The Populist Politics of Latin America’s Deep Social Divisions

Much of the media has focused on the behavior of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s current populist right president, comparing him to Donald Trump (“Trump of the Tropics”) and to the right populists of Europe. In Latin America, both left and right populisms struggle to recruit political support in deeply divided societies. These efforts reflect and exacerbate the deep inequalities and divisions peculiar to the region.

Presidents Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil and AMLO, Mexico

Until the late 20th century transition to electoral democracy, Latin America had experienced alternating cycles of electoral democracy and military rule. Now political swings involve electoral struggles between a populist left and the political right. While the political right defeated left populist leaders in mid 2010s, only one of these right leaning leaders, Jair Bolsonaro, was populist in the sense of providing a charismatic, emotionally-charged leadership. Meanwhile, the populist left survives as seen in the recent election of socialist MAS presidential candidate, Luis Arce, to the presidency of Bolivia in 2020. Mexican left populist president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), elected in 2018, has remained popular (with a 52 percent approval rating) despite harsh criticisms of his handling of the pandemic and his failure to provide more generous financial support for the poor. The notable rise in poverty and unemployment occasioned by the pandemic, could set the stage for a resurgence of parties and leaders with redistributive priorities. Given rising debt and past restrictions imposed on government spending required by the International Monetary Fund, popular mobilizations against taking loans from that organization have been mounting—suggesting the anti-neoliberal predisposition of the populist left is alive and well.

Brazil’ Right Populism as a (Somewhat) Special Case

Jair Bolsonaro’s win of the Brazilian presidency, with 55 percent of the popular vote, is illustrative of innovative nature of right populism in its efforts to gain power. Aided by a deep political and economic crisis, Bolsonaro won by knitting together a heterogenous support base. That support involved middle classes, fearful of downward mobility and disgusted with the country’s high level of corruption. It also involved support from the poor due to having the allegiance of key evangelical church leaders and their followers—the former able to direct the vote of their congregations. Bolsonaro also won over the Brazilian business community and their technocratic allies due to his stated adherence to market principles. A key aspect of Bolsonaro’s appeal, from both middle and lower classes, was his socially conservative position on women and sexual diversity issues.

Strong opposition to the recognition of gay marriage and the right to abortion are core issues for evangelicals and their followers in Brazil and elsewhere in the region. In Brazil, evangelicals vigorously opposed the left populist regime’s efforts to legalize gay marriage (finally achieved in 2013). The 90 or so evangelical members of Congress were formidable foes to L.G.B.T. oriented legislation and played an important role in impeaching the left female president, Dilma Rousseff. Indeed, the gains made by the left regimes of Presidents Lula and Rousseff appear to have triggered a socially conservative backlash that the political right was able to capitalize on. Indeed, Bolsonaro’s social conservativism has garnered support from very unlikely sources: he has been able to recruit black electoral candidates, linked to Christian evangelicalism, from poor regions of the country despite his blatantly racist rhetoric.

While there have been similar populist right movements and leaders in other Latin American countries, none have achieved national power, although in Costa Rica, in 2018 a populist right presidential candidate placed second in the popular vote in the first round of voting. Like Bolsonaro, Fabricio Alvarado ran with the support of evangelical leaders and their poor adherents and was backed by a group of free market technocrats and the business community. In the 2018 Mexican presidential election, another populist right leader, Jaime Rodríguez, (El Bronco) garnered only about 5 percent of the vote. In 2015, however, he was the first independent candidate to win a governorship—that of Nuevo Leon. He has been instrumental in the anti-AMLO protests in Mexico. Hence, Bolsonaro emerges as somewhat of an anomaly.

Left Populism’s Social Conservativism

The strength of Bolsonaro’s brand of populism in Brazil is in part linked to the depth of Brazil’s economic and political crises and to the more rapid rise in popular adherence to evangelical Christianity, which has provided the popular support need to win elections. However, just an important in avoiding the sort of right populist backlash found in Brazil may well have been timidness of left populist regimes in addressing gender and sexual diversity rights. This insight is illustrated by the fact that Costa Rica’s significant support for a right populist presidential candidate involved mobilization against legal recognition of same sex unions. Mexico’s left populist president, AMLO, on the other hand, has resisted commitment to abortion and gender equality, his electoral coalition having included a socially conservative party founded by evangelical Christians.

Evo Morales, former president of Bolivia

Nor did Bolivia or Ecuador’s left populist leaders pursue liberal social reforms aggressively. In fact, Evo Morales homophobic comments aroused sharp criticism from feminist and LGBT groups in his country. The exception is Argentina which was the first Latin American country to approve gay marriage. Its progressiveness arises due to a variety of unusual features, including greater secularism, fewer evangelicals and a weaker conservative political right. For the most part, however, these examples suggest the (unhappy) possibility that left populist leaders had a better chance of political survival if they avoided progress in gender and sexual diversity rights--in deference to a significant socially conservative popular base that can be mobilized to remove or block the left (or populist left) from power.

The New Context and the Instability of the Populist Coalitions

The evangelical churches have provided the mass support that right parties have lacked. As I have explained elsewhere, key aspects of church teachings served the purpose of creating hope among marginalized peoples, thereby opening the way for political allegiance to parties and leaders not primarily concerned with distributive issues. However, the pandemic and its severe impact on the region’s poor has introduced a new ingredient into the picture, destabilizing Brazil’s populist right alliance. The sharp economic downturn that Brazil experienced, followed by the very negative impact of the pandemic, has resulted in the dispersal of minimum income payments (at an estimated 9.7 B US) to the country’s increasing number of poor. At the same time, privatizations, dear to the hearts of his business and technocratic allies, have been put on hold. This new direction involving the abandonment of the market agenda of keeping the public deficit in check and reducing the role of the state has created tensions with Bolsonaro’s market favoring Finance Minister who promised privatizations and tight control of government spending. This situation has produced resignations from the finance ministry and market turbulence.

The left populist regimes of Latin America were fraught with conditions that made their hold on power tenuous: commodity dependence, which made the flow of government resources for social spending fragile, and growing alienation on the part of middle and business groups. The economic downturn linked to the decline in commodity prices set the stage for a growing political backlash, which, particularly in the case of Brazil, included opposition to the left regime’s liberal social agenda. The Brazilian left’s inclusionary social agenda appears to have provided the political right ample ammunition for oppositional mobilization. However, the deepening social crisis arising from the pandemic may breathe new life into the political left, including the populist left, insofar the sharp rise in poverty makes necessary attention to the pressing material needs of the poor. The outcome of all of this is deeply uncertain given that the deep fissures in Latin American societies set the stage for the tenuous coalitions that constitute left and right populisms. In this context, gender and sexual diversity rights may well fall by the wayside.