Tiny Dominica goes to the polls today, amid controversy over party campaign financing and allegations of dual citizenship against candidates of the two main parties, including Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, who has admitted to being a French citizen. Notwithstanding this, the governing Dominica Labour Party is expected to be returned to office, based on what appears to be a modest turnaround in the country’s economic fortunes.
Elsewhere in the Caribbean, elections are due in St Kitts and Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Suriname in 2010, with an early election in neighbouring Trinidad and Tobago also a distinct possibility.
A new cycle of elections is under way in Latin America and the Caribbean, with those in Latin America being of particular interest in the context of the ongoing ideological battle between left and right. Now, unlike the previous cycle of 2005-2006, when there was talk of a ‘pink tide’ sweeping through Latin America, with the election of a succession of left-wing or centre-left presidents, there is a sense that the region may be beginning to experience something of a conservative backlash
That said, in March, in El Salvador, Mauricio Funes of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a party founded by Marxist guerrilla leaders, won the presidential election, with the right-wing Arena party tasting electoral defeat for the first time since the end of El Salvador’s civil war in 1991. Then in April, in Ecuador, the radical leftist incumbent, Rafael Correa, was re-elected with no need for a second round run-off vote for the first time in 30 years.
In Panama, however, in May, there appeared the first sign of the political pendulum swinging in the other direction, with the victory by a clear and significant majority of the conservative supermarket magnate, Ricardo Martinelli, at the head of a right-wing alliance.
More recently, on October 25, the former leftist guerrilla leader, José Mujica fell just short of the majority needed to triumph in the first round of Uruguay’s presidential election. He nevertheless came back strongly in the run-off on November 29 against the conservative former president, Luis Alberto Lacalle, to win more than 50 per cent of the popular vote. Mr Mujica will next March succeed the popular Tabaré Vázquez, who was the country’s first ever left-wing president.
Coincidentally, November 29 was also the date for Honduras’s controversial elections, held in the shadow of the coup that ousted left-leaning President Manuel Zelaya, back in June, amidst widespread international condemnation. The new president-elect, Porfirio Lobo, a wealthy landowner, is the candidate of the centre-right National Party, and many are looking to him to put the upheaval of the past six months to rest and re-establish order in the country, in what is still a fraught national and regional political situation. In other words, he is expected to return to the status quo before Mr Zelaya’s flirtation with Hugo Chávez and his radical, ‘twenty-first century socialism,’ though he has made encouraging utterances about the need for national unity.
On December 6, in Bolivia, the left-wing populist, Evo Morales, won a second term in office, by a resounding majority, with his party dominating both houses in the national Congress, thereby affording him the opportunity to continue with his sweeping social reforms aimed at redressing the social and economic balance in favour of the country’s poor, indigenous population. He should tread carefully though, for he will continue to face bitter opposition from the country’s entrenched business elite, which has threatened to divide Bolivia, almost to the point of civil war.
Chile, on the other hand, after 20 years of rule by the leftist coalition, Concertación, following that country’s return to democracy after the Pinochet dictatorship, may be poised for a dramatic change. Last Sunday, the billionaire businessman candidate of the centre-right alliance, Sebastián Piñera, won the first round of the presidential election, but failed to surpass 50 per cent to register an absolute victory. He will now have to take part in a second round, run-off election in January, against the second-placed candidate, Eduardo Frei, a former president from the centre-left. Mr Piñera is confident of victory over the disunited Concertación and, even though he is from the right, he is not necessarily a throwback to the Pinochet era, for he voted ‘no’ in the 1988 plebiscite, which the dictator had hoped would perpetuate his rule.
Brazil, Colombia and Costa Rica will also go to the polls next year, with the latter two countries expected to maintain their centre-right leanings. But while it is perhaps somewhat premature to talk of a general swing to the right in Latin America, the latest, emerging tendency in some countries to favour the right or centre-right, in a global climate of economic uncertainty, should not be ignored. More positively, the recourse to the ballot box to resolve ideological differences is a trend that needs to be sustained, if democracy is to be consolidated in a region infamous for its abuses.