RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – He was so disconnected from Ecuador that he couldn’t even vote in the election he won last Sunday. But Andrés Arauz, the leftist candidate who won the first round of the presidential elections by a margin of over 10 points, emerges as the latest figure in a latest rise of progressive projects in Latin America.
Arauz had lived in Mexico since 2017 and his ties to ex-president Rafael Correa, who was unable to run because he was sentenced to eight years and disqualified for corruption, ultimately led to his return to the country. Arauz is a young politician, only 36 years old. The polls showed that his sympathy for the so-called socialism of the 21st century has not faded away, and he now represents a new hope for his international allies, who hope to consolidate a new left-wing axis in the region.
The first sign of a Latin American left wing revival was given in December 2018 in Mexico, with the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as President and Claudia Sheinbaum as Mayor of Mexico City. A year later, Kirchnerist Alberto Fernández was elected President in Argentina, after the four-year term of conservative Mauricio Macri. In October 2019, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) returned to power in Bolivia with Luis Arce, after a year of upheaval during the interim government of Jeanine Áñez.
In Argentina and Bolivia crucial support came from Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, alongside Alberto Fernández as his vice-president, and ex-President Evo Morales, who had been forced to resign amid accusations of election fraud. Both represent the generation of the “founding fathers”, rulers who from 2000 onward dominated South America, together with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador.
It was the latter who boosted Arauz, now the favorite to repeat his victory in the second round and leave behind the period of Lenín Moreno, seen by the Correa movement as a “traitor”. There has been a replacement of names, something that in part is also generational. But at the same time, these leaders have known how to take advantage of their opponents’ mistakes.
How to reinvent the Latin American left
“To begin with, the left had to reorganize itself after a period of government in which it was co-opted by corrupt elements. And I’m not just talking about Correa and former Ecuadorian vice-president Jorge Glas [arrested for involvement in the Odebrecht case], but also Brazil and Argentina. The left is trying to resettle after a period in which the voters rejected it, and now it has been able to take advantage of the establishment’s mistakes,” points out Sergio Guzmán, director of the consulting firm Colombia Risk Analysis, “They tried to convince voters with the counterfactual notion that if they had been in charge of the country in the middle of the pandemic, they would have done better.”
The triumph of Peronism in Argentina has shaken up the South American chessboard, until then dominated by a conservative axis led by Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Kirchnerism emerged from the movement founded by Juan Domingo Perón in the 1940s, which brings together leftist trends, conservative union groups, and ultra-rightist sectors.
With the Kirchners, the period of “progressive Peronism” began in 2003, interrupted by Macri in 2015. In this second stage, Fernández must act as a balance between the historical tensions of the movement, placing himself in a moderate center in the economic sector and progressive in the social field, with the abortion law passed in December as a flag of this ambivalence game.
Fernández is a 60+-year-old leader with a long track record in politics, but left-wing Peronism is already betting on younger personalities, such as the 49-year-old governor of Buenos Aires province, Axel Kicillof. The country’s wealthiest and most populous district is a minefield for up-and-coming figures, but Cristina Kirchner’s former Economy Minister is confident he will do well. Two aspects will be crucial: the outcome of October’s legislative elections, a thermometer of any management with presidential aspirations; and the ability to control the damage of the pandemic.
“It seems that in the region there is a new opportunity for the lefts, in the plural,” says Gilberto Aranda, an academic at the University of Chile. “But I don’t think we are in a cycle like the one that began in 2000. The left-wing project continues to be social justice, something very necessary in this part of the world, but it has an Achilles heel anchored in eternal figures. It needs to understand that there are more possibilities for a real renewal of leadership, that new leaders are not hand-picked,” says Aranda.
“Arce won in Bolivia with the support of this first institutional breath that is Evo Morales but differentiating himself from him. The hyper-presidentialist left must listen to the grassroots, must go from the bottom up and understand that people are tired of the advantages and corruption of politics.”
Indignation has structured the discourse of Verónika Mendoza, for one, candidate of the Juntos por Perú party for the presidency in the April 11th elections, which will coincide with the second round in Ecuador and the Constituent Assembly election in Chile. This same line also marks former Colombian presidential candidate and opposition leader Gustavo Petro, who intends to run again in the 2022 elections. The difference between the two is that Mendoza, 40, has growth potential -the newspaper La República placed her among the three favorites-, despite having been on the front lines of politics for a decade, while Petro, former guerrilla of the defunct M-19 and senator, has already demonstrated in 2018 that he has not been able to convince the center sectors needed to be elected in a second round.
