Opinion: Latin America’s swing to the right

A new political trend is taking shape in Latin America. For the past six years or so, international political talk about the region has been all about voters’ swirl to the left. The new and under-reported story is the re-emergence of the right.

Chile, Uruguay and Brazil are the three countries in the region that best epitomise the mellow, well-behaved left that the international right is willing to praise from time to time – as opposed to Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia. Their governments are seen as financially responsible, have a good number of socially-friendly policies and the three presidents – Michelle Bachelet, Tabaré Vázquez and Lula – are both respected abroad and very popular at home.

The three countries are also in the midst of presidential election campaigns. Uruguayans will be going to the polls in October and Chileans in December, and while the Brazilian election is set for October 2010, the campaign is already in its initial stages. One could rightfully suppose that the left is cruising to victory. Strikingly though, the frontrunners are all centre-to-right.

Optimists believe the tide may still change in favour of the progressive candidates. According to surveys, the Socialist candidate in Uruguay, José “Pepe” Mujica, leads the race by four points over the main conservative candidate, the former president (1990-1995) Luis Alberto Lacalle. But he would probably lose in the runoff when the two conservative parties (Nacional and Colorado) are more than likely to join forces against the left as they did in 1999.

In Chile, surveys have Eduardo Frei, the former president (1994-2000) and candidate for the centre-left, lagging by less then 10 points behind Sebastián Piñera, the billionaire businessman running on the right (President Bachelet, who enjoys popularity rates of over 80% is still to campaign openly for Frei).

In Brazil, the gap is wider: Lula’s candidate, Dilma Rousseff, lags the top opposition candidate, José Serra, by well over 20 points.

Progressive optimism is undermined if other regional elections this year are considered benchmarks. The only president elected in Latin America this year was a conservative businessman, Ricardo Martinelli, in Panama, and in congressional elections in both Mexico and Argentina voters tilted to the right.

In Mexico, the main leftist alternative, the PRD, ended in a far-off third place after winning second place in a highly contended presidential election in 2006. In Argentina, the centre-to-left faction of the Peronist party led by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner, was handed a lofty nationwide defeat by more right-leaning alternatives that included a rebel Peronist wing. While the Kirchners are not nearly as popular as other regional leaders, their defeat is worth taking into account within the bigger regional picture.

Critics say the Kirchners are not truly leftists, simply disguised as such. The same can be heard in different degrees about Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, and even by critics from the left of Bachelet and Lula, unhappy with the pair’s good relationships with the markets. However, if political stances are analysed through the context of regional politics in the past 20 to 30 years and of the alliances sought on the international stage by current leaders there is no question they all stand firmly on the left.

This leads to an obvious question: Why are popular, and even successful, progressive leaders seeing their parties trail the opposition right, especially given the legacy of the conservative governments of the 90s?

Immanuel Wallerstein recently attempted an explanation. The Latin American left, he said, came to power “because of US distraction and good economic times. Now it faces continued distraction but bad economic times. And it is getting blamed because it’s in power.” The explanation is likely to find many adherents, but may be a tad simplistic if one considers forecasts by the likes of Ricardo Marino, head of the Latin American banking federation, who said this month that the region will be the first in the world to pull out of the global recession.

A second explanation may lie in the difficulty popular regional leaders have finding younger and charismatic heirs. In Chile, the centre-to-left governing Concertación front’s best option ended up being a 67-year-old former president. In Uruguay, the Frente Amplio front turned to Mujica, who is 74. In Brazil, when Lula in late 2008 picked Rousseff as his candidate, he chose a minister in her 60s whose recognition rates among voters was in the single digits.

The left came to power in most of Latin America because of the awful legacy of the conservative policies from previous decades. It was not easy: Lula ran unsuccessfully for the presidency three times before winning, and Vázquez failed twice to reach the presidency. That their political legacy, and that of others in other countries, is at risk speaks loads to the difficulties of building progressive leadership in Latin America.