Pundits reviewing 2022 are heaving a palpable sigh of relief. This was the year, or so the consensus goes, when far-right strongmen such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro were enfeebled, China stumbled and the “West” made a comeback, at least against Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Such assessments, nostalgic for a lost “liberal international order,” ignore a more widespread development: how a general discontent with the old order, exacerbated by the pandemic, is fueling a revival of the left in Latin America, Europe and Australasia.
The trend can be seen most clearly in Latin American countries that have long been tormented by extremes of poverty and inequality. Returning to power in Brazil in October, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva heads a remarkably long victory parade by leftists throughout the region. In June, Colombia elected its first leftist president in Gustavo Petro. Gabriel Boric became in December 2021 the most left-wing president of Chile since Salvador Allende. Bolivian President Luis Arce came to power in 2020. In 2019 in Argentina, Alberto Fernández defeated an incumbent right-wing president. A year earlier, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador won in a landslide. (Pedro Castillo’s ouster in Peru after a failed attempt to dissolve congress stands as the movement’s one notable reverse.)