The case of Venezuela does not even fit the resurgence of a progressive axis. If the late ex-president Hugo Chávez was a symbol, despite all the criticism, of the first wave of a Bolivarian revolution, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, has turned this project into an economic management, institutional crisis, and social emergency catastrophe.
Argentina immediately opened its arms to Bolivia, and Fernández campaigned for Arauz. There is also an attempt to formalize a Buenos Aires-Mexico City axis, which has so far not fully materialized.
Brazil, meanwhile, is growing as the great exception to the leftist shift, with right-wing radical Jair Bolsonaro firmly ahead in the polls. The fact that leftist Guilherme Boulos managed to run in the second round of the election for mayor of São Paulo last year, the wealthiest city in Latin America, was the most exciting thing to happen to the Brazilian left since right-wing Bolsonaro became president.
Progressives have not yet recovered from the devastating blows resulting from the ousting of Dilma Rousseff and the imprisonment of ex-president Lula. Although the Workers’ Party (PT) has the largest parliamentary bench and retains organizational strength, it is still widely hated for its legacy of high-level incompetence and corruption. The left has failed to find its place and voice in a Brazil that has clearly turned to the right.
Three names on the left stand out, political old-timers: Boulos, leader of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), a split-off from PT that has been gaining supporters; PT’s Fernando Haddad, party head for two decades; and Ciro Gomes, a member of a political clan from Ceará and visible face of the Democratic Labor Party (PDT). All three have been presidential candidates, but none currently holds a public office that guarantees space in the national debate.
With more than a year and a half to go until the next election, the outlook for the left and the opposition to Bolsonaro, in general, is still very volatile. The only certainties at this point are that the president will run for reelection (he has already announced it), that he retains the unwavering support of a third of the electorate, and that attempts to forge a front ranging from the left to the center-right have not borne fruit. An announcement made days ago by Lula, as charismatic as he is detested, has ruined the mood on the left.
Since the Supreme Court has not yet decided whether to restore his political rights, the ex-president designated Haddad as the PT’s candidate for the 2022 presidential elections, in case he himself can’t run. Boulos received the decision as a punch in the gut. “I advocate that the left should seek unity to confront Bolsonaro. To do this, before releasing names, we must discuss the project,” the youngest of the trio raged in a tweet.
Even under Lula’s shadow, Haddad enjoys the most national projection, an important factor in a country as large as Brazil, where political dynamics are often local. The PT candidate -who, with 45% of the vote was defeated by Bolsonaro two years ago- will stop teaching at the university to focus on the elections. Boulos, whose party is small, is quite focused on social networks, in the absence of a springboard to gain space in national politics. Gomes’ PDT improved its result in the last municipal elections, which sank PT even more. Gomes has national projection because he was governor of Ceará and minister during the PT government and a great vote-getter in his home state. In the second round of 2018, he did not support PT, not even to stop Bolsonaro.
The profiles of the Latin American left
Andrés Arauz
He turned 36 on the eve of the February 7th elections. This Quito-born economist has been linked for years to ex-president Rafael Correa. He was Minister of Knowledge and Human Talent in the last stage of Correa’s term and, after Lenín Moreno’s victory in 2017, went on to earn a doctorate in Financial Economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Like Correa, he was trained in the United States. He then worked as director at the Central Bank of Ecuador. In August, he ran for the presidency boosted by the party machine of the former ruler, who is ineligible to contest elections and lives in Belgium.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Morena Party)
The Mexican president was born 67 years ago in the state of Tabasco. He was active for years in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which he later abandoned to join the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) – an acronym that sheltered him until the 2012 presidential campaign when he founded the National Regeneration Movement (Morena). A moral leader of the Mexican left for decades, AMLO as López Obrador is known, won the presidency on his third attempt. In 2006, he came within a few thousand votes of the presidential seat. He denounced fraud and proclaimed himself “legitimate president.” In 2012, the photogenic Enrique Peña Nieto crushed all attempts by the left and brought the PRI back to power. And in 2018, finally, with the country mired in the worst security crisis in its modern history, AMLO was elected president.
