The Comunes party, which emerged from the demobilization of the former FARC guerrilla following the 2016 peace agreement, has ceased to exist as a political force in Colombia. Eight years after arriving in Congress with representation guaranteed by the pact signed with the State, the organization failed to elect any of its candidates in the 2026 legislative elections.
By failing to reach the minimum number of votes required by electoral law, it lost its legal status and was officially left out of the political system.
The outcome confirms the limited electoral support the party had shown since its creation. For two legislative terms, its presence in Congress had been guaranteed by the peace agreement itself, which reserved ten seats to facilitate the transition of former combatants into legal politics.
But once that exceptional period ended, the organization had to compete for citizens’ votes like any other party. In that first test without automatic guarantees, the result was decisive: no candidates elected and insufficient electoral support to continue to exist.
Former FARC party loses legal status in Colombia over lack of electoral support
The political organization born out of the former guerrilla never fully managed to shed the weight of its past. From the beginning, its transformation into a party aroused distrust among broad sectors of Colombian society, shaped by more than half a century of internal armed conflict.
Even the name of the new movement reflected those tensions. When the party was founded, the former commanders decided to maintain — in a first blatant mistake that showed their disconnection from the country’s social and political reality — the historical initials of the guerrilla. The movement initially presented itself as the Common Alternative Revolutionary Force, keeping the acronym FARC.
The decision sought to preserve the political identity of the insurgent group, but it also provoked strong rejection among much of public opinion, which continued to associate those letters with kidnappings, attacks, and decades of violence.
After the failure at the polls, the party’s leadership issued a statement confirming its commitment to peace. “We reaffirm our commitment to the full implementation of the Final Peace Agreement; the unity of the popular sectors is the path to building social justice and democracy. We will continue working so that peace becomes a reality in Colombia,” Comunes wrote on its account on the social network X last Monday, March
Reafirmamos nuestro compromiso con la implementación integral del Acuerdo Final de Paz, la unidad de los sectores populares es el camino para construir justicia social y democracia.
Seguimos caminando para que la paz sea una realidad en Colombia.🇨🇴✊🏻 pic.twitter.com/IG07mWL8ZN
— Partido COMUNES 🌹 (@ComunesCoL) March 9, 2026
Over time, the organization understood the political cost of that decision and opted for a change of name. The party came to be called Comunes, in an attempt to build an image closer to the public and less linked to the armed past. However, the rebranding failed to alter the underlying perception or translate into significant electoral support.
External difficulties were compounded by problems within the organization itself. The transition from a guerrilla structure to a civilian and democratic political party proved more complex than expected. Internal differences began to become visible over the years and eventually weakened the movement.
Some of the former leaders distanced themselves from the political project, while others staged departures that exposed internal tensions. Disagreements over the party’s direction, its relationship with other sectors of the left, and its failed electoral strategy became increasingly visible.
The organization also had to face the impact of armed dissident groups, led by former commanders who rejected the peace agreement or returned to clandestinity. Although these structures were not part of the legal party, their existence reinforced the distrust of sectors of the population toward the political project born from the peace process.
The missed opportunity to integrate into the left
Amid this panorama, Comunes had an opportunity that could have changed its political destiny. During the consolidation of the Historic Pact as the major unified party of the Colombian left, the organization of former combatants could have taken a deeper step toward integration into a unitary project.
Some sectors raised the possibility that the organization could dissolve within that political alliance, contributing to the creation of a broader party of the Colombian left and guaranteeing a dignified disappearance — as happened with Human Colombia, the Democratic Pole, the Patriotic Union, and the Communist Party, founders of the Historic Pact that ceased to exist organically after the formation of the Historic Pact.
Had Comunes also integrated — something that probably would not have helped the Pact much either — the organization of demobilized guerrillas could have explained a more epic and generous ending by converging in an unusual unitary project of left-wing organization. That was not the case.
Despite its open support for the legislative initiatives of the Petro government, Comunes sought allies in Citizen Force (Fuerza Ciudadana, in Spanish), a party — now turned into a political coalition — led by former Magdalena governor Carlos Caicedo, within a left-wing current dissident from the government that, like Comunes, failed resoundingly last Sunday at the Colombian polls.
Disconnection from the country that left the war behind and the closing of a historical cycle
The organization’s political trajectory was also marked by a deeper difficulty: the distance between the experience of its leaders and the current political reality of Colombian society.
Many of the party’s leaders had spent decades in armed struggle, in clandestinity and in rural territories far from the center of national political life. That long period in the mountains, devoted to war, ended up creating a disconnection from the social and political changes the country had experienced.
For much of the population, the guerrilla’s violence remained too recent a memory. The kidnappings, attacks, and battles that marked the armed conflict left a deep mark on the collective memory. This reality made it difficult for the party to build a broad electoral base beyond its own and limited militants.
The disappearance of Comunes as a political party symbolizes the end of a stage that began with the signing of the 2016 peace agreement. For eight years, the movement had a guaranteed presence in Congress intended to facilitate its transition into democratic politics; however, as happened with the M-19 guerrilla, demobilized in 1990, its political platform will not continue.
Whether the survivors will manage, through new initials as the demobilized members of M-19 did — one of them, Gustavo Petro, is now the country’s president — to continue specific political proposals is something that will have to take shape in times further removed from this ending by implosion.
In the midst of the process of consolidating a clearly democratic and systemic left, overcoming a past in which it was both victim and perpetrator, Comunes has failed to obtain social support when it has had to compete without the guarantees of the peace agreement.
After more than 60 years of internal armed conflict, four years of peace negotiations in Cuba, and eight years of guaranteed parliamentary representation, the political project of the former combatants — which did not want to or was not accepted into the unitary project of the left — has come to an end. The party of the former FARC is now part of Colombia’s recent political history.