By Eric Hershberg and Fulton Armstrong

Photo Credits: Douglas Fernandes and _Butte_ / Flickr / Creative Commons

Argentine President-elect Mauricio Macri’s actions since his historic victory last week indicate a rightward shift in domestic and foreign policy that some observers are tempted to proclaim as part of a broader Latin American trend.  He has reiterated promises of broad economic reforms and appointed a cabinet – including former JP Morgan executive and ex-Central Bank chief Alfonso Prat-Gay as his finance minister – to implement them.  He has further pledged to reverse outgoing President Fernández de Kirchner’s protectionist trade policies.  (During the campaign, advocates of unbound capitalism cheered when he named Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” as one of his favorite books.)  Macri has named Susana Malcorra, a senior aide to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with strong diplomatic credentials, to be his foreign minister and, for starters, directed her to reverse policies he judged to coddle Venezuela. The President-elect, who takes office on December 10, is speaking with the confidence of a President elected with more than a 3-point margin over Kirchnerista candidate Daniel Scioli and with control over more than the 91 seats (one third of the total 257 seats) that his Cambiemos coalition won in the lower house of Congress.  (His party is the first, however, to control simultaneously the Province of Buenos Aires, the City of Buenos Aires, and presidency.)

The temptation in some quarters to declare Macri’s victory as the beginning of the end for Latin America’s “Left Turns” is understandable but nonetheless premature.  To be sure, the Argentine electoral results coincide with other major setbacks for various currents of the Latin American left:  The Chavista project in Venezuela is crashing; Brazilian President Rousseff and her party are mired in a corruption morass and economic crisis whose combined effects may cut short her time in office; President Correa, facing a dire economic situation in Ecuador, is increasingly talking about abandoning efforts to run yet again in 2017.  Chilean President Bachelet’s low popularity and declining public support for the Vázquez government in Uruguay may be additional signs that the prospects for the “pink tide” are very much in doubt.

But in Argentina and beyond, the jury is still out.  Through no action of its own, the South American left enjoyed the multiple benefits of the decade-long commodity boom that began in 2003.  Just as its electoral successes did not indicate wholesale shifts to the left in the region – indeed political scientists have long questioned whether the evidence supports claims of a leftward shift in popular preferences – today’s parallel crises may reflect the end of of the boom rather than a rejection of left-leaning governments.  Many of the policies advanced by various currents of the “pink tide” may remain highly popular, even while they are no longer affordable.  Another tempting explanation is that Latin Americans are rejecting leaders who they perceive as corrupt, irrespective of their placement on the left-right spectrum.  In Argentina, notably, Macri hasn’t rejected the Kirchneristas’ redistributive agenda but has instead emphasized the confusing, corrupt way it has been pursued for the past 12 years.  (Never before has an Argentine rightist portrayed eliminating poverty as a core priority.)  It may well be that voters understand economic slowdowns and dysfunction as a product of corruption rather than the fallout from declines in historically high commodity prices.

Regardless of the underlying drivers of electoral change and public disillusion with incumbents, it’s fair to ask if the left’s current travails and the right’s resurgence will open the way toward more accountable political leadership, whatever its ideological proclivities, or just signal an alternation of power.  Like Macri in Argentina, a new cohort of Latin American leaders will have to prove that they are more than outsiders drawing on sentiment to throw out the incumbent rascals.  The question is whether they pursue policies that make democracy more transparent, expand meaningful political participation, and sustain the social gains that have been achieved by the pink tide governments that now appear to be on the ropes.

December 2, 2015