Daily Times

Latin American governments are learning not to get too comfortable in office, as disgruntled voters repeatedly topple incumbents, often in favor of outsiders or inexperienced politicians.

In many cases, things have not gone well for the newcomers.

The election of brash Argentine upstart Javier Milei shows that an anti-incumbent trend over the past decade is becoming a fixture, analysts say.

“There is no left-wing wave or right-wing wave. There is no clear ideological trend. You simply have governing parties losing,” said Ignacio Labaqui, a professor in Latin American politics at the Argentina Catholic University.

From Chile to Peru, Colombia and Ecuador, voters have simply opted to boot out the government of the day in favor of someone new. In Brazil, voters swung from outsider Jair Bolsonaro and then back to veteran leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Since 2018, the only government to hold onto power in a free and fair election has been in Paraguay, said Labaqui.

Gerardo Munck, an Argentine professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, told AFP that in the past decade, 80 percent of elections have been won by an opposition party, since a commodities boom fizzled out. The economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic only made things worse.

“Voters are basically just tired of everything,” he said, pointing to Argentina, where Milei swept to power on a wave of fury over decades of economic decline under the long-dominant Peronist coalition.

While the economy has been a big driver of exasperation, many voters are also increasingly concerned with crime, as drug and gang violence — once only an issue north of Colombia — spreads into new countries, such as Chile, Ecuador and even normally stable Uruguay.

Milei is also one of several examples of presidents elected not out of fervent adoration, but rather rejection of the other candidate, with many Argentine voters describing him as “the lesser evil”.

Analysts say the collapse of powerful traditional parties has allowed outsiders like Milei to flourish.

Milei, a former television pundit, will take office next month with very little political experience and 38 out of 257 seats in Congress, leaving a cloud of uncertainty over what he will be able to accomplish.

If he looks to the precedent elsewhere in the region it has been an “unhappy record” for new governments who have struggled or seen their popularity swiftly plummet, said Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue think-tank in Washington.

In Peru, rural teacher Pedro Castillo burst from obscurity to the top office, but with little experience and a minority in Congress, chaos quickly ensued. He overhauled his cabinet four times in six months, and faced multiple impeachment proceedings.