If Lula wins Brazil’s presidency, seven of Latin America’s largest economies will be ruled by the left | Opinion


Andres Oppenheimer
Wed, September 28, 2022 

Virtually all polls agree that leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is likely to win Brazil’s elections on Sunday, which would turn most of Latin America into a leftist-ruled region.

If Lula defeats Brazil’s far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, Latin America’s seven biggest economies — Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile and Peru — will soon be run by leftist and ultra-leftist leaders. In addition, several smaller economies, such as Bolivia, Nicaragua and Honduras, are also led by leftist or far-left presidents.

An average of recent polls suggests that Lula will win Sunday’s election with at least 45% of the vote, followed by Bolsonaro with 33%. If no candidate reaches 50% of the vote in this first-round election, polls show that Lula will most likely win a runoff held Oct. 30. Bolsonaro is centering his campaign on Lula’s conviction on corruption charges in 2017. He received a 12-year sentence, but had served only 19 months in prison when a federal judge ordered his release.

There are three main reasons why a Lula victory is not likely to mark a return of a powerful leftist regional bloc like the one that dominated Latin America’s politics in the early 2000s.

First, most of the region’s leftist-ruled countries are in deep financial trouble. And with China’s economy falling fast, they can no longer expect it to give them huge rescue loans in exchange for political influence.

Unlike the early 2000s, when Latin American commodity prices were at record highs and former Venezuelan populist leader Hugo Chávez crisscrossed the region promising to build massive infrastructure projects, most of the region’s current leftist leaders have no funds to help their political allies abroad.

Oil-rich Venezuela, which before the Chávez regime was one of Latin America’s richest countries, has become one of the region’s poorest. And most countries in the region are facing rising U.S. interest rates, making their debts more expensive to pay, and a weakening global economy that depresses their commodity exports.

Luiza Duarte, an analyst with the Washington-based Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute, says the region’s latest “pink tide” is very different to the previous ones. “Their international context is different, and the current leftist leaders have many more differences between them than they had in the 2000s,” she told me.

Indeed, Chile’s new president, Gabriel Boric, has publicly denounced Venezuela’s human-rights abuses. And several Latin American leftist leaders, in addition to Boric, have voted to condemn Nicaragua’s dictatorship at the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Second, most of the region’s leftist leaders have low popularity rates and growing domestic problems that will demand their near full attention.

Chile’s Boric has seen his popularity rate drop from 56% when he was elected in December to 33% now. He recently lost a key national referendum on a new constitution.

Peru’s president, Pedro Castillo, is facing several corruption investigations, and his popularity rate is below 25%. Argentina’s populist-leftist President Alberto Fernandez’s popularity is below 20%.

Third, there will be presidential elections in Argentina in 2023, and the right-of-center opposition has a good chance of winning. And while Mexico’s populist-leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his Morena Party are still popular, the currently fractured Mexican opposition could still unite behind a common candidate with a chance to win the 2024 elections.

To be sure, if Lula wins in Brazil, he most likely would try to revive UNASUR, the bloc of South America’s leftist countries that emerged in the 2000s to replace the Washington-based Organization of American States (OAS). Unlike the OAS, UNASUR does not include the United States or Canada.

Lula would probably pick his former foreign minister, Celso Amorim, as his top foreign-policy adviser and would take a more proactive foreign-policy approach than Bolsonaro has. Still, a new Lula government would have a more centrist congress than during his 2003-2010 presidency, which could affect his policies.

“Bolsonaro doesn’t care that much about foreign policy,” Thiago de Aragao, a political risk analyst with Arko Advice, told me. “Lula would be more of an activist.”

If the polls are right, and Lula wins, we can expect the region to shift further to the left. But we probably would not see a strong, united and powerful leftist bloc.

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