The Left Turn

During the late 20^th century and early 21^st century, many Latin American nations saw a dramatic shift leftwards in their elections. This wave of left-wing victories began in 1998 with the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and over the next decade many other left-leaning parties and candidate saw huge political gains all across Latin America. This wave took different forms in different countries, the movements that led to Chávez’s victory were different than those that led to Ricardo Lagos in Chile, or Néstor Kirchner in Argentina, or Lula in Brazil. All of this was a drastic change from the neoliberal regimes that had dominated the region since the 1980s, this dominance was so widespread that many thought that the Left in Latin America was essentially dead, as their electoral victories were few and far between, and also because many left-wing movements accepted several of the right-wing policy changes that had taken place over the course of those years. As popular opinion on neoliberal policies declined in the late 90s, so too did the popularity of the incumbent right-wing governments, and soon after the Left began experiencing great electoral success all across the region.

In The Resurgence of the Latin American Left, Levitsky discusses the various ways in which these new left-leaning regimes governed. The rush of leftist regimes can be divided into four groups. The first group, the institutionalized partisan left, like the Workers Party in Brazil under Lula, acts like most European democracies, utilizing existing organizational structures and using a bottom-up type of political mobilization, where most of the power exists amongst the party base. The second group, the movement Left, like the MAS in Bolivia, represents the emergence of a new type of political organization that displaces the existing party organizations, but also focuses on a bottom-up sort of mobilization, where most of the regimes authority lies within the voters instead of a single figure. The third, the populist machines, is like the institutionalized partisan left in that it uses existing party structures to govern, but its base of power lies with one dominant figure, such as with Kirchner in Argentina. The final group is the populist Left, which presents a new type of political organization, much like the movement Left, but also is heavily dependent on one central figure, such as Chávez in Venezuela.

I found this discussion of the various types of Leftist regimes during this time very interesting, especially because of how a regime’s political institution are set up and managed contribute greatly to the way in which the voting public acts when it comes time for an election without the key figure of the Leftist movement in that country. After Chávez’s death, there was a special election in which Nicolás Maduro narrowly won against his opponent. This, coupled with the instability of the Maduro regime, is most likely a result of the concentrated authority, and also potentially because of the displacement of the past political organizations, of Chávez’s regime. This is made much more clear when you compare the transition from Chávez to Maduro in Venezuela, to the transition from Lula to Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, which happened three years earlier. Brazil’s Workers Party acted as most political parties in the Western world act, it was not candidate-centered, and it also used the existing democratic institutions to gain power and also to govern. This allowed the transition from Lula to Rousseff to go fairly smoothly, in 2010, Rousseff was elected by a twelve-point margin, and while Brazil wasn’t particularly rosy during her time in office, it was clearly a much more stable government. In this way, these new left-leaning regimes are not so different from many of their neoliberal predecessors except for their ideologies, but the Levitsky reading does give some good insight into how the Left gained traction in the early part of the 21^st century, and also into the internal structures of these regimes, how different the structure was compared to other seemingly similar regimes, and also how different the policies they held actually were.