Far-Right’s electoral victories in Colombia and Germany and their effects

Opening Remarks

This mini newsletter has been published during the week of October 19^th as Brazil heads toward the runoff of a decisive presidential election, the results of which will determine the future of democracy in the country. It discusses the first round of voting but also contextualizes the Brazilian election in relation to two other electoral events. The first is Colombian presidential elections held in June; the other, farther afield, is the German state elections that took place in September. This editorial choice seeks to underscore, once again, that what is happening in Brazil—while it may have its own unique characteristics—is not exactly exceptional.

Regarding the first round of the Brazilian elections, a series of seven articles (in Portuguese), produced by the Gênero&Urnas initiative, examines how “gender” featured in its tense dynamics. These analyses are complemented by a briefing on voting data and a selection of in-depth analyses on the short- and long-term political significance of these results. Then, in the following pages, we offer an overview of the other two electoral processes, supplemented by interviews and analyses by Alejandro Gamboa, Viviana Bohórquez Monsalve (Colombia), and Alrik Schubotz (Germany), whom we thank for their promptness and generosity.

Colombia and Germany: Common Threads That Span Distances

A first observation to be made regarding the elections in these two countries is that they not only differed in scope—the first was national and the other two were state-level—but also in what concerns differentials in terms of both historical backgrounds perspective and current sociocultural conditions that shape electoral sentiments and trends. However, their results strikingly illustrate causes and effects of the concurrent and persistent rise of the far right, with unequivocal effects on gender and sexuality policies. Looking at these processes from the perspective of the Brazilian context, it is also worth noting that the post-electoral scenario in Colombia illuminates drastic effects of the far right’s rise to power in the Trump II era, when these impacts are not only relentless but also vertiginous¹.

Colombia

In the neighboring country, the first eight weeks of Abelardo de la Espriella’s administration—which took office on August 7—leave no doubt that an autocratic leader has come to power. As noted by the Jacarandas Foundation website, just as seen when Trump’s second term began , the measures taken since August aim at dismantling existing regulatory and social protection systems as quickly as possible, and openly challenging guaranteed rights. The president’s ostentatious use of speeches, symbolic gestures, and Christian religious rites projects a strongly theocratic atmosphere that threatens secularism.

No less significant, in early September, the president staged a blatant necropolitical act when, following a bombing raid on a jungle area, he strolled comfortably among the corpses. The scene that provoked widespread condemnation and outrage strongly indicates that the complex of institutions and policies established as a result of the 2016 Peace Agreement—centered on the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP)—was under explicit threat². Indeed, a few weeks later it was reported that, as provided for in the budget for 2027, funding for the Unit for the Disappeared had been drastically cut by 50%.

During the campaign and in the period leading up to the inauguration, newly appointed ministers announced the outbreak of a “cultural war” in the realms of education and culture, with the aim of transforming Colombia into the “miracle country” promised during the campaign. As known, this “war” always primarily targets gender, sexuality, and abortion rights. Consequently, as soon as the government took office, the then-Minister of Education, Viviane Morales, announced a review of school educational materials focused on sex education, claiming that they were intended to promote “ideologization” and “wokeness.” A month later, Morales that a few days later would resign from her post, appointed, by decree, 11 delegates from the Office of the President to seat on the Higher University Councils of the country’s public universities. Half of these persons have ties to religious institutions. Morales was replaced by the ultra-Catholic prosecutor Ilva Myriam Hoyos. It is no coincidence that both are well-known figures in the ongoing “war on gender,” in its Colombian version.

The Colombian current context illustrates both the longevity of the “cultural wars” on gender and the role they play in the dynamics of permanent revolution that have fueled the rise of the far right everywhere. The Colombian “war on gender” has been raging for nearly two decades. Its origins can be traced to 2007, when Ideología de Género: Utopía trágica o subversión cultural was published, authored by Attorney General Alejandro Ordoñez, who is currently serving his second term as Colombia’s ambassador to the OAS.

Ordoñez’s book—the first non-clerical anti-gender diatribe produced in Latin America—was released, not coincidentally, in the same year when the Latin American Episcopal Conference launched the Catholic Church’s first official campaign against the specter of “gender ideology.” In 2016, when the Peace Agreement, signed between the government and the FARC, was put to a referendum, these initiatives would coalesce, on a much larger scale, as right-wing forces spread a threatening phantasm: the Peace Agreement aimed at subjecting Colombian society to “gender ideology.”

