Six presidential elections, no front-runner
Who will win in Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile? It's hard to model when the candidates and coalitions aren't clear.
In the next 12 months, presidential elections will be held in Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. Honduras is a one round election and the rest are two round elections. Congressional elections will be held concurrently with the first round of the presidential elections, except in Colombia, where they will be held the month before.
The commonality among the six elections is just how undefined they all are and what that says about broken political and party systems in the region.
There are no front-runners. Across the six countries, there is perhaps one presidential candidate polling above 30% (Rixi Moncada in Honduras, and even that is based on weak polling). Nobody polls close to the 50% mark. There are discussions about various potential populist candidates - including Kaiser and Kast in Chile and Davila in Colombia - but none of them is polling like a surging version of the next Bukele. Every article about someone “surging” in the polls is about someone sitting at maybe 20% support.
There are giant messy groups of candidates. Each of these countries (Honduras again being the exception) has a large group of potential candidates competing in an invisible primary to determine who will be the leading 3 or 5 candidates going into the actual campaign season. Colombia has over 20 people running for the presidency. Chile has a dozen candidates, though a few will be weeded out in the center-left primary later this month. In recent elections in Costa Rica, the winning candidate wasn’t even polling among the top three one month out from the election, and the same could happen again next year. Some of this is about how far the next election is into the future, but the lack of definition of the candidate fields is worse than usual and won’t consolidate neatly in most countries.
In four of the six countries, presidents aren’t naming clear successors. Castro named Moncada. Petro will dedazo his preferred successor and should be successful in doing so at some point in the coming months. In the other four countries, the presidents are struggling to turn their chosen successor, if there even is one, into a viable candidate that competes in the top two for the presidency. Many can’t even consolidate support behind a single candidate from their ideological coalition. Even Petro may struggle depending on how Colombian politics and the labor reform play out in the next few weeks.
Ideological coalitions are divided. Bolivia will likely have multiple candidates running on the right and left. Chile, Colombia, and Peru are expected to have multiple right-leaning candidates competing and dividing the vote in the first round, and may also have multiple center or left-leaning candidates. The ideal of a three candidate (left, center, right) race competing for two spots in the second round won’t happen. There will be 5-6 competitive candidates in most of these countries.
The party systems are broken. All of the comments above point to broken party systems in each of these countries. All of these countries lack strong institutional parties representing specific ideological spaces. Honduras’s Libre is a personalistic party following the Zelaya-Castro family and the Liberal Party was just hijacked by an outsider who avoids being boxed in on ideology. In Bolivia, the ruling MAS party is now divided into two or three factions. Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia are all seeing candidates creating parties or grabbing onto parties to be their platform, rather than institutional parties driving the campaign process.
All of the presidential winners are likely to lack a Congressional majority and struggle to build coalitions. The divided presidential races and weak parties mean that no party will gain a majority and Congresses will be split among many factions. It’s likely that in all six countries, the elected president will either lack a majority coalition or struggle to build one amid all the competing parties and leaders.