First, elections are always the ultimate polls and two small elections occurred in the region this week. The ruling party just barely held onto power in Aruba. In Coahuila, Mexico, the PRI held on to the governor slot, which they've owned for about eight decades.
Onto the poll numbers.
In Colombia, as always, Uribe maintains high numbers. The most recent poll from Semana showed that 56% would vote for his reelection.
Some interesting numbers in Ecuador. In July, President Palacio's numbers were the same in Quito and Guayaquil, about 67-30% in support. Now, his poll numbers remain about the same in Guayaquil, but they've dropped to about 43-55 in Quito. Nationwide, another poll shows he only has 33% support.
In Peru, Flores passed the 30% mark for the first time.
In Bolivia, the election polls remains close, but it looks like it may be postponed.
In Chile, Bachelet maintains her lead.
Now, the Miami Herald poll. The poll of 523 leaders in six countries has a fairly low sample size, so while the numbers may not be perfectly accurate, the general trends are probably correct.
Much of the Latin American media this week was talking about the news that Chilean President Lagos was considered the most respected leader by the "elites", followed by Brazilian President Lula da Silva. While most of these elites come from the business and political communities that are generally dominated by more conservative political ideologies, their choice on leaders shows a recognition that some sort of "third way" must exist that can address the issues of poverty and inequality in a business friendly way. In fact, many of the people from the upper economic levels self-identified as "left of center", which I think is an interesting shift (many of them are pro-free trade and anti-regulation, but choose to identify with the left or center rather than the right).
President Uribe and President Fox did not score quite as high (although it should be noted that both scored very high within their own countries). Not surprisingly, Chavez and Castro received among the lowest ratings. The individuals polled, after all, came from the economic strata that are regularly attacked rhetorically and economically by those two regimes.
Oppenheimer notes the other interesting trend in the poll: Latin American elites dislike the United States government at about the same levels as Latin America's poor. Those polled were strongly in favor of free trade and like the United States in general (although they like Spain more), but their attitude towards the policies of the Bush administration and their foreign policy comes out very negative.
2 comments:
I am not surprised in the slightest that Latam's elites dislike the U.S. government as much as the poor. There is no such thing as a Republican anywhere to be found in Latam, and there is no comparable 'Reagan' or Reagan revolution on any horizon to correct the excesses of its predecessors - in Reagan's case, the Carter administration.
I spoke to an economist for Ricardo Lopez-Murphy a couple years ago in BsAs and he told me the leftwingery of the BsAs elites was nearly monolithic and almost identical to the leftwingery of the U.S. elites in the cultural establishment - media, university, foundations, arts, intelligentsia - there is very little diversity of ideas in those establishments.
In the U.S., we often view this as the red-state/blue-state divide, which corresponds to the rural/urban divide. Here's my theory: Latam is almost completely a 'blue' state politically. What a coincidence then, that it is also the most urbanized continent in the world. Latam's lefwingery as well as its hatred of Bush and the U.S. government, is probably a function of its high urbanization. But in this atmosphere, the conditions might not ever be there to elect a guy like Bush. That is, unless political conditions are very unusual. Both Reagan and Schwarzenegger did seem to pull in urban voters that Bush never could. It makes me curious about what quality it was that these two men possessed that enabled them to appeal to enough urban voters against the trend. Finding out why might give us a clue about how Latam can elect someone who might really make a difference. IMHO.
There is no such thing as a Republican anywhere to be found in Latam...
I don't know, I seem to find politicians resembling Tom Delay everywhere I look in the region...
Now that my partisan cheapshot is out of the way, you're right that there are few small government conservatives or federalists in Latin America. Even the more "conservative" politicians, people like Uribe, Saca or Fox, would not say that government is the problem the way Reagan did.
I think this goes to the question of whether we need a new model for understanding politics in Latin America. There are some relics of the old left-right model (Chavez/Castro for the most part), but most of Latin America's politics is now defined by a different set of variables. What defines a Lagos vs. Uribe matchup is not a Marxist vs. anti-Marxist mentality. And while you may be concerned about Evo Morales' leftist policies, Bolivian voters do not support Morales based on him being a "leftist" but more a form of indigenous populism.
I'm not sure how the rural/urban divide fits in, but it's an interesting variable to consider.
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