This turmoil was examined by Franklin Gil Hernández in a study published by SPW in 2020. The research revisits the events that paved the way for the “war on gender” in the Peace Agreement. It examines the role of Ordóñez and Ilva Hoyos, then his deputy attorney general, in the fierce battles over abortion rights in the second half of the 2000s. It also mentions the support provided by the attorney general and his group for the protests the “guide to respecting sexual diversity” that preceded the anti-gender furor of the referendum. And, retraces the ultra-conservative record of Viviane Morales as a congresswoman representing the evangelical bloc in Congress during that same period. A re-reading of the study inevitably triggers the sensation that we are diving into a sea of signs that foreshadowed what the future might hold.

Today, there are strong indications that this future has arrived, with threats to revoke abortion rights and, above all, rhetoric and measures rejecting LGBTQIA+ rights. In mid-September, the Colombian Foreign Ministry withdrew, without prior notice, from the co-chairmanship of the Equal Rights Coalition, an intergovernmental platform dedicated to the promotion and protection of LGBTQIA+ people, and in October, rejoined the so-called Geneva Consensus, from which it had withdrawn in 2022.

Alejandro Gamboa, in a brief reflection on the state of the political landscape in early October, notes that the severe fiscal austerity measures proposed by the new government have dominated the political debate. But, according to him, in the shadow of these measures, interventions in private organizations—and, above all, attacks on the press—are proliferating, and the “culture war” announced since the transition continues unabated. Above all, there are strong signs that De la Esprillera aims not only to dismantle the left but also to subordinate the traditional right.

To learn more about what all this implies for policies on gender, sexuality, and abortion rights, we interviewed Viviana Bohórquez Monsalve, director of the Jacarandas Foundation.

Saxony and Pomerania

In the Saxony elections in early September, the significant victory (44% of the vote) of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) made headlines around the world. At the end of the month, in a new round of state elections, the AfD also got the majoritybof votes (38%) in the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania election, more than doubling its share of the vote compared to the last election in 2023. Though coming from before the ascension of AfD has gained momentum since the party entered the national parliament in 2017.

Among other effects, its striking victories in 2026 point to the implosion of the CDU, the liberal-conservative party that, together with the social-democratic SPD, has underpinned German political stability since the 1950s. These electoral gains as analyzed by Andrea Dip in the article “In Germany, Fascism Has Lost Its Shame” (in Portuguese), this political shift comes as no surprise to those who follow the German political scene. This is shown by the article in Politico, published on October 11, which examines how the rise of the AfD was preceded by nativist movements that have widely attracted a young generation educated to reject Nazi-fascism, but who now is seduced by calls for a society in which “each person has his/her place”.

At the political level, El País and the News Statesman analyzes the AfD’s growth as a string sign of the incapacity of political forces committed to democracy—in particular the CDU and the SPD—to sustain the “cordon sanitaire” that had long limited the electoral advance of the far right. The AfD’s gains are particularly disturbing, not only because it was in Germany that Nazi-fascist totalitarianism took root, but also because the AfD’s political project openly envisions a break with the European Union with a view toward a geostrategic alignment with Putin. As former Chancellor Joschka Fischer (SPD) notes, when one considers the present German scenario in connection with the concurrent rise of the far right in France, the outlook ahead is grim.

Looking at the German scene from Latin America, it is also worth recalling that in the interwar period (1920s-1930s), the presence and influence of Nazi-fascism was a frequent topic of debate across the region, especially those countries with significant numbers of German and Italian migrants. Presently, however, these connections have been overshadowed by the greater relative—and now imperial—weight of the American far right; and, in Hispanic countries, by the wider visibility of Spanish forces and actors. This does not mean, however, that these connections do not exist.

In 2021, for example, one of our bulletins reported on the visit to Brazil by several iconic figures from the German far right, who even met either with then-President Jair Bolsonaro (July 2021) or with other officials, such as the former Minister of Women, Family, and Human Rights Damares Alves (September 2021). Significantly, the then-deputy leader of the AfD, Beatrix von Storch (granddaughter of the Nazi regime’s finance minister), also visited the country, after a visit to Chile motivated by the ties of her husband—a Chilean-German businessman—to the then-Chilean presidential candidate (and now president) José Antonio Kast.

The visceral rejection of immigration, expressed in openly supremacist terms, has always been the AfD’s top priority. This does not mean, however, gender and sexuality matters are absent from its political platform. The party vigorously opposes legislation that simplifies the procedures for gender change in civil registration and advocates banning healthcare services for the gender transition of adolescents. And, even though its leader, Alice Weidel, is a lesbian and is married to an immigrant, the defense of the “traditional family” is also central to the party’s agenda, which also implies opposition to nclusive education for LGBTQIA+ people in schools and adoption rights for same-sex couples. The effects of the AfD’s electoral gains on policies regarding gender, sexuality, and abortion rights are analyzed in Alrik Schubotz’s article.

Below, we offer a series of analyses on the significance and impacts of the Colombian and German elections.

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