College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
100 The Silent Majority(?): The Insurgent Right in the Southern Cone, 2019-2023
Mauro A. Gonzalez
Faculty Mentor: David De Micheli (Political Science, University of Utah)
Introduction
While pundits have started to claim that Latin America is entering a “second pink tide” (Kirk 2022), there is more nuance than socialists triumphantly re-entering executive office after being exiled to the political wilderness during the 2010s A new, insurgent right has cropped up at the same time: being more conservative, populist, antagonistic, and even authoritarian than their center-right forebearers. This paper examines three recently established right-wing populist parties in the Southern Cone: Chile’s Partido Republicano (PR), Paraguay’s Cruzada Nacional (CN) and Uruguay’s Cabildo Abierto (CA).
Each of the three were newly created for their country’s most recent election cycle and saw strong performances. The Chilean PR has quickly overtaken the center-right Chile Vamos (ChV) coalition, beating them more than 2-to-1 in the first round of the 2021 presidential race (28% to 13%), and garnering 44% of the vote in the runoff. The PR won another stunning victory in the 2023 Constitutional Council elections, totaling 34% of the vote to the center-right’s 20% (SERVEL 2023). The Uruguayan CA got 11% in the 2019 general elections, outperforming the nearly two hundred year-old Colorado party in eight of nineteen departments (Corte Electoral 2019). Finally, the Paraguayan CN got nearly 23% in 2023, right on the heels of the center-left’s 27% (ABC Color 2023b). What’s remarkable is the previous performance of right-wing anti-system parties. Jose Antonio Kast’s (founder of the PR) independent 2017 run for president saw him score nearly 8% of the vote (SERVEL 2017). In Paraguay, an assortment of right-wing protest parties got less than 4% of the vote in 2018 (TSJE 2018). Meanwhile Uruguay did not have a right-wing anti-establishment party compete in 2014. This electoral surge is noteworthy given that the three above-mentioned Southern Cone countries have some of the oldest and most stable party systems in the region. Such a momentous jump in vote shares is rare (Roberts 2014), especially one that so quickly displaces traditional coalitions.
This article seeks to investigate how these parties have managed to find a foothold in well-established party systems. While the parties may differ in certain policy and rhetoric, all three have used appeals to tough-on-crime policies to highlight the failures of the state, romantic nationalism for an antelapsarian past, and the activation of domestic center-periphery tensions to create new coalitions that disrupt the traditional party system. The right-wing insurgents have particularly relied on disenchanted voters on the margins of mainstream politics. These voters tend to be less ideological and more willing to vote for protest candidates, thus taking votes from both left- and right-wing part