Latin America is in the midst of what has been called an electoral super cycle. Since last year and until 2024, presidential and legislative elections have marked and will continue to mark the political and news agenda in most countries in the region. And its results dictate the trends and strategies that citizens are choosing for the second half of a decade that is in danger of being considered as “lost”.
In their ideal form, elections should be platforms for the proposals that political parties offer citizens as solutions to problems. But in its real form, election campaigns are, to a large extent, a show of disqualifications, spectacles and polarization. Currently, they can also be seen as a war of narratives where, above all, one seeks to consolidate a narrative of power.
Media Context
Digital media play an ambivalent role in political communication and can be a key factor in the dissemination and criticism of these platforms. But they can also contribute to its misrepresentation through the dissemination of fake news and the institution of post-truth.
Digital communication technologies have allowed the public to move from being mere consumers of information to creators of content and information. Thus, it became accessible to anyone to distribute false information in a deliberate, algorithmic and massive way. In this context, as Christian Salmon wrote, all statements are in a state of permanent uncertainty because, given the ease with which information is manipulated, it is almost impossible to verify its veracity or falsity.
The only criterion we have at hand is a “veridiction regime” defined by the number of plays, “likes”, “shares” or “replys”, and in this situation the power of words is weakened and whoever has the most powerful reach will have the power to create a truth, to oppose it to others and to emerge triumphant.
Political Context
In this context, the following electoral processes will be developed, but in what situation are their protagonists? From different surveys and reports on democracy in Latin America, we know that trust in political parties and politicians is at its lowest level since there are measurements.
But this decline is not just due to erratic handling of the pandemic. Since the 2008 global crisis, political narratives have been seen as increasingly distant from the daily lives of the governed. This distance represents their deep disbelief in realizing that no government of any orientation has succeeded in alleviating our harrowing inequality.
It is no coincidence that the recent social protests in Colombia and Chile have been unleashed not so much on politicians, but on the policies that imply those decisions. People know that political power is on the wane and, more than promises, we demand concrete actions. And in the context of a state of uncertainty, everything seems to indicate that this demand will only be satisfied if, in the battle for truth, the political narrative is worthy of our attention and appreciation, in order to obtain approval and its reflection in the vote.
Reports faced
The distrust of political narratives, associated with the state of communicative uncertainty in which we find ourselves, according to Salmon, resulted in the establishment of an era of confrontation in which political communication is understood as a process of disqualification and destabilization of other political actors in order to nullify as adversaries and impose a narrative as the only legitimate one.
While it is true that disqualification or fabrication of crimes is a common practice among politicians that increases at the time of elections, we must not lose sight of the fact that in our state of communicative uncertainty, evidence or judicial investigations do not matter. What matters is the construction of a narrative that positions the wholesaler, not as a political opponent, but as an “enemy” for society and its well-being.
It doesn’t matter to prove the crime, what matters is to narrate it through memes, fake news, images, chain messages or bots, so that it is seen by the greatest number of people and thus impose a new narrative. In this sense, the political campaigns that are approaching in our region will enter a war of narratives if they make use of fake news and post-truths as strategies to gain credibility.
The power struggle that elections entail no longer takes place in rallies or televised debates; The digital network is the arena for this fight and the advantage that the report has over the formal message is that, with the instruments of this digital network, it is possible to create an “enemy”, a face “guilty” of crises, injustices and inequalities.
With a succession of elections at the door, it is important, for the sake of democracy, that the proposals make up for the disqualifications, especially in the context of the health, economic and political crisis that Latin America is going through. But in the age of confrontation, where truth is constructed on the basis of its virality, we will probably only see the creation of a narrative of moral disqualification that will opaque the political proposals that we are so sorely lacking. Knowing how to criticize the narrative and demand proposals is our challenge. It is necessary to be attentive.
