Leftist populism continues to lose ground in Latin America. Last Sunday, voters in Bolivia rejected President Evo Morales’ attempt at constitutional reform to allow him to run for a third consecutive presidential term in 2019. (In practice it would be his fourth term, but his first term in office is not counted because it came before the amendment to the constitution mandating a two-term presidential and vice-presidential limit.) Voter turn-out was high (84.45% of the 6.5 million electorate) and the ‘no’ vote beat the ‘yes’ vote by 51.3% to 48.7%.
Apart from the losses suffered by his Movement to Socialism (MAS in Spanish) in municipal and regional elections in March last year and defeat in the referendums on autonomy statutes in five of Bolivia’s nine departments in September, this was Mr Morales’ first defeat in a direct vote since he took office in 2006 as Latin America’s first indigenous president.
Mr Morales is also Bolivia’s longest serving president and he has, until now, enjoyed huge personal popularity, due largely to his charisma and his government’s anti-poverty programmes funded by revenue from the hydrocarbons sector, which he nationalised in 2006. His reputation has however taken a considerable hit, not only with this result but also because of increasing authoritarianism and corruption scandals leading up to the referendum. Causing particular damage was one allegation that he had secured a managerial post for a former girlfriend in a Chinese company operating in Bolivia, amidst general claims of influence trafficking regarding contracts awarded to the same firm.
In addition to the backlash against corruption, analysts have linked the defeat to a region-wide trend against the cult of personality and what Latin Americans call ‘continuismo’, that is, the temptation of leaders – thus far, mainly leftist populists with authoritarian tendencies – to seek to perpetuate themselves in power by constitutional means.
Now, it seems that the brakes are being applied to ‘continuismo’ and the ‘pink tide’ in Latin America may be on the ebb. November 2015 saw the defeat of ‘kirchnerismo’ in Argentina and the election of Mauricio Macri, after 12 years under Néstor Kirchner and his widow Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Then, in December, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) suffered a major loss in legislative elections, effectively a referendum on the stewardship of President Nicolás Maduro, the heir to Hugo Chávez, which was the biggest electoral setback for ‘chavismo’ in 17 years.
Of all Latin America’s populists though, Mr Morales was, until recently, considered the most authentic, mainly because of his Aymara heritage, and the most serious and pragmatic in his pursuit of socio-economic reform, particularly with regard to the rights of the country’s majority indigenous population. In this respect, in spite of continuing tensions and divisions in Bolivia, he has been the most successful, using income from the commodities boom to build social inclusion and cut the rate of extreme poverty from 37% to roughly 19%, without the accompanying disruption and collapse experienced by Venezuela.
Mr Morales has blamed the referendum loss on discrimination and a “dirty war” focusing on corruption, waged by the right-wing opposition, particularly on social media. MAS campaign chief Hugo Moldiz has however said that the ruling party made three basic errors: failing to get its message across on social media; failing to consolidate its work across the country as a whole, especially in areas hostile to Mr Morales; and failing to provide a credible response to the “dirty campaign”.
Mr Morales’ biggest mistake, though, would appear to be, after 10 years of power and electoral triumphs, that of succumbing to the hubris of power, falling into the trap of believing in his own infallibility and indispensability and seeking to remain in office indefinitely. Put bluntly, the most successful populist government of the Latin American left lost the referendum because its leader could not see his way clear to giving way to another.
MAS is still the strongest party in the country and as the search begins for a worthy successor, Mr Morales will have to resist the other temptation of leftist, authoritarian populists – which might sound familiar to Guyanese – that of nominating a substitute or a puppet, as a variation on the theme of ‘continuismo’.
