- Five Latin American countries — Ecuador, Bolivia, Honduras, Chile and Colombia — swung to the right or center-right in just over a year, between April 2025 and June 2026.
- Argentina and El Salvador didn't change political direction, but widened support for right-wing governments already in office, in October 2025 and February 2024 respectively.
- On Sunday, Germany's far-right AfD followed the same pattern in a regional vote in Saxony-Anhalt, posting its best-ever result, though it fell three seats short of an outright majority.
- Analysts disagree on the cause: some point to a broad protest vote against incumbents, others to a sustained ideological shift; cases like Mexico, Honduras and the mismatched election calendar complicate any single storyline.
A Sunday in Saxony-Anhalt That Reopened the Debate
Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 43.8% of the vote in Sunday's regional election in Saxony-Anhalt, its best showing ever in a state race, according to the preliminary official count reported by public broadcaster ZDF. That figure roughly doubles the 20.8% the party pulled in 2021 and leaves it, under leader Ulrich Siegmund, just three seats short of governing alone: the AfD took 39 of the new 83-seat regional parliament, with 42 needed for an outright majority.
The Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which had run Saxony-Anhalt without interruption since 2002, collapsed from 37.1% to 17.2%, its worst result in the state's history. Turnout reached roughly 78%, the highest for an eastern German state election since reunification in 1990.
Despite the result, outgoing state premier Sven Schulze, of the CDU, ruled out any opening toward the far right: "I don't intend to work with the AfD," he said hours after the count closed. Every other party in the new parliament held the same line, extending the so-called firewall that mainstream German parties maintain against a party the state's domestic intelligence agency classifies as far-right extremist.
Five Presidencies Flipped in Just Over a Year
The Latin American sequence began in Ecuador on April 13, 2025, when Daniel Noboa won a full term over correísta challenger Luisa González. With the count fully closed, the National Electoral Council certified an eleven-point-plus gap between the two: 55.63% for Noboa against 44.37% for González.
Six months later, Bolivia broke a two-decade run of governments from the Movement for Socialism. On October 19, 2025, centrist senator Rodrigo Paz won the country's first-ever presidential runoff, taking 54.5% of the vote against 45.5% for right-winger Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga, according to the tallies released by Bolivia's electoral authority.
Honduras produced the tightest margin of the five: conservative Nasry Asfura edged out fellow conservative Salvador Nasralla by just 0.74 points — 40.27% to 39.53% — in the November 30, 2025 vote. The National Electoral Council certified Asfura's win on December 24, after nearly a month of disputes and fraud allegations from Nasralla and the outgoing government of Xiomara Castro. Asfura took office on January 27, 2026 and has governed since; the irregularity claims never overturned the result or blocked his inauguration.
Chile swung harder still on December 14, 2025: hard-right José Antonio Kast won a landslide 58.61% of the vote, nearly 18 points ahead of the 41.39% posted by leftist Jeannette Jara, according to the full official tally from Chile's electoral service. Kast was sworn in that March.
The circle closed in Colombia on June 21, 2026, when far-right lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella beat leftist senator Iván Cepeda by the narrowest presidential margin the country's democracy has ever recorded: 49.66% of the vote against 48.70% for his rival, as confirmed by the national civil registry; Cepeda conceded that gap three days later. De la Espriella was sworn in on August 7, 2026, barely eleven weeks before the German vote in Saxony-Anhalt.
Two Governments That Already Held Power Widened Their Base
Two other cases belong on this list for a different reason: right-wing governments that didn't change hands, but strengthened at the ballot box instead. In Argentina, President Javier Milei's La Libertad Avanza took roughly 41% of the vote in the October 26, 2025 midterm legislative elections, substantially expanding its bloc in Congress and edging closer to the one-third of votes needed to shield presidential vetoes.
In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele won re-election on February 4, 2024 with 82.66% of valid votes, a landslide the country's electoral tribunal certified when it closed the final count.
For international analyst Oláguer Chacón, the common thread isn't ideological but circumstantial: "It's more a punishment vote against administrations," he told the channel NTN24, describing how Latin American voters keep swinging in blocs from one political camp to another based on each government's economic track record.
Other readings point to something more durable. Argentine journalist Claudio Fantini told the Peruvian outlet Gestión that "Latin America is torn between the center and the ultraconservative right", referring to the realignment the region is undergoing ahead of the 2026 election cycle.
An analysis from the Barcelona-based think tank CIDOB pushes back against any uniform reading, however: it notes that in Colombia, Cepeda's leftist coalition posted its strongest vote total in history despite losing, and that in Chile, Jara herself led the first round before falling in the runoff — evidence, the authors argue, of a region more fragmented than evenly tilted rightward.
The Pieces That Don't Quite Fit
Mexico sits outside any "wave" narrative altogether: leftist Claudia Sheinbaum governs the country with no sign of an imminent handover. Honduras, though settled today with Asfura in office since January, was decided by a razor-thin margin and dogged by weeks of fraud claims that delayed the official proclamation. And the calendar itself resists any tidy "election year" storyline: nearly two and a half years separate Bukele's February 2024 re-election from the German vote in September 2026 — far longer than the twelve-month window implied by grouping all eight results together.
Peru adds another wrinkle to the picture: in June 2026, Keiko Fujimori beat leftist Roberto Sánchez by just 49,641 votes, a margin nearly as tight as Colombia's and further proof of how close several of these races really were.
October's Test Case in Brazil
Brazil will put this trend to the test on October 4. Seeking a fourth, non-consecutive term, 80-year-old Lula da Silva will face Flávio Bolsonaro, the 45-year-old senator the Liberal Party crowned as its presidential pick at a July 25 convention attended by Argentina's Javier Milei. The younger Bolsonaro is running as heir to his father's project; the elder Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year sentence for trying to block the peaceful transfer of power after losing the 2022 election, and has served it under house arrest in Brasília since March for health reasons, after months in a federal prison in the capital. With a possible runoff penciled in for October 25, that result will show whether the region keeps tilting the same way, or whether Saxony-Anhalt and Bogotá turn out to be, in the end, two stories that only looked alike from a distance.
