In the past 14 national elections in Latin America, the government-backed candidate has lost 13 times. The sole exception is Nicaragua’s artlessly rigged vote in favor of re-installing its dictator. In no competitive electoral system has the government won. The wave has swept away criminally corrupt governments and adequately competent ones alike. Remember, government performance has little to do with voting choices when the lean cow years come.And the problem is not simply that incumbents and incumbent-backed candidates always lose, the issue is who they lose to.
The generation of leaders finding their ways to the second round of Latin American presidential elections in the 2020s is a sorry cast. It includes the hard-right populist daughter of Peru’s multi-decade dictator, a small-town TikTok obsessed Colombian millionaire mayor with a long record of abusing his staff, a former Brazilian air force colonel who has spent decades arguing for a return to military dictatorship, a hard-left former guerrilla cadre whose nom de guerre, “Aureliano,” was cribbed from the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez, the hard-right brother of a Pinochet Cabinet minister, and a son of a rural schoolteacher turned hard-left party leader. Some of them won, some lost, but none bear any resemblance to the sober men-in-gray-suits who took care of party politics a generation or two ago (and often failed to deliver as well).
The common thread is not that all these new contenders are Marxists or communists, nor is it that they’re all Trumpists or authoritarians. It’s that they’re all far, far outside what would have been considered mainstream even five or six years ago. They all pitch themselves as radical outsiders with determined proposals to shake up the country. Few have any government experience at all, and many espouse ideas that could kindly be described as “unorthodox.”
More and more often, elections in the region consist of a choice between these kinds of contrasting extremists of highly dubious allegiance to democracy. Some will use the tactics of populism, polarization and post-truth to try to establish themselves in power as elected autocrats. Others will try to work within existing channels, but they will most often fail, because of those lean cows.
Either way, the success or failure of these newcomers in office will have little to do with their own skill, and much to do with what happens to next year’s price of soybeans. Or sardines. Or lithium. Or oil. Or cotton. Or copper — or whichever commodity your particular country specializes in.
For their part, many Latin Americans voters have indeed noticed that whom they vote for doesn’t much seem to matter for how their lives progress. This has turned a shocking number of them against the whole concept of democracy. In its 2020 report — i.e., pre-pandemic — the respected consultancy Latinbarómetro found 10 countries in the region where democracy no longer enjoyed majority support. Heartbreakingly, among the countries where support for democracy is highest is my own Venezuela, where it has been wholly extinguished.
Few of the newcomers seem up to the monumental tasks that await them. When they fail — and most of them will fail — voters will be tempted to back even more extreme candidates. Some will fall to outright authoritarians, as Nicaragua and Venezuela already have, while others will continue to cycle through disposable presidents at breathtaking speed, an art perfected by the Peruvians.
― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, 12 July 2022 11:53 (one year ago) link