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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