Starting this month, voters throughout the region will have opportunities to begin pulling their nations back from the brink — or to weaken them further.
Starting this month, voters throughout the region will have opportunities to begin pulling their nations back from the brink — or to weaken them further.
I n the next several months, while U.S. voters focus on their own upcoming elections, residents of seven Latin American countries, including two of the most populous — Argentina and Mexico — also will choose new leaders. The results are worth watching because there’s a chance that we’ll see a retreat from the anti-Americanism that has dominated the region’s politics in recent years.
The elections begin next week with the October 15 presidential runoff in Ecuador, where Daniel Noboa, a young businessman, is expected to defeat Luisa González, a stooge of former president Rafael Correa, the corrupt autocrat who fled to Belgium to avoid a prison sentence and subsequently helped sabotage the government of outgoing president Guillermo Lasso.
A week later in Argentina, two opposition candidates — Javier Milei, who combines libertarian ideology with right-wing populism, and Patricia Bullrich, a minister of security under the former center-right president Mauricio Macri — are competing against Sergio Massa, the candidate of the Peronist government. If none of the candidates obtains enough votes to claim the presidency on October 22, there will be a runoff between the two top vote-getters. While Massa could make it to the runoff, it’s highly unlikely he would prevail. This is a race to watch.
Voters also are expected to go to the polls in Venezuela next month in a primary contest to choose the candidate who will run against dictator Nicolás Maduro next year. Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, a founding member of Vente Venezuela, a classical-liberal political party, is favored to defeat twelve other hopefuls to become the standard-bearer of the united opposition.
Chilean voters go to the polls in December; Salvadoran voters next February; the Dominican Republic will hold elections in May; and Mexico, where Xóchitl Gálvez, a businesswoman with indigenous roots, will represent a wide-ranging opposition coalition, will vote in June 2024.
All this before the Democratic and Republican national conventions.
Nobody can guarantee that candidates supporting constitutional democracy, freedom of expression, the rule of law, and free-market economics will win any of these upcoming elections. In Venezuela, the odds of a fair election are almost nil. Nor can anyone be certain that “good” candidates, even if they prevail, will govern more effectively than any of the others who in the past decade defeated left-wing populists. But given Latin America’s overall disastrous condition (with a few exceptions), the mere possibility that these elections might turn things around is reason for hope.
The current disaster has been a long time in the making, but 2015, which marked the end of the commodities boom, is a key year.
The commodities boom had lifted millions of Latin Americans out of poverty, but most countries that benefited were short-sighted, missing the opportunity to diversify and liberalize their economies in ways that would raise productivity and promote sustained prosperity. When commodity prices cratered, stagnation followed. Then came the pandemic, inflation, and high interest rates, and, now, a semi-recessionary international environment.
Demagogic, statist populists returned to power in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru. They destabilized the government of Ecuador. Populists did the same in Peru after its Marxist president, Pedro Castillo, attempted to grab dictatorial powers and was replaced by his vice president, who rejected his policies and allies. These years also brought a right-wing populist reaction against left-wing populism, in El Salvador, for example.
Every populist resurgence comes with new traits. The current one is impregnated with the cultural wars of our times, including, on the left, the kind of identity-driven, single-issue politics we see in the United States and Europe, and its counter-image on the right.
Sure, there’s been a reaction of sorts lately. The Chileans, who voted in favor of changing their constitution, and elected a constituent convention made up of extremists to rewrite it, later rejected the new charter. There have been similar backlashes against left-wing populism in Colombia, Argentina, and even Mexico, where Xóchitl Gálvez appears poised to upset the plans of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to rule behind the throne after he leaves office next year.
Is this a sign of better things to come? Let’s hope.
Elections still mean something to most Latin Americans and offer at least the possibility of change according to the rule of law and affirming individual rights. It’s a miracle that more than half (but not much more) of the region’s population still lives under liberal democracies, though many of the countries stretch the meaning of “rule of law.”
For optimists, the coming election cycle offers the promise of something better. The first test comes in Ecuador.