The Populist Right, the Poor, and the Resiliency of Neoliberalism in Latin America

With the decline in commodity prices and the receding of the pink tide (the recent removal from power/defeat of various populist left governments), we are now seeing an emergence of two linked phenomena: a return to neoliberal policies and the emergence of the political right, increasingly with populist features. Populist right movements are garnering significant electoral support; successfully recruiting supporters from a wide spectrum of social sectors, including from among the poor—the very part of the population whose expansion was linked to neoliberal reform. While the most notable case is Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, another worrisome case is that of Costa Rica—the very country widely assumed to be one of the region’s strongest bastions of liberal democracy and civil liberties.

Populism Left and Right: Distinct Concepts of “The People”

Populism is best thought of as a political style involving charismatic leadership, a direct appeal to “the people,” overriding what is characterized as a corrupt political institutional framework. This latter, so populist leaders claim, has been manipulated by the “enemies” of the people. In the case of the populist right, those enemies are the “traditional” party leaders, particularly, and most recently, left leaderships. For the political right, this political style is an essential component in electoral success as it facilitates a cross-class coalition of heterogeneous social groups in a way that obscures the objectives of powerful economic interests. As I have noted in a earlier post, populism is largely a reflection of the absence or fraying of distributive settlements and, particularly in Latin America, the fact that nation building projects excluded a significant proportion of the population, particularly Indigenous people, but also those of significant African heritage.

The populist left sought to address these distributive and identity-based exclusions; hence, “the people” are the poor” (“los de abajo”), who had been excluded from economic prosperity and political access. The populist right seeks to obfuscate the distributional issue, establishing a concept of the people that while superficially integrative, allows discrimination and inequality to not only persist, but deepen. The populist right concept of “the people” facilitates the unbridled pursuit of neoliberalism with its destructive human and environmental implications. Its concept of the people is those who commit to its socially conservative values of Christian morality, entailing a traditional definition of family, a rejection of women, gay, and transsexual rights, opposition to morally questionable behavior, particularly corruption in public life, and values of hard work and individual responsibility in achieving prosperity. As such, it is a nice fit with radical neoliberalism’s assumption that the market, without collective action or state intervention, will lift all boats.

Brazil: Knitting together a Coalition of Contradictory Interests

While support for Jair Bolsonaro has declined since his election as president of Brazil in 2018, it is important to consider the social forces behind his ascent. His support has come from the Brazilian business class, particularly commercial beef and soy producers, technocrats supporting radical neoliberal economic policies, sectors of the middle classes concerned about public morality and corruption, and the popular classes particularly those adhering to the county’s powerful Christian fundamentalist organizations.

Bolsonaro is explicitly pro-business and free market; both inclinations are closely linked to his anti-environmental stance. In his efforts to expand beef production for export, he has encouraged the burning of the Amazon. JBS, a powerful Brazilian meat processing company behind the expansion of cattle production, is alleged to have made illegal campaign donations to Bolsonaro’s chief of staff and leader of his transition team, Onyx Lorenzoni. Meanwhile, Bolsonaro’s economic team, headed up by former investment banker Paulo Guedes, is committed to a radical neoliberalism of free trade and full privatization.

The Politics of the Poor in Brazil

President Jair Bolsonaro with Indigenous People

Despite a pro neoliberal stance that had been no harmful to popular groups in the past, Bolsonaro was able to garner considerable electoral support from the poor, due to his close alliance with Protestant fundamentalist preachers, particularly of Pentecostalism. About 30 percent of the Brazilian population is Protestant, about 70 percent of which are Pentecostal. Aggressive proselytizing on the part of Pentecostal preachers has been instrumental in the rise of the sect. Recruitment has been particularly successful among rural migrants and has also had important success within Indigenous communities in the Amazon, attracting adherents by such tactics as not condemning illegal survival activities (such as illegal mining), even as preachers demonize Indigenous culture and encourage commercial ventures on Indigenous lands. Prosperity gospel (a form of Pentecostalism), has attracted the poor because it gives them hope that their material situation will improve with sufficient faith, prayer, and adherence to strict social rules such as abandoning drinking and smoking. Faith healing is also an important draw for the poor as it provides hope for those who have multiple health problems and lack of access to health care.

By 2002, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (president 2003-2010), whose candidacy had been opposed by powerful Protestant organizations, succeeded in obtaining the support if not quiescence of these powerful sects--and consequent votes from the Protestant poor. However, the global economic crisis, the drop in Brazilian commodity prices, and the emergence of large-scale corruption scandals all opened the way for a right-wing demonization of Lula and the Workers’ Party and a political shift of popular classes to the populist right. Pentecostal sects mobilized against the political left and in support of Bolsonaro. Sect-based media engaged in inflammatory and false campaign allegations to discredit the left. Fear of downward mobility among the newly non-poor, who had benefited from the left regime’s social policies, was likely also a powerful factor in this shift in political support, as were rising crime rates, which fed support for Bolsonaro’s law and order agenda among all social groups.

The Worrisome Case of Costa Rica

Presidential candidate, Fabricio Alvarado

A similar process has been emerging in Costa Rica where right populism has been fueled by the rapid expansion of fundamentalist Protestantism with its attendant conservative social values. While voting on the second ballot in 2018 gave the presidency to the centrist Popular Action party, the first round saw Fabricio Alvarado (National Restoration Party), an evangelical preacher, in first place with 25 percent of votes, ahead his opponent at 22 percent. Seventy percent of his support came from evangelical Christians.

As in Brazil, protestant sects have become a political force to be reckoned, now constituting a socially conservative block in the country’s legislature. As in the case of Brazil, their recruitment of popular support has focused on the poor with Avarado’s support coming largely from the three provinces which have been most abandoned by the state and where the evangelical churches have stepped in to provide state functions. Like Brazilian president, Fabricio Alvarado is supported by a group of radical neoliberal businessmen and technocrats.

Left and Right Populism and the Absence/Fraying of Political Settlements

The perceived threat to the traditional family represented by Inter-American Court of Human Right’s 2018 decision that all members must recognize same sex unions provided the ideal event around which the Popular Restoration Party could rally the faithful. However, the story of the weakening of Costa Rica’s social democracy and the groundwork for the rise of the populist right and the spread of evangelical Christianity began much earlier, with the gradual erosion of the country’s commitment to social democracy and its equitable social welfare system. Since the mid-1980s, both inequality and poverty have risen in Costa Rica. The betrayal of the country’s distributive settlement produced, by 2014, the disintegration of the traditional bipartisan party system and the emergence of new parties, articulating popular disillusionment with the traditional political elite and the political system.

In Brazil, the absence of a distributive inclusive political settlement set the stage for the rise of the populist left in the early 2000s. The threat to the economically powerful that this represented, the various conditions giving rise to the expansion of Pentecostalism, and the recent economic downturn, have all facilitated the emergence of the populist right. In Costa Rica, it has been the breakdown of a much more inclusive social democratic political settlement that has made possible a similarly constituted populist right. In both cases, dominance by neoliberal business and technocratic elites raises the likelihood of worsening social outcomes and further political upheaval.