“We are an example that dreams can come true. Dreams of freedom, of justice. Let’s shout freedom (…) Long live freedom, long live Colombia world power of life! My name is Gustavo Petro and I am its president”. This is how the intervention ended. of the newly elected president of Colombia after an erosive second round on June 19.
Closing the presidential speech by talking about freedom is no small thing for those who have been labeled by the international media as “the first president of the left in the history of Colombia”. Perhaps previous presidents, renowned social democrats such as Ernesto Samper or César Gaviria, will not agree with the categorization, but there is no doubt that Petro’s consistent message has focused on a more just Colombia, from an anti-system approach, with which it would enter in a different category, closer to that of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, Gabriel Boric in Chile, Alberto Fernández in Argentina, Luis Arce in Bolivia or even Pedro Castillo in Peru.
Likewise, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Miguel Diaz-Canel in Cuba call themselves leftists. The upcoming election in Brazil, with Lula da Silva as the main favorite, would close the circle of the undoubted advance of the left in the subregion.
Left or authoritarianism?
But along with the advance of these lefts, a noticeable setback in civil liberties of the area and a notable democratic recession. Democracy does not seem to be living its best times, neither in Latin America nor in the rest of the world. After the fall of the Berlin wall, dozens of countries joined democracy, in what seemed like an irreversible trend, but from the perspective that 2022 offers us, it seems like a hasty trial.
After the remarkable global consensus around the democratic system, the golden years of democracy seem to be over. So much so that in the recent and haphazardly celebrated Summit of the Americas President Biden put the new axis of dissection of contemporary politics in the diatribe democracy-autocracy, which would lead us to ask ourselves if the continent turns to the left or if it turns, in fact, towards authoritarianism.
Ever since the Jacobins sat on the left in the seats of Parliament during the French Revolution, while defenders of the monarchy sat on the right, the right and left categories have served as the main axis of dissection of politics. The left tends to emphasize the search for social justice and the equal condition of all human beings, while freedom has been rather a value defended by the ideological positions of the right.
The terrible inequity of the region
There are no more unequal societies than Latin American ones and it is the region with the greatest inequality on the planet. Probably this makes the continent captive of the protest discourse. The Gini index, which measures the economic imbalances of a society, where zero would be perfect equality and 1 the most aberrant inequality, calculates that for 2020 the value for Latin America was 0.46.
In his influential work polyarchyRobert Dahl suggests that it is a question of a historical inequality that would have roots in the conquest of the continent and the traditional peasant society.
Cumulative inequalities of status, wealth, income, and means of coercion imply a marked inequality in political resources. A structural inequality in which a small minority with superior resources develops and maintains a hegemonic political system through which it can also impose its rule over the social order and thus strengthen the initial inequalities even more.
Inequality in Latin America has been declining, however. In 2002, the Gini index was 0.54 on average for the region and would have improved 8 points by 2020. Shortly before the start of the pandemic, at the end of 2019, the streets of Colombia and Chile were burning with demand for more fair. But, after the pandemic, those demands are even more peremptory.
The covid-19 raged with unusual force on Latin America and its precarious health systems. Of the total fatalities left by the pandemic, 27% of the world’s deaths have been concentrated in the region, with only 8% of the population. Three out of five children in the world who missed a school year due to covid-19 live in Latin America and the Caribbean. All of this has created even more unjust and unbalanced societies and makes the claiming message more timely, raising the demands for equity, which the traditional discourse of the left has been taking advantage of in its political communication efforts.
However, it is one thing to make political communication during the campaign and another thing is to communicate from the government. Petro is clear about it, and in his closing speech he not only flirted with freedom, but also with capitalism: “We are going to develop capitalism in Colombia. Not because we adore it, but because we have to overcome caudillismo, the new slavery.”
Shutterstock / Arturo Larrahondo
From the left, but not as much as Maduro or Ortega
With this moderation, Petro declares that he is approaching the democratic left, respectful of human rights, and wants to be more like the left of Lula da Silva or Boric, than that of Maduro or Ortega. He also displays a certain ability to appropriate the historical flags of the right, if necessary.
However, a narrative leveraged on social justice does not necessarily lead to equity. It can happen exactly the opposite. The case of Venezuela with its brutal inequality is exemplary: in the Venezuelan tragedy, the Gini index went from 0.42 in pre-revolution times until 0.65 in 2021a figure that places Venezuela as the most unequal country in Latin Americawith a difference of 19 percentage points with respect to the average coefficient of the region.
In just one year, between 2020 and 2021, the Gini coefficient increased by 7.4 percentage points. in 2020the average income of the richest 20% of the population was 23 times higher than the average income of the poorest 20% of the population, while, in 2021, the income of the richest 20% was 46 times higher than that of the bottom 20% poor.
Just as Petro inserts flags that do not entirely belong to him, Latin American political options that wish to be an alternative to the overwhelming wave of the left will have to do something similar. The post-pandemic suggests that the demands for fairness are here to stay, and reconnecting with their electorate will require the obligatory reinvention of traditional Latin American parties.
Carmen Beatriz FernandezProfessor of Political Communication at UNAV, IESA and Pforzheim, university of Navarra
This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.