RIO DE JANEIRO — It was not a banner day for Latin America’s leftists.
Colombia rejected a peace deal with Marxist rebels
on Sunday, delivering a very public victory to the conservative former
president who campaigned passionately against it. On
the same day,
voters in Brazil handed a resounding defeat to the leftist party that
once controlled their country, knocking it down in municipal elections.
It was just another sign of the shift to the right in Latin America. In less than a year, voters have thwarted the leftist movement in Argentina and elected a former investment banker as president of Peru, while lawmakers impeached the leftist leader of Brazil.
“Put
simply, conservatives are on the rise in Latin America,” said Matías
Spektor, a professor of international relations at Fundação Getúlio
Vargas, a university in Brazil.
Many
factors are feeding the trend. The sharp drop in commodities prices has
eroded economic growth around Latin America and the support leftist
governments once drew from it. The clout of evangelical Christian
megachurches is expanding, and they are confronting socially liberal
policies and channeling widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo.
But
in one country after another, the results are the same: Leaders
embracing market-friendly policies are eclipsing the leftists who
exerted sway around the Americas in the previous decade. Once-powerful
leftist presidents like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Cristina
Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina now face corruption inquiries.
Still,
political analysts caution that the trend does not necessarily involve a
wholesale rejection of the policies that won admiration and votes for
leftist governments in previous years. For instance, Michel Temer and
Mauricio Macri, the leaders of Brazil and Argentina, have expressed
support for maintaining popular antipoverty programs.
Peru’s
new president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, relied on an alliance with the
left to defeat his rival, Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of Alberto
Fujimori, the imprisoned former president.
Likewise,
Colombia’s vote on the peace deal offered an example of how
unpredictable politics is getting in some parts of Latin America.
Leaders around the region — from an array of ideological backgrounds —
had supported the agreement, which was forged between President Juan
Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the
FARC.
Colombians
rebuffed the deal largely because they thought it was too lenient on
the FARC, enabling most fighters to walk away scot-free. But the result
also showed how ready voters were to reject what the political
establishment was offering.
“Voters
defying the status quo is hardly peculiar to Colombia,” said Michael
Shifter, president of Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in
Washington. “It fits a pattern that can be discerned in Argentina,
Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico and other countries.”
Leaders
around Latin America are paying close attention to the shifting mood in
their countries. In Chile, President Michelle Bachelet returned to office in a landslide in 2013 on a platform of reducing inequality.
But Ms. Bachelet shifted course in the face of a slowing economy and a graft scandal involving her family,
naming a finance minister respected by the business establishment. Her
government’s budget for 2017 prioritizes Chile’s tradition of fiscal prudence while reining in stimulus spending.
In
Brazil, a country of 206 million, half of South America’s population,
the shift to the right has unfolded against a backdrop of rising
political divisiveness.
Supporters
of the impeached president, Dilma Rousseff, argue that her ouster was
the equivalent of a coup, a view that has weighed on the legitimacy of
Mr. Temer, her former vice president who rebelled against her.
Candidates from his centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party were
also roundly defeated in Sunday’s mayoral elections in Brazil’s largest
cities.
But
the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, which had its origins in the
opposition to the country’s military dictatorship before evolving into a
more conservative grouping that now anchors Mr. Temer’s coalition,
scored big gains. One of the party’s members, João Doria, a former host
of a reality television show that involved firing participants on the
air, glided to victory in the mayoral race in São Paulo, Brazil’s
largest city.
Some
in the region see parallels with the “Brexit” vote in which Britain
elected to leave the European Union, or the chance that Donald J. Trump,
who also starred in a reality game show in which he fired contestants,
will win the presidential election in the United States.
The vote in Colombia reflected a shift “from magical realism to tragic realism,” the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince said
on Twitter, referring to the mythical narratives of Latin American
authors like Gabriel García Márquez. “All that’s left now is for Trump
to win.”
Colombia,
for its part, has long defied easy explanations of its politics. A top
ally of Washington in Latin America, the country has traditionally been
more politically conservative than some of its neighbors, even as
nominally leftist guerrillas persisted for decades in its jungles.
The
rightward shift has stalled in some parts of the region. While the
opposition won control of Venezuela’s National Assembly earlier this
year, the country’s leftist president, Nicolás Maduro, has managed to
delay a referendum to remove him from office despite the collapsing
economy.
In Bolivia, the leftist government of President Evo Morales has won plaudits
from the International Monetary Fund for its management of the economy.
Bolivia’s central bank said in September that it expected gross
domestic product to expand by about 5 percent this year, ranking it
among Latin America’s fastest-growing economies.
But in a recent speech
peppered with references to Marx and Lenin, even Bolivia’s vice
president, Álvaro García Linera, acknowledged the ebbing influence of
leftists in the region.
“We
are facing a historical turning point in the region; some are talking
about a throwback,” Mr. García Linera said, comparing the current
situation to previous periods of conservative resurgence in Latin
America. “We must relearn what we learned in the ’80s and ’90s, when
everything was against us.”
As
leaders on the left pick up the pieces in parts of Latin America, their
dilemma now resembles that of the conservative politicians they long
struggled to dislodge.
“We
can think of the shift as a Latin American variant of the West’s
blossoming romance with anti-establishment movements,” Mohamed A.
El-Erian, the chief economic adviser at Allianz, the German financial
services giant, wrote
in a recent essay. “For now, rightist parties and policy agendas are
the main beneficiaries of the region’s economic and social disillusion.”
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