Colombian general election, 1974

General elections were held in Colombia on 21 April 1974 to elect the President, the Senate and the Chamber of Representatives. They were the first elections after the end of the National Front agreement, which had restricted electoral participation to the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party, with each party allocated 50% of the seats in both houses, whilst the Presidency alternated between the two parties.

Although the 1974 elections were crucial in that both parties fielded presidential candidates for the first time in over thirty years, only 45 percent of eligible voters voted. Scholars also attributed Colombia's traditionally high abstention rates to apathy, to non-compulsory voting, and to bureaucratic obstacles, such as inconvenient residency requirements. In the presidential elections, all three main candidates were the son or daughter of previous presidents. Alfonso López Michelsen of the Liberal Party emerged as the winner with 56% of the vote. The Liberal Party also won a majority of seats in Congress.

The initial discussion of the National Front began in 1958 between liberal Alberto Lleras Camargo and conservative Laureano Gomez when they wrote the , which lead to a 16 year term in which the Liberal and Conservatives would alternate presidency every four years. The National Front was the result of following series of agreemnets between Camargo and Gomez including The March Pact and the and created a joining force between the Liberal and Conservative parties. The agreement affirmed to assuage interparty strife and distrust due violence and democratic collapse, mainly in response to La Violencia, a civil war which lasted from 1948 to 1958 between the Colombian Conservative Party and Colombian Liberal Party parliamentary forces who organized as armed self-defense and guerrilla military units. The cause of this internal strife was due to the refusal of successive governments to accede to the people's demands for socioeconomic change and instead created a military occupation in Colombia that sent the national economy deep into debt. General Rojas Pinilla took power in 1953, he declared an amnesty that demobilized most of the armed groups. However, due to conflict with the Liberal and Conservative groups, Rojas was removed from power in 1957, and the Liberal-Conservative parties took over again with their new alliance to try and rehabilitate the economy while maintaining power.

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