The Economist March 12th 2022 29
The AmericasLatinAmericanpoliticsMany shades of pink
W
hen gabriel boric, who is 36 and
calls himself a “libertarian socialist”,
is sworn in as Chile’s president on March
11th it will mark the most radical reshaping
of his country’s politics in more than 30
years. His election in December is also
widely seen as part of a new “pink tide” of
left-wing governments in Latin America. It
followed the victory of left-of-centre presi-
dential candidates in Mexico, Argentina
and Bolivia between 2018 and 2020 and in
Peru and Honduras last year. Two left-
wingers, Gustavo Petro in Colombia and
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, the re-
gion’s most populous country, lead in
opinion polls ahead of presidential elec-
tions in May and October respectively. Lat-
in America, it seems, is poised to swing de-
cisively to the left (see map on next page).
The picture is more complicated than it
looks. The dominant trend for several
years has been anti-incumbency, at least
where elections are fair. The left has done
well mainly because voters rejected right-
leaning governments, which have had to
deal with economic stagnation and then
the pandemic. Region-wide surveys show
that voters cluster in the centre. But they
want better public services and think that
their countries are governed for the benefit
of a privileged few, which can help the left.
Mr Boric’s victory, and that of Pedro
Castillo, a rural schoolteacher with no for-
mal political experience, in Peru last June
brought comparisons with an earlier pink
tide. That began with the election of Hugo
Chávez in Venezuela in 1998. It included
the likes of Lula in Brazil, Evo Morales in
Bolivia, Néstor Kirchner and his wife Cris-
tina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina
and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. In an article
in 2006 in Foreign Affairs, a journal, Jorge
Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign min-
ister, argued that there were “two lefts” in
the region. One, represented by Lula and
the Workers’ Party in Brazil, the Broad
Front in Uruguay and the centre-left Con-certación coalition in Chile, was “modern,
open-minded, reformist, and internation-
alist”. The other was “nationalist, strident
and closed-minded” and came from Latin
America’s tradition of populism. This left
included Chávez, Mr Morales, the Kirch-
ners and later Mr Correa in Ecuador, all of
whom nationalised businesses and railed
against American imperialism.
In some respects that distinction still
holds today. “I don’t see a homogenous
progressive axis from Mexico City to Santi-
ago,” says Mr Castañeda. If anything, there
are even more variations than in the past.
In part, that is because of what is about
to happen in Santiago. Mr Boric represents
something new. Although he, like all left-
ists, worries about economic inequality
and looks to the state to reduce it, he will
bring to Chile’s presidency the concerns of
his generation. For Mr Boric, the “existen-
tial issues” are “climate change, gender in-
equality and the recognition of indigenous
communities”, says Robert Funk, a politi-
cal scientist. Argentina’s Peronist presi-
dent, Alberto Fernández, shares Mr Boric’s
social liberalism and Mr Petro in Colombia
his greenery. The Chilean combines those
21st-century priorities. Mr Boric’s electoral
programme mentioned gender 94 times
and economic growth just nine times.
Unlike Chávez and Ms Fernández de
Kirchner, now Argentina’s vice-president,
he is a consensus-builder, not a flame-
thrower. Mr Boric uses social media to es-
tablish rapport with his supporters ratherL IMA, MEXICO CITY, SANTIAGO AND SÃO PAULO
A wave of leftwing governments has more differences than similarities→Alsointhissection
— Bello is away