Mapping the region's ideological landscape - December 2025

With the final election of the year over, it's a good time to re-visit and re-map the left vs right discussion.

With Chile’s election of a rightwing president last weekend, boring left-right maps are starting to pop up again on social media. Here, as much as it pains me, I created one for you with Chile updated to the incoming government:

A version of this boring map is the reason I created the map in 2022 that went viral. Treating the region as a left-right binary oversimplifies the narrative. Still, even this year’s boring map has some takeaways:

1. Scale. More than half of Latin America’s population and GDP is in Mexico and Brazil and another 10% or so is in Colombia. That’s a lot of Latin America that remains governed by the left, even amid the narrative of a rightward shift. To paraphrase a conversation I had with Will Freeman yesterday, there is a danger in overreading giant regional trends from elections in the smaller countries while ignoring the largest actors.

2. Timing. One reason for the alleged shift to the right is that there are more leftwing governments facing elections due to a previous round of elections 4-6 years ago. For most countries, politics follows a pendulum. The truly problematic countries are the ones that never change color.

3. Geography. If Colombia flips toward the right next year, South America’s Pacific coast will be an unbroken blob of rightwing governments.

4. Centrism is missing. With perhaps the exception of Rodrigo Paz in Bolivia, there is no center. Centrist candidates who compete between a clear left and right alternative don’t win. That said, some of the left and right across the region have even more extreme parties and candidates than those in government.

Still, the boring map doesn’t capture the nuances of what is going on in the region.

Below is my map to track the political-economy left-right trends in Latin America as the year comes to a close.

Takeaways:

1. The market vs state divide is messy. One common variable in defining right-left is support for free market capitalism vs support for state interventions in the economy. Yet, there are a number of supposed left-leaning governments that are thriving thanks to global capitalism, while one of the loudest rightwing governments in the hemisphere, Argentina, only held on during the midterms thanks to a bailout from an external actor (socialism! Of a sort.)

2. Stated ideology says less than incentives. Venezuela is far from pure socialism. El Salvador is far from pure capitalism. In both cases, the state is operating under a form of kleptocratic and rent-seeking authoritarianism. The grifts, whether from oil contracts or crypto scams, run deep through the layers of government, with the officials at the top taking cuts.

3. Not all corruption is the same. I’m sure people will point to corruption in other countries I didn’t mark as kleptocracies. Sure, there is plenty of corruption in many countries. What I think is different about the countries I marked on this map is the fact that their governments appear organized around state capture for profit. The corruption isn’t just a side hustle for them. To the extent there are power struggles, it’s about who gets to control the wealth.

4. US policy matters. Beyond left-right, I do think a key variable in 2025 has been how countries have responded to the new US policies toward the hemisphere. You can see my map on that US policy issue in September as well as a December update that discussed Trump’s role in LatAm elections.

5. Security and organized crime could be their own variable. Security populism has largely helped candidates on the right, while the blame for crime has harmed candidates mostly on the left, but really anyone who takes over and fails to deliver better security. The security agenda is central to the Bukele narrative, which has become a regional topic of discussion. But organized crime also plays a role in state capture and in attempts to capture the state. How organized crime interacts with commodities markets is a critical issue in Brazil and Mexico. Having done this map, elements of the security issue might make for a good alternative left-right map.

As always, the maps are a starting point for debate and are meant to be half serious. I welcome comments and encourage you to make your own if you think you can do better.