By Luis Jaime Acosta
BOGOTA, March 6 (Reuters) - Colombians head to the polls on Sunday to elect a new Congress and choose three of the presidential candidates who will contest elections this May, a vote that will shape the next president's ability to push through legislation and fulfill their agenda.
Voters will choose from over 3,000 candidates to fill 102 Senate seats and 182 House seats, in a vote analysts predict will be divided among dozens of parties, likely forcing the next president to form
a coalition government.
Some 41.2 million eligible voters will also be able to participate in consultations through which the right, center and left-wing parties will select their presidential candidates.
However, the candidates leading the polls, leftist Ivan Cepeda, an ally of current President Gustavo Petro, and right-wing Abelardo De La Espriella, will not participate in Sunday's consultations but will be on the ballot for the May 31 presidential election.
Sergio Guzman, the director of consultancy firm Colombia Risk Analysis, said that with a Congress split among several political parties, "any government will see its legislative proposals diluted" and have difficulty getting them approved.
Morgan Stanley also expects Colombia’s fragmented party system to persist in Sunday's legislative vote, meaning centrist and traditional parties will likely remain crucial to forming congressional alliances.
JPMorgan said Colombian assets currently price little extra election risk, suggesting the legislative vote alone is unlikely to move markets unless it clearly signals a shift in policy.
A divided result would likely keep markets steady. Stronger opposition momentum could support the peso and narrow sovereign spreads, while gains for the left could weigh modestly on local assets and keep fiscal concerns in focus.
For Guzman, the consultations to choose candidates will allow the right, the left, and the center parties to measure their strength in the lead-up to the presidential elections.
Petro has repeatedly questioned the software that will be used for the vote count in the elections, calling it unreliable and vulnerable to fraud, and has raised doubts about the way in which the physical tally sheets from the polling stations, called E-14, are filled out manually.
"The transparency of the Colombian electoral process is complete and absolutely guaranteed. There are absolute guarantees with the software and the E-14 forms," National Registrar Hernan Penagos recently said.
The registrar denied the possibility the software used to tally the votes could be altered, and reiterated the main guarantee would be the 860,000 jurors at the 125,000 polling stations set up throughout the country, in addition to more than three million party witnesses.
Some 246,000 members of the military forces and the national police have been placed on high alert to prevent attacks by illegal armed groups seeking to disrupt the election or pressure voters to cast their ballots for certain candidates, Defense Minister Pedro Sanchez said this week.
Leftist guerrillas throughout the country often carry out attacks during elections, a common occurrence of the six-decade internal armed conflict that has left more than 450,000 dead in Colombia.
(Report by Luis Jaime Acosta in Bogotá, additional report by Rodrigo Campos in New York, editing by Chris Reese)
