The turbulent political winds of Latin America blew to the far right in Argentina’s November presidential election. Javier Milei, a self-styled “anarcho-capitalist”, won 56 percent of the vote, while his opponent Sergio Massa, economy minister in the Peronist centre-left ruling coalition, secured only 44 percent.
1973 in Chile was a year of hope and tragedy. Hope because one of the world’s best organised and most militant working classes was engaged in a fierce class war, and tragedy because it lost. Fifty years have now passed since the Chilean coup of 11 September 1973, which established a seventeen-year military dictatorship. The lessons of the period remain important.
As millions of Spaniards went to the polls on 24 July during a blistering European heatwave, many breathed a cool sigh of relief as the results came in. The widely expected parliamentary majority of the centre right People’s Party (PP) and the far-right Vox party did not eventuate. In fact, Vox’s vote went down markedly from the last election in 2019, as it lost 19 of its 52 seats.
The process of creating a more progressive Chilean constitution took another decisive step on 9 May. Unfortunately, it was a step further away from the demands of the 2019 rebellion, which pushed the conservative government to the brink of collapse and forced it to initiate the constituent process as a way out of the political crisis.
After seventeen months in office, Peruvian President Pedro Castillo was this month deposed by a right-wing parliamentary coup hidden behind the facade of an official and legal impeachment process. The impeachment vote came just hours after Castillo announced that he planned to dissolve Congress, hold new elections, redraft the constitution and place Peru under a state of emergency. His vice-president, Dina Boluarte, has assumed the presidency while Castillo is held by police on charges of “rebellion” and has been ordered to remain in prison for the next eighteen months.
More than 150 million Brazilians went to the polls to elect a president and members of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies on 2 October. The election was a showdown between the two heavyweights of Brazilian politics, pitting former president and leader of the Workers’ Party (PT), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, against the far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro.