In the U.S. and Europe, a rise in personality cults could threaten the complex interplay of institutions, rules and marketsBy STEPHEN FIDLER
Oct. 20, 2016 4:46 p.m. ET
http://www.wsj.com/articles/politics-is-looking-more-latin-american-these-days-1476996392Politics on both sides of the Atlantic looks a lot more Latin American these days.
There is a rise in the cult of personality and the notion that a charismatic figure or caudillo can resolve a country’s economic or political failings. Claims multiply that the corrupt old order needs to be overturned. And as corruption becomes more and more the coin of political discourse, opponents are portrayed as having no motives but personal gain.
Institutions are politicized, with leaders in some European countries attacking the independence of judiciaries that they view as obstructing their governments. The election process itself has even been questioned, including for the first time in the U.S.
By no means are all these “Latin American” attributes evident everywhere in Europe and North America, where political history and experience ranges widely.
Nor have all these characteristics been present everywhere in Latin America—and where they have been, many countries have moved on. Latin American politicians haven’t, by and large, had much to say about immigration either, a prominent theme in European and U.S. politics today.
One common claim losers have made in Latin American national elections was that the vote was rigged against them. And unlike in U.S. national elections, it often was.
But the losers’ focus on election rigging had a major consequence: it meant that opposition politicians could never be reconciled with the result. They and their followers were therefore estranged from the political system, which they condemned as unjust, and therefore excluded from shaping policy.
Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo recognized this problem in the mid-1990s in his own country, at that point the longest surviving one-party state in the world.
“The problem with Mexico’s political system is that each time we have elections, one side declares in advance the illegitimate nature of the rules and therefore refuses to accept the results,” he said in an interview at the time.He introduced changes to address this, and power now shifts among Mexico’s political parties.
Apart from his insinuations about the coming election’s fairness, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has also challenged the legitimacy or competence of institutions once considered off-limits to politicians, including the Federal Reserve, the intelligence services and the country’s top generals.
For the U.S. this represents a sharp shift from 30 or 40 years ago, when the political debate was often polite to the point of being decorous.
“Thirty years ago you would have talked about the dominance of ideology in Latin American politics, whereas the U.S. was willing to compromise. Now it’s the other way round,” said Victor Bulmer-Thomas, an economic historian of Latin America and a former director of the Chatham House think tank.(more at link)
