Existentially important politics
Every president seems to be elected in a moment of crisis with a mandate to change the direction of the country
In recent years, we don't get many boring elections in the hemisphere. Instead, it feels like every president is elected in a moment of crisis with a mandate to change the direction of the country. In the space between elections, political systems experience existential clashes because they know the next election will also be a fight over potential radical change.
I was trying to find a trend to unite Latin America's three elections from 2023 and the men1 who won their country's presidencies: Bernardo Arévalo in Guatemala, Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, and Javier Milei in Argentina. The three are different in ideology, background, mannerisms, and generations. The one clear trend is anti-incumbency, the topic of my final newsletter from 2019. Yet, to just wave my now cliche "anti-incumbency" analysis at these three elections doesn't fully capture the political moment as I write my last newsletter for 2023.2
Arévalo managed to topple a cabal of corrupt political elite at the ballot box and has so far held on to the hope of inauguration next year in spite of the institutional forces against him. Noboa rose from single digit support to win an unscheduled election after the president dissolved his own office and the congress and must now face a security crisis that has seen homicides triple in recent years. Milei is the most recent politician in the hemisphere to upend the traditional parties of his country amid an economic and debt crisis that appears near impossible to fix without massive social upheaval.
This is complemented by the countries where election campaigns aren't formally underway. Chile rejected a second attempt to reform the constitution. Peru is in a permanent political crisis. Colombia's governing coalition has largely fallen apart and lost most of the races in regional elections in October. Honduras faces a fight over the Attorney General and how the president's party is manipulating legislative rules. Brazil started the year with an insurrection as the losing candidate and former president attempted to overturn the democratic results.
Once upon a time, the problem in this hemisphere was that democratically tossing out incumbent political elites was nearly impossible, political systems stagnated, and populations became disillusioned with the lack of change. Now the winds of change violently swing the political pendulum in circles, sometimes crashing it to the ground, but populations remain disillusioned by the lack of results even when change occurs.
I'm not making a case for boring politics here.3 Many of the ongoing political battles in the hemisphere are worth fighting. The side that tries to tone down the rancor and get back to boring governing will too often find itself outmaneuvered by a fire-breathing populist who seizes their moment before the situation settles.
Instead, this is just me as an analyst trying to recognize that the elections this year reflect a moment the hemisphere is going through. Every political fight is treated as a battle for the soul of the country and a must-win fight for its future direction. Every political leader is elected with both a mandate for radical change and an expectation of swift positive results. When they can't deliver, it exacerbates the crisis and political fights. When combined with an anti-incumbent trend, it leads to countries lurching from policy to policy without continuity across governments which can lead to positive forms of personal stability and the results of gradual change that voters probably prefer, even if they sometimes don't vote for it.
Next year, even as it will likely have several exceptions to the anti-incumbent trend, that narrative of "existentially important politics" in which all sides treat every election and political fight as a battle that can’t be safely lost is also what we'll see in 2024 with the elections El Salvador, Panama, Mexico, Venezuela, and the United States.4 These hard-fought elections will make for another busy year, but they should also raise questions about if, when, and how this trend gets disrupted or ends. Eventually, a little political normality would be welcome.
In an alternate reality, I'm writing a newsletter where Sandra Torres, Luisa González, and Patricia Bullrich all won the presidency and everyone is focused on the new wave of women political leaders.
Or maybe I could just not leap to broad trend articles when dealing with three distinct countries, but what's the fun in that?
Arguably, the big success from Lula in recent months and something that goes against the thesis of this column has been his ability to return Brazilian politics back to a boring normality.
The Dominican Republic should be a surprisingly normal election. Also Uruguay, but not surprisingly.