The election of Gustavo Petro to the presidency of Colombia confirmed a second pink wave in Latin America. According to recent polls of voting intentions, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will win the October elections in Brazil – to be confirmed whether it will be in the first or second round.
The Brazilian elections at this point were definitively polarized between Lula and Bolsonaro. The question is how and when Bolsonaro will try to deliver his coup. Whether this will be before or after the elections, and what scope it will have.
In any case, it is unlikely that the eventual riots by police and military, and the displays of violence by fascists and militia supporters of Bolsonaro, will prevent the holding of the elections or the inauguration of Lula. Everything indicates that the coming months will be one of anguish and violence, but that democracy will emerge victorious. At least momentarily, as it is evident that Bolsonarism will live on.
Thus, by the beginning of 2023, almost the entire region will once again be governed by parties and movements on the left of the political spectrum. This will include countries that did not participate in the first pink wave, such as Mexico, Colombia and Peru. It is quite possible that later on the left will return to power in Uruguay and Ecuador.
This new wave, however, must be understood as a new moment – not as a continuation of the first, the cycle of leftist governments in the region during the 2000s and first half of 2010. That one wore off in the mid-2010s, giving way to an advance of far-right and center-right governments, which is now in disarray even before consolidating.
The challenges of this new wave
The global context experienced today is very different from that of the beginning of the 21st century, marked by the so-called commodity boom. Now, the situation is one of crisis, exacerbated by the pandemic and the Ukrainian War – and a likely recession next year. The second pink wave will fail if it doesn’t make self-criticisms and adaptations in relation to the first, it will have worse results, and a short duration. It cannot be “more of the same” in a worse context, which has changed considerably.
Of course, Latin American societies are not the same as they were two decades ago. They are marked by more unemployment, underemployment, precariousness, “uberization”. They are crossed by neoliberal values, entrepreneurship and consumerism. The advance of neo-Pentecostal religious denominations is related to this, and is not of little relevance in this context. Their economies are reprimarized and geared towards exporting agribusiness (or at best the “maquiladoras”), with vast regions increasingly given over to illegal economic activities, paramilitaries, devastation and land grabbing.
In this context, in addition to the urgency of growing and urgent social investments, this second pink wave could actively resume regional integration, with greater emphasis on productive integration and human circulation. And jointly seek to face issues such as the climate crisis, the devastation of the Amazon, the definitive overcoming of the pandemic, even issues such as the reduction of neo-extractivism and dependence in the field of knowledge and technology.
Emerging social movements (much stronger in the region than they were two decades ago) could find in these governments not agents that instrumentalize or silence them, but democratic spaces for the condensation of their multiple demands, derived from multiple forms of oppression. In this sense, these governments could foster more radical and decisive versions of democratization and power-sharing.
Could all this be possible? And would it be desirable for these leftist forces that are returning to occupy governments? I’m afraid not.
The key lies in popular mobilization
Therefore, it is difficult to imagine that all this could happen without popular mobilizations. In this sense, there is some greater potential in countries where cycles of mobilization preceded the arrival of the left to power, such as Chile and Colombia.
Even so, the government of Gabriel Boric begins to show signs of retreat and paralysis in Chile (with the approval of the new Constitution threatened). And one could not expect so much from Petro in Colombia, after his moderation moves to arrive as a favorite in these elections – deepened to guarantee his victory by a narrow margin in the second round. The Petro government will do much to democratize Colombian politics – it has already begun to do so by “normalizing” the left, now disassociated from guerrillas and violence in that country’s imagination.
The new wave in Lula’s Brazil
In Brazil, less can be expected. At this moment, a broad front is being configured to defeat fascism and the real threats of the definitive overthrow of Brazilian democracy – in the process of dismantling since the 2016 parliamentary coup that overthrew Dilma Rousseff.
Thus, in principle, the new government will present itself as an attempt at democratic and institutional reconstruction, and a resumption of the agenda (in worse conditions) of reducing hunger, poverty, unemployment, and economic reactivation, which characterized the first administrations of Squid.
Some innovations could come from ecological, feminist, black, LGBTQIA+, indigenous mobilizations – today much stronger in Brazil than in Lula’s first election in 2002. In these areas, new proposals and ways of acting will have to be presented. But, again, the key is in the streets.
Beyond the visible mobilizations, it is never possible to predict what could generate a trigger in street mobilizations such as the Chilean social explosion. The social analyst will always find it difficult to observe the subterranean movements that lead to such a phenomenon until it occurs.
However, without popular mobilizations that push the governments, the return of the left in Brazil and in other parts of the region is likely to be short-lived, configuring a more fragile cycle than the previous one.
