Latin America’s Center Cannot Hold If It Doesn’t Exist

Mainstream establishment parties across the continent have been replaced by populists offering easy and empty answers.

Author

Christopher Sabatini

Dr. Christopher Sabatini, is a senior fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, and was formerly a lecturer in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University. Chris is also on the advisory boards of Harvard University’s LASPAU, the Advisory Committee for Human Rights Watch's Americas Division, and of the Inter-American Foundation. He is also an HFX Fellow at the Halifax International Security Forum. He is a frequent contributor to policy journals and newspapers and appears in the media and on panels on issues related to Latin America and foreign policy. Chris has testified multiple times before the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2015, Chris founded and directed a new research non-profit, Global Americas and edited its news and opinion website. From 2005 to 2014 Chris was senior director of policy at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas (AS/COA) and the founder and editor-in-chief of the hemispheric policy magazine Americas Quarterly (AQ). At the AS/COA, Dr. Sabatini chaired the organization’s rule of law and Cuba working groups. Prior to that, he was director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the National Endowment for Democracy, and a diplomacy fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, working at the US Agency for International Development’s Center for Democracy and Governance. He provides regular interviews for major media outlets, and has a PhD in Government from the University of Virginia.

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On July 1, Mexican voters will head to the polls. In October, Brazilian voters will do the same. This wave of elections in the region — Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Paraguay have all voted in the past year, too — comes at a time when popular anger against the political class is rising and support for democracy is in decline.

Over the past 16 years in Latin America and the Caribbean, voter support for traditional parties that had been anchors for their respective democracies has been declining, as voters opt instead for independent candidates and new, smaller parties. In the first round of Colombia’s recent election, none of the top three candidates represented either branch of Colombia’s previous two-party system, long dominated by the Liberal and Conservative political machines. Instead, two polar opposite candidates — one from the right-wing Democratic Center party, Ivan Duque, and the other from Colombia’s new left Progressive Movement, Gustavo Petro — faced off in the June 17 runoff election. Although Duque won Sunday’s election with 54 percent of the vote, the first-round results showed that the country is extremely polarized.

It’s a trend that is being repeated in Mexico and Brazil. Self-proclaimed outsider candidates offering easy, vacuous answers to voter malaise. In Mexico, the projected leader in the one-round presidential election system is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the head of his own National Regeneration Movement party.

Twelve years earlier, running under the banner of another party — the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) — López Obrador lost to the conservative Felipe Calderón of the National Action Party by fewer than 300,000 votes and claimed fraud. He then led a two-month protest that blocked Mexico City’s main thoroughfare and staged an inauguration in which he was sworn in as the “legitimate” president and named his own presumably legitimate Cabinet. Slowly, though, Mexicans tired of the performance, which hurt the small businesses along La Reforma avenue (some of them López Obrador supporters), where he maintained his protest. Eventually, he decamped and waited for the next election in 2012.

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