Ariel Goldstein Farid Kahhat Ernesto Bohoslavsky.
The last seven years have brought a string of successes for the right in Latin America. In October 2018, Jair Bolsonaro won the Brazilian presidency. In June the following year, Nayib Bukele came to power in El Salvador, and that November, the Bolivian right seized on an electoral crisis and ousted Evo Morales. In Peru, after the leftist Pedro Castillo narrowly won the presidency in 2021, right-wing forces in Congress paralysed his government and eighteen months later, after his failed attempt to dissolve the parliament, booted him out of office; they have maintained a lock on the country’s politics since. In Chile, the far right made a strong showing in the 2021 elections, successfully mobilised to vote down the country’s proposed new constitution in 2022 and dominated elections to the body tasked with drawing up an alternative charter in 2023. Javier Milei’s surprise win in Argentina in late 2023 confirmed and consolidated the region’s rightward drift.
This year brought another big win for the right: the implosion of the Movimiento al Socialismo in Bolivia ended almost twenty years of left-wing dominance, opening the way for the centre-right candidate Rodrigo Paz to win the presidency, while right and centre-right parties gained control of both chambers of the Legislative Assembly. In Colombia, Gustavo Petro’s left coalition is struggling, and parliamentary and presidential elections are due next year. In Chile, three of the four leading candidates for the imminent presidential contest are on the far right. Polls currently show José Antonio Kast, the far-right candidate who came close to winning four years ago, in second place behind the left coalition’s candidate, Jeannette Jara of the Chilean Communist Party; in third place is Evelyn Matthei of the Unión Demócrata Independiente, a party created in the 1980s by the Pinochet dictatorship. Kast broke with the UDI in 2016 because it was too moderate. In fourth place is Johannes Kaiser, a libertarian who broke with Kast’s new party because for him that was too moderate.
What explains this right-wing surge? To some extent it conforms to a global pattern exemplified in the US by Trump, in Asia by Modi and Duterte, and in Europe by Orbán, Le Pen, Meloni and Farage. There are parallels between these right-wing populists and Latin America’s contemporary right: they share a hostility to ‘globalism’ and to ‘gender ideology’ and the conviction that ‘cultural Marxism’ has taken hold of most of the world’s media outlets and universities. Like its peers elsewhere, Latin America’s right has also effectively exploited social media to ratchet up polarisation and outrage.
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