Latin America voters face presidential elections next year

BUENOS AIRES — The look of Latin American politics may be on the verge of a major face-lift.

In presidential elections scheduled for next year, some 400 million voters in four key Latin American countries will head to the ballot box, facing tough choices between an often corruption-ridden establishment and colorful — yet untested — newcomers.

Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia will all hold national elections in the next 12 months that appear sure to shape the trajectory of a region stuck between a decade of populist dominance and a recent tilt toward more market-friendly, pro-American administrations.

U.S. policymakers have all but ignored the races despite Latin America’s growing strategic importance — an error of judgment, analysts say, especially at a time when the Trump administration is renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, feuding with Venezuela and trying to formulate an overall approach to the hemisphere.

“It’s a momentous time, and I’m hoping people are paying attention,” said the Rev. Matthew Carnes, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Latin American Studies. “Certainly in Mexico the status of the United States has fallen dramatically. It used to be that the United States was the country that Mexicans most wanted to imitate, and now, actually for the first time, China is showing up ahead in polls.”

That China focus may also hint at how the elections across Central and South America will likely hinge on economics and the closely related fight against corruption. That plague has hampered economic development for decades, and scandals have again propelled corruption to the top of voters’ minds.

The determination with which Latin American countries have moved to clean up their act, while dealing with the messy Colombian peace process and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, shows that, with the significant exception of Venezuela, the elections next year will truly put the power in citizens’ hands.

“What’s remarkable, actually, is how much the region has been able to hold accountable some of its leaders, and especially the collusion between leaders and business,” Father Carnes said. “It stretches the robustness of the institutions, but so far they’ve held, and, boy, that’s a real testament to the strength of these institutions in the region in a way that a few years ago we might not have thought possible.”

After a “pink tide” decade with leftist parties in power in most capitals in the region, conservative and center-right parties have been scoring some big wins. Former businessman Mauricio Macri won Argentina’s presidency in December 2015, and conservative former President Sebastian Pinera won his old job back after eight years of leftist rule under President Michele Bachelet in elections this month.

Change may be the watchword, but it’s playing out with major individual differences in the countries facing elections.

MEXICO

’Trump-like’ leftist

In Mexico, the anti-corruption sentiment means that all things related to President Enrique Pena Nieto’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has governed the country for 76 out of the past 88 years, have become politically toxic.

“When you ask in a survey, ’What party would you never vote for?’ 50 percent say the PRI,” said Nicolas Loza, a researcher at Mexico City’s Latin American Institute of Social Sciences. But in nominating independent former Foreign Secretary Jose Antonio Meade as its standard-bearer, the big-tent party is “trying to turn this problem around” in a pragmatic way, he added.

Taking a different tack, the center-right National Action Party (PAN), the PRI’s traditional adversary, in early December opted to enter into an exotic coalition with the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution, anointing former House Speaker Ricardo Anaya as their common “Front for Mexico” nominee.

Whether any of those moves will be enough to help calm voters in a pronounced anti-establishment mood, though, is at best doubtful, especially since that mood has been masterfully captured by leftist former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

“He just made some Trump-like statements saying that the PRI and PAN candidates are ’pirrurris’ — a term here for someone of inherited wealth who has his whole life laid out for him,” Mr. Loza said. “He made reference to the PRI and Front [for Mexico] candidates’ skin color, saying they were ’a little white’ and you could tell they don’t live among the people.”

Beyond his provocative rhetoric, the 64-year-old Mr. Lopez Obrador has tapped into frustration over a sluggish economy not unlike the one candidate Donald Trump channeled in the U.S. presidential election, Mr. Loza said.

“What happened with jobs in Mexico is very similar to what happened with jobs in the United States: The job market really has grown, but the quality of the jobs is not very good,” he said, “and the wealth increase of other segments [of society] has led to a kind of unease overall.”

In an ironic twist, meanwhile, Mr. Lopez Obrador toned down his criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement just when Mr. Trump demanded a renegotiation of the trade deal, lest he be accused of agreeing with the American president not just in style but on policy as well.

“Lopez Obrador has 30-some percent of the electorate in the bag — they’ll vote for him — and I believe his electoral fate depends primarily on what happens [with Mr. Meade and Mr. Anaya] because these two candidates share the same [center-right] ideological space.”

