As I noted last week, the Trump-backed far right candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, went into the second round of Colombia’s presidential election as a strong favorite. It was therefore some consolation for the left that he won only very narrowly, taking 50.5% of the vote, a margin of 250,000 votes over leftist Iván Cepeda.
After waiting a few days, Cepeda has conceded defeat; according to the BBC, he said “I do so to contribute to co-existence, to peace, and to dialogue among Colombians.” De la Espriella, who will take office in August, also tried to sound conciliatory, as winners usually do. Time will tell how much that can be relied upon: his past rhetoric is not exactly encouraging on that score. (He will also have to manage without a legislative majority; congressional elections were held separately back in March.)
Together with the even narrower victory a fortnight earlier of Keiko Fujimori in Peru,* the election marks a further stage in South America’s shift to the right. Of the twelve countries in the continent, only four – Brazil, Guyana, Uruguay and Venezuela – still have governments that could be described as left wing, and of those Venezuela has become a sort of dependency of the Trump administration since the abduction of its previous president at the beginning of this year.
The big one is Brazil, which goes to the polls later this year; 80-year-old president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is being challenged by Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. So far the polls give Lula a clear lead, but the situation is unpleasantly reminiscent of Joe Biden’s abortive 2024 re-election effort.
The right-wing leaders do not fit a single mould. Those in Bolivia, Paraguay and Suriname could reasonably be described as centre-right, while Chile’s José Antonio Kast lines up with de la Espriella on the Trumpist far right. Fujimori could also be called far-right but does not appear close to Trump, while Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa is the reverse: he was elected as a centre-right candidate but has shifted Trumpwards in office.
And Javier Milei in Argentina is in a class of his own, although the success (so far) of his libertarian economic policies has led others, including de la Espriella, to promise to imitate him. But there’s no long-term path for coexistence between Trumpist cronyism (which in South America long predates Trump) and an actual free market.
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* For those who are still following, Fujimori is now up to 50.12% of the vote, a lead of about 44,500 votes with just 114 returns (0.12% of the total) still to be finalised.
The World is Not Enough 