An Incipient Wave of Upcoming Elections Could Change the Face of Latin America Matthew Taylor - Council on Foreign Relations
go to original December 19, 2016

Almost half of the 20 nations in Central and South America will hold presidential elections over the next two years (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, and Venezuela). The number of elections is not unprecedented, but the degree of uncertainty is, given the economic doldrums and political crises that have afflicted the region in recent years.

As a consequence of the electoral outlook’s uncertainty, many of the coming year’s events in Latin America will need to be interpreted through the peculiar lens of candidates’ strategic calculations and parties’ maneuvering for advantage at the polls.

...Mexico’s electoral season will be dominated by a politician from other parts: Donald Trump, whose August visit to the country was seen by many Mexicans as one more in a string of strategic miscalculations by incumbent Peña Nieto. Significant reforms opening the economy have been overshadowed by recrudescent violence, a ham-handed government response to the Ayotzinapa disappearances, and a string of corruption scandals that have diminished the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI was severely punished in the June 2016 gubernatorial elections, and repeated stories of corrupt governors – including some on the lam – have done little to improve its electoral chances.

The top running PRI candidate, government secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong, currently polls in third place behind the National Action Party’s top-seeded Margarita Zavala (wife of former president Felipe Calderón) and the Party of the Democratic Revolution’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Mr. López Obrador has been seen as the candidate most likely to push back against the new US administration’s efforts to revisit the North American Free Trade Agreement and migration issues and, perhaps as a consequence, he has risen to meet Ms. Zavala in recent polls. Both far outpace Mr. Osorio, suggesting that whoever wins, this election will lead the country away from the PRI.

Read the rest at The Christian Science Monitor

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