Columbia has recently held elections for their congress members and also begun primaries for their upcoming presidential election. As was discussed in a previous post, this suite of elections is the first to include the political party FARC, which originated as a rebel group in the Columbian Civil War. Due to the FARC’s former role killing hundreds of thousands in the civil war, the general population doesn’t have a very favorable opinion of the group now as a political party. Columbians’ general attitude towards the party has proven true as the election results are showing. FARC received less than half a percent of the votes in both the Senate and lower house elections. Voters instead favored the more conservative parties which are against the peace deal which established FARC in politics. What makes this situation of an unsupported political party more complicated, though, is the mandatory 10 seats that FARC is entitled to under the peace agreement. Rather than merely dropping out of politics as a party would normally do in this situation, FARC instead is given more power than the voters would grant it. This imbalance of representation, where FARC has more power than democracy says it should, could become a source of significant tension in Columbian politics. But if the conservative parties which many Columbians are supporting to eliminate FARC from politics end up succeeding in this, they will be undoing the agreement which brought the civil war to an end. The destabilization which could result from such a policy move could pose a serious threat, however, the Columbian government, being stronger now than it was at the time of the civil war, could be able to effectively suppress FARC.
