The electoral results of last Sunday in Chile have shown, once again, the strength that it is acquiring radical right throughout Latin America. After its emergence and consolidation in Europe, and its outbreak in the United States, the ‘brown wave’ is coming with force to many countries in Central and South America.
In Chile, if the votes obtained by the far-right candidacy of Jose Antonio Kast (28%) with those of the ultra-liberal Franco Parisi (13%), the Chilean radical right seems to have the presidency of the Republic within reach. A week earlier in Argentina the right-wing populist leader, Javier Milei, made a hole in the Chamber of Deputies with 17% of the vote, and is trading up for the next presidential elections. To this is added, despite the criticism received, the possibility of a second term for Jair Bolsonaro, whom no one can take for granted.
How is the turn of this right in the region possible? The most synthetic answer is because it is never quite gone. Despite the fact that leftist formations have periodically reached the institutions since the 1990s, in Latin America the right has continued to exercise power through economic control due to its links with increasingly concentrated business groups, by maintaining the alliances with the armed and police forces, for its ability to create and disseminate thought thanks to the use of the media, and for the symbiotic relationship it has with ‘think tanks’ afines. To all this it is necessary to add the traditional communion of the right with the churches, who consider any lawsuit on issues such as gender equality, abortion, equal marriage and legalization of cannabis the target to beat.
Only in this way is it possible to understand the capacity of the Latin American right to launch charismatic and disruptive leaderships through electoral platforms that declare themselves independent, non-partisan, alien to institutional logic and against traditional politicians. That is not news, in the past there have already been similar experiences. Cases of Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Fernando Collor in Brazil, Alvaro Uribe in Colombia and Mauricio Macri in Argentina they are precursors.
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In Latin America, when strong and programmatic political parties -like the PAN in Mexico, ARENA in El Salvador, PSD in Brazil or RN and UDI in Chile- are not competitive, those who defend the interests of the right look for other more ductile, attractive and agile tools to reach the government. As they point out in a work Juan Pablo Luna and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser on conservatism in Latin America, the key to the hegemony of the right is based on the fact that traditional elites have disproportionate access to economic, institutional and symbolic resources in an extremely uneven region. In other words, the dominance of the elites in the key areas of the economy, ideology, the military, politics and transnational relations gives the right the opportunity to transform its offer according to the conjuncture. So the other question to understand the arrival of this “radical right & rdquor; is: What is the situation today?
The answer is to point out that the current situation accounts for a more impoverished and unequal socio-economic landscape and hence, more conflictive, harsh and stressed. In this context it is easy to imagine that the right wing prefers to appeal to the vote through charismatic and aggressive leaderships that accuse immigrants, environmentalists, feminists, and leftist movements and parties of all the ills of the country. It is nothing new. In the past this strategy was described as’punitive populism ‘ and offered ‘strong hand ‘in the face of insecurity and economic opportunities from neoliberal deregulation. Today the same renewed strategy adds to the previous formula the discredit (and contempt) towards ‘what is different’, especially on issues of morals and values. These formulas, which arrived half a century ago through coups, are today presented in the electoral market as something attractive. There is nothing.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com