose path to power was made plausible in part by the normalization of outsider candidacies that Petro represented.
The democratic space is wider. Petro did not concentrate power, did not shut down elections, did not move toward the authoritarian consolidation that his opponents predicted and his rhetoric sometimes suggested. When the institutions pushed back- courts, the central bank, the press- they held. That is not a small thing in a region where the same pressures have repeatedly led to different outcomes.
But the democratic space is also weaker. The systematic effort to delegitimize electoral results, the attacks on judicial independence, the appointment of personal lawyers to the Constitutional Court- these are not trivial. They are the kind of erosion that does not show up in a four-year balance sheet but accumulates across decades. Petro leaves a democracy that is more inclusive and somewhat less trusted than the one he inherited.
The person who made that trade was a president who genuinely wanted to change Colombia, who had real achievements in the areas he directly controlled, but who ultimately failed at the things he most publicly promised.