Barring another wild card candidate sticking it to traditional parties, Mr. Loza said, one of those three men will likely end up winning a ticket to Los Pinos on July 1. Mr. Carnes suggested keeping a particularly close eye on Mr. Lopez Obrador.

“If we were to have a significant swing, [it] would be bucking the trend in a lot of ways,” he said. “A lot of countries have been turning right in recent years, so a turn to the left would be quite striking.”

BRAZIL

Back to the future with Lula

Whether the political pendulum swings back to the left in Brazil, meanwhile, could be determined by the legal system before voters get to weigh in, since the candidacy of former president and odds-on favorite Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva continues in legal limbo following his July conviction on corruption charges.

Their country may have stumbled through an unprecedented economic and political crisis in the wake of the so-called Car Wash scandal in which Ms. Rousseff, Mr. Lula da Silva’s handpicked successor, was impeached and removed from office. But Brazilians seem to hope their iconic former president — a onetime factory worker universally known as “Lula” — will somehow bring back the boom time he came to symbolize in the early years of the century.

A left-wing coalition of Mr. Lula da Silva’s own Worker’s Party (PT), along with the Socialist, Communist and Democratic Labor parties, has already rallied around the former labor leader, who continues to score big in polls. But if his conviction is upheld and he is disqualified, the lack of another unifying figure may lead the powerful bloc to crumble.

“If Lula takes part in the campaign, it’s very likely in my view that he’ll win,” said Wagner Mancuso, a University of Sao Paulo political scientist. “But if it doesn’t work out for Lula, we don’t know if they won’t split up into four and split forces at the ballot box, or if they’ll have a unified strategy.”

Ironically, among those who could most benefit from Mr. Lula da Silva’s forced exit from the political stage would be Chief Justice Joaquim Barbosa, a man who has presided over many of the trials that brought down prominent Brazilian establishment politicians. So far, though, the left-leaning Mr. Barbosa has remained coy about his presidential ambitions.

The Workers’ Party’s ultimate nominee, however, will no longer be the sole punching bag of anti-corruption rhetoric now that the reputations of center-right leaders such as outgoing President Michel Temer and 2014 presidential runner-up Aecio Neves have been similarly tainted, Mr. Mancuso noted.

“Corruption will be a very visible topic — but targeting all sides,” he said. “In the [2016] municipal elections, the PT was at the heart of the Car Wash [investigation], but now that they’ve caught Aecio Neves in recordings, that they’ve caught Temer’s allies fleeing with bags full of money, this topic no longer can hurt only the PT.”

Mr. Temer, a former vice president who succeeded Ms. Rousseff upon her removal from office in August 2016, has declined a run for re-election. Other viable candidacies on the center-right side of the spectrum have been conspicuously scarce.

Names mentioned include those of Jair Bolsonaro, a social conservative close to Brazil’s influential evangelical churches, and Geraldo Alckmin, a more moderate former governor of Sao Paulo state. But given Mr. Temer’s dismal approval ratings and unpopular reforms, both would have a hard time carrying key electoral districts, Mr. Mancuso said.

Whatever Mr. Lula da Silva’s fate and the eventual outcome of the vote scheduled for October, though, South America’s most populous country has already showcased the sturdiness of its democratic institutions in the face of unprecedented upheaval and economic stress, Mr. Carnes noted.

“In spite of the upheaval, really it’s amazing how much the institutions have held,” he said. “We’ve seen impeachments and transitions without either resort to violence or a non-elected actor, say the military, stepping in. That, I think, is quite striking, actually, to Latin America’s credit.”

VENEZUELA

Emboldened Goliath

Among Brazil’s neighbors to the north, however, embattled leftist President Nicolas Maduro — theoretically up for elections next December — keeps chipping away at what little was left of the rule of law and civil liberties in Venezuela.

Following an opposition boycott of a Dec. 10 municipal vote, Mr. Maduro unilaterally disqualified former House Speaker Henry Ramos Allup, one of the few likely presidential contenders who have not been imprisoned or barred by courts deferential to the regime.

“Ramos Allup, don’t get dressed because you’re not going, my friend,” said the president, a protege of the late anti-U.S. populist Hugo Chavez. “The [main opposition] parties have disappeared from the Venezuelan political map, and today they’re disappearing entirely, because a party that hasn’t competed and called for a boycott can no longer participate.”

Whoever is allowed to be on the ballot, the fraud-ridden 2017 votes that neutered the opposition-controlled National Assembly with a pro-Maduro superbody and cemented the regime’s hold on key governorships may have left little appetite for what could be another meaningless campaign.

