Ambivalent Voters Send Mixed Messages

Voters in Latin America these days are confusing pundits and themselves, clashing with a patchwork quilt of electoral systems and their own contradictory feelings and aspirations. In recent elections in Argentina, in last Sunday’s vote in Uruguay, in this Sunday’s PRI primary in Mexico and in the Dec. 12 presidential contest in Chile, a sense of paralysis and stalemate is emerging both from electorates’ intentions and voters’ increasingly split political personality. While many may say this is democracy at work and a normal and even predictable outcome of the consolidation of the region’s more than decade-old shift to democratic rule, it also casts some shadows on the prospects for effective governance in many of these countries.

Two trends figure prominently in these votes. First, electorates are showing signs of fatigue with market reforms, unbridled capitalism, globalization and other fads that have not lived up to swollen expectations. But second, they do not want to go too far in supporting alternatives.

In Argentina, President Carlos Saul Menem’s 10 years in office virtually eliminated inflation, but at a cost in unemployment, corruption and an increase in poverty and inequality that led to the Peronist party’s worst showing ever in a presidential election. At the same time, though, voters refused to give opposition Alliance candidate Fernando de la Rua and the left-of-center coalition he heads a majority in Congress. Human rights activist and cultural heroine Graciela Fernandez Meijide reached a higher percentage of the vote than any candidate of the left has ever attained in the Peronist stronghold, but it was not enough to win. So Argentine voters threw some “bums” out, kept other “bums” in and expressed highly contradictory sentiments at the polls: wanting an end to unemployment, inequality and poverty, but also the continuation of the exchange rate and anti-inflation policies that produced the latter ills in the first place.

In Uruguay on Sunday, voters opted for the left-wing Frente Amplio candidacy of Tabare Vazquez, but not by a sufficient margin to give him a first-round victory; in the Nov. 28 runoff the tiny nation will, in all likelihood, split in two, with roughly half the population voting for Vazquez and the other half siding with one of the traditional Blanco or Colorado party candidates.

Meanwhile, what a few months ago seemed like certain victory for the Concertacion’s socialist contender, Ricardo Lagos, in Chile is now appearing to be at best a second-round squeaker, with the possibility of a right-wing upset no longer inconceivable. Given the plethora of authoritarian enclaves left in place by the Pinochet dictatorship, the country could only move forward through a combination of impressively high growth rates since 1986 and broad, deep electoral mandates for democratically elected presidents Patricio Aylwin and Eduardo Frei. Now it lacks both: The country is in a deep recession, and though it will undoubtedly emerge from it next year, a return to 8% growth seems distant. In view of his reluctance to stray from the beaten ideological and political path, if Lagos reaches the governing palace La Moneda, the chances of any decisive action are slim.

And then there is Mexico, which continues to mystify friends and foes alike. On the one hand, the ruling PRI has opened up its nomination process and will hold a free-for-all primary Sunday; on the other, the party and government machinery have by all accounts blatantly tilted the playing field in favor of “official” candidate Francisco Labastida, who polls predict will win by a wide margin. Second contradiction: Both Labastida--euphemistically--and main challenger Roberto Madrazo--stridently--have blasted President Ernesto Zedillo’s economic and social policies and pronounced themselves against “neo-liberalism,” barely distinguishing themselves from opposition candidates Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and Vicente Fox, both running socially minded campaigns. These are welcome developments for those who always believed most of the policies of Zedillo and his predecessor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, were mistaken.

However, polls and intuition suggest that a divided opposition will lose next July, and Mexicans will have their 12th consecutive PRI president, this time elected in a more democratic fashion. If so, they will almost guarantee that the next administration will be a carbon copy of the current one: uninspiring, ineffective, paralyzed by divided government and its own indecisiveness.

These trends are not exclusive to Latin America. Confused or ambivalent voters, governmental paralysis and substance-devoid politics are common democratic fare in much of the North Atlantic world today. Yet that is faint solace: The challenges and unrealized dreams in the region are of another caliber; Latin America lacks Europe’s and North America’s laurels to sleep on as its century comes to a close.