the advantageous position that arises from holding a public office and participating in an electoral contest on the basis of the following terms: (…) if the president were reelected for a second time, his or her term of office would extend for four more years, for a total number of twelve years, a lapse of time which, in addition to widely exceeding the limits that, according to institutional practice and history in Colombia, has been the longest attempted in a presidential system subject to rules that prevent its deterioration, would have an impact on the institutional balance achieved by coordinating the president’s term of office with those of other senior state officials, as well as on the renewal of the political model and on the principle of rotation in office. (…) the eventual lengthening of the president’s term of office up to twelve years entails upsetting the equilibrium between the figure of the head of state with the relevant powers vested in him or her by the presidential system of government, whose powers to appoint are reinforced and whose term of office coincides with those of the officials of various monitoring and judicial bodies that he or she appointed or were elected from short lists proposed by him or her, with regard to the role that these monitoring bodies in charge of ensuring the system of checks and balances for the presidential power would perform. As such, a president who is a member of a political party who has secured a majority in congress would manage to control not only the executive and legislative branches of government, but also the judicial branch and autonomous and independent institutions such as the Bank of the Republic and the National Television Commission, precisely by virtue of the authority to appoint described above. (…) The second immediate reelection would also have direct consequences for the relationship between the executive branch and the legislative branch because congress is renewed in its entirety every four years, whereas the president would be able to stay in power for twelve years. It is clear that, owing to the presidential system of government adopted by the 1991 Constitution, a president elected by universal suffrage can exert a decisive influence on the structure of the legislative branch, so that political parties that pledge their support to the president may obtain significant majorities in congress. (…) The prolonged permanence of the president in office implies a similar permanence of the political party, movement, or coalition supporting the presidency, so that the continuation of persons or ideologies favorable to the state would thereby be consolidated. This continuation entails a high risk of installing a hegemony, characterized specifically in the practical instatement of a system interested in ensuring the self-preservation of the model being advocated and the perpetuation of a regime which, over time, tends to augment the decisionmaking role of the leader and the glorification of his or her individual qualities, to the point of increasingly creating a kind of charismatic legitimacy supported by a prevailing majority and teams established to perform government tasks. (…) Suffice it to add that, along with equality of treatment and within the set of conditions that have been observed during the presidential campaign, equality of opportunities also plays a noteworthy role, because of which an attempt is made to ensure that all candidates start off on a level playing field and that, in the electoral contest, their own specific capacities are taken into account to transmit their message to the voters, without the presence of unfair advantages that place some of them in a privileged or more favorable situation than that enjoyed by the other candidates. (…) Among the factors with a high potential for unduly interfering with the electoral process and undermining the equality of opportunities which must help the candidates, there is the superiority enjoyed by those who are holding a public office. Indeed, the eventual wielding of power to influence voters is a mechanism of abuse that the legal system tries to avoid by requiring those at the helm of government to be neutral in the election or by preventing causes of disqualification which, because of their specific situation, would prevent certain persons from submitting their names to the consideration of voters. 56 71. By means of Legislative Action 2 of 2015, Colombia eliminated the presidential reelection clause and confined the head of state’s constitutional administration to one single four-year term of office. In 2016, the Constitutional Court, in its judgment C 230-2016, dismissed a claim on constitutional grounds against said provision that amended the Constitution and provided that a citizen who, on the basis of any standing, had held the office of the presidency would not be able to be elected to be president of the republic. The ban on reelection could only be amended or repealed by means of a referendum convened by a people’s initiative or a constitutional convention. Regarding this, it provided the following reasoning: 56 Judgment of the Constitutional Court of Colombia C -141-2010 of February 26, 2010.