“Here, we have an asymmetrical battle: There is a big monster using force, threats, everything it has at its disposition,” said Yorelis Acosta de Oliveira of the Central University of Venezuela’s Institute of Political Studies in Caracas. “The adversary doesn’t play fair, and the adversary has many resources, legal and illegal.”

Just how one-sided the presidential election might turn out is evident from something as mundane as its date, which Mr. Maduro, in an effort to take advantage of opposition infighting and fatigue, wants to move up from December to March.

“There have to be elections, and they have to take place at a specific time under specific conditions. So what does the government do? They move them how it suits them,” Ms. Acosta said. “That alone speaks of the weakness of — and the coercion and influence they have on — public institutions like the [National Electoral Council].”

It’s precisely what turns Venezuela into “real challenge in the region right now,” Mr. Carnes said.

“The idea that they would even call some presidential elections soon to seize the moment,” he said, “this is really not following the normal rules of the game, so that’s very concerning.”

With chronic food and medicine shortages and inflation at a mind-boggling 4,000 percent, the opposition’s toughest challenge, though, may not be a lack of candidates or an uneven playing field but making itself heard among citizens battling just to make it through another day.

“The opposition can’t offer you an apartment or a bag of food,” Ms. Acosta said. “The opposition offers dreams and hopes and options of a change for a better future. But these still are only images, which have to be powerful enough to sweep people up.”

COLOMBIA

A rocky adjustment to peace

Next door in Colombia, meanwhile, virtually all candidates vying for the presidency agree that last year’s peace deal with the FARC guerrilla movement means a better future is already within reach after more than a half-century of civil war. And voters’ next goal, polls suggest, is to clean up the political class.

Colombians have tired of the endless battle over just what concessions to make to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which for the past four years pitted outgoing President Juan Manuel Santos against Alvaro Uribe, his predecessor and onetime mentor.

It was a fiercely independent self-styled maverick — mathematician turned politician Sergio Fajardo — who first read the desire to move on and then used it to turn the onetime mayor of Medellin into the early front-runner for the top job.

“One of Fajardo’s successes is to have pointed out that he doesn’t want to continue with this Uribe-Santos fight,” said Juan Carlos Ruiz Vasquez, a political scientist at Bogota’s Del Rosario University. “There is a fatigue in many Colombian sectors who see this fight as sterile, as very long, and who want to turn the page.”

And many, Mr. Ruiz Vasquez added, on May 27 also want to stick it to the political dynasties that have dominated Colombia’s small governing class for much of the country’s history.

“There will be a great test in this campaign: Traditional politics with corruption and clientism against more open politics, which tries to combat these customs,” he said. “In effect, [Mr. Fajardo] is a candidate of renewal because he tries to be against these old Colombian customs of ’politicking’ [and] has not been named in any corruption case.”

Anti-establishment as he may be, what truly characterizes the 61-year-old academic is his almost radical centrism.

“He’s not a man of the left, nor of the right; he’s a man of the center,” Mr. Ruiz Vasquez said. “His biggest flaw, perhaps, is his very vague rhetoric. By not committing to anything, he doesn’t scare off the electorate and he doesn’t scare off voters. But in the long run, it can also be counterproductive.”

His main challengers, former Bogota Mayor Gustavo Petro and German Vargas Lleras, Mr. Santos’ vice president until March, have similarly kept clear of any ideological extremes, instead courting an electorate that after decades of warring with guerrillas and drug lords seems to put a unique premium on normalcy.

“Strangely, the extremes have never been able to stand out in Colombia,” Mr. Ruiz Vasquez noted. “[Even within Mr. Uribe’s] Democratic Center, which comes from a pretty radical right, the most moderate of all candidates was chosen, the one who used the most moderate rhetoric and was not capriciously or stubbornly opposed to the peace process and its results.”

In the meantime, the two contenders most closely associated with that peace process, government negotiator Humberto de La Calle and former FARC leader Rodrigo Londono, are polling in the single digits. But with his base in Colombia’s rural hinterlands, surveys may not fully capture support for Mr. Londono, known by his nom de guerre Timochenko, some analysts caution.

“People will be surprised as to how successful even a group like the FARC is going to be,” said Christine Balling, a senior fellow for Latin American affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council. “They’re not going to win the presidential election, but I’m convinced that this is going to be the decade for the more extreme left down in Colombia.”