Claudia Sheinbaum (Morena)
With a degree in Physics, a doctorate in Engineering and Energy, the head of government (mayor) of Mexico City has been linked to Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s project for two decades, when she took over as the capital’s Secretary of the Environment. Sheinbaum is 58 years old and educated in her country and in the United States. She was part of an intergovernmental group of experts on climate change that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. She has been a consultant to the World Bank and the United Nations. In 2018, she won local elections and will run the world’s largest Spanish-speaking city until 2024.
Alberto Fernández (Frente de Todos – Peronism)
The Argentine president was born in the city of Buenos Aires 61 years ago. He was head of the Cabinet of Ministers in the governments of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. His resignation from office in 2008 turned him into a hardcore oppositionist, to the point that today his relentless criticism of Kirchnerism, the movement that in May 2019 would welcome him back into its ranks as a presidential candidate, simmers on the networks. Fernández divided his time between politics, his profession as an attorney, and his work as an academic at the University of Buenos Aires. Today, he assures questioners that his relationship with Cristina Kirchner, his vice-president and political mentor, is indissoluble.
Axel Kicillof (Frente de Todos – Peronism)
Axel Kicillof was born in Buenos Aires and is 49 years old. An economist, he was Finance Minister during the last government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. In 2019, he won the election for governor of Buenos Aires province, the wealthiest and most populous in the country. He is considered a member of the circle closest to the ex-president and represents the most left-wing sector of Peronism.
Luis Arce (Movement towards Socialism – MAS)
The 57-year-old economist, born in La Paz, rose to prominence in Bolivia as Evo Morales’ Economy Minister, a post he held for more than a decade. He was the main driver of the Andean country’s finances, taking advantage of a boom in commodity prices. He studied in La Paz and in the UK and has a long career as a civil servant. He has worked at the Central Bank of Bolivia, where he has held management positions. A candidate for president in 2020 for the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), he won the elections in the first round in October, 11 months after Morales resigned and left the country.
Gustavo Petro (Colombia Humana)
The former presidential candidate and senator was born in Ciénaga de Oro, in the interior of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, and is 60 years old. In the 80s, he was a militant of the guerrilla organization Movimiento 19 de abril (M-19), demobilized in 1990. He was a senator for the Polo Democrático Alternativo and then for Colombia Humana. He is Colombia’s most visible leftist leader. In 2018, he ran for president and reached the second round, obtaining a historic result for this political sector, with more than 8 million votes, although this vote was insufficient to upset the current president, Iván Duque.
Verónika Mendoza (Together for Peru)
She is 40 years old. She was born in the Santiago district, in the Peruvian region of Cusco. In Paris, she studied Psychology and graduated in Social Sciences. She was a Spanish teacher, and in Peru, she has worked as a researcher, consultant, and teacher, according to the official Andina agency. She was elected to Congress in 2011. She ran for the nationalist front Ganha Peru, but a year later she left that alliance. In 2016, she contested the presidential elections for the Broad Front.
Fernando Haddad (Workers’ Party – PT)
He was born in the city of São Paulo, of which he was mayor, and is 58 years old. He was Minister of Education in the PT government. When the Supreme Court vetoed Lula’s candidacy in 2018, Lula chose him as party head. After being defeated, he went back to teaching at a university in São Paulo, a job from which he will retire to dive back into the electoral race, with an eye on 2022.
Ciro Gomes (Democratic Labor Party – PDT)
He is 63 years old, born in the São Paulo city of Pindamonhangaba, and is the national vice-president of PDT. A law professor in his youth, he came third in the 2018 presidential elections. He has been almost everything in politics: state deputy, mayor of Fortaleza, governor of Ceará, minister of Finance and National Integration, and federal deputy under different Governments. Gomes’ political clan includes his brother Ivo, mayor, and both his father and uncle. He was a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School.
Guilherme Boulos (Socialism and Liberty Party – PSOL)
He is 38 years old and was born in São Paulo. He leads the Homeless Workers’ Movement (the urban equivalent of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement). Trained in philosophy and clinical psychology, this activist, who contested the 2018 presidential election with no chance of victory according to the polls, surprised last year by reaching the second round of the municipal elections in São Paulo, after attracting many traditional PT voters in the city. But now he lacks a powerful platform beyond social networks, where he is a leftist standard-bearer.
Source: El Pais