Analysts wonder if the Latin America's "pink tide" could be receding:
Chile, Uruguay and Brazil are the three countries in the region that best epitomise the mellow, well-behaved left that the international right is willing to praise from time to time – as opposed to Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia. Their governments are seen as financially responsible, have a good number of socially-friendly policies and the three presidents – Michelle Bachelet, Tabaré Vázquez and Lula – are both respected abroad and very popular at home.
The three countries are also in the midst of presidential election campaigns. Uruguayans will be going to the polls in October and Chileans in December, and while the Brazilian election is set for October 2010, the campaign is already in its initial stages. One could rightfully suppose that the left is cruising to victory. Strikingly though, the frontrunners are all centre-to-right.
I got to this piece through the
Latin Americanist, which came to the following (rather odd) conclusion:
Should center-right candidates win the presidency then other moderate leaders on the left may become less centrist in order to consolidate their power. Barry Goldwater famously said that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” yet the last thing Latin America could afford are a set of leaders amassed on the far part of either side of the political spectrum.
Maybe I'm reading to much into this, but that seems as though the election of rightist groups is being proactively fingered as the cause of extremist drift. But the transfer of power from one ideological group to another is a natural, essential part of politics. If an aspiring strongman uses a Serra win to justify his anti-democratic practices, no one in Brazil should be blamed for that.
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