Latin Analysis: How are corruption and populism connected?
Scott Barbour / picture alliance
It is widely known that one of the biggest challenges that Latin America faces is that of corruption. Indeed, it has been pointed out by political academics that corruption within the region has a tremendous collateral impact on economic and social development, as it impacts institutions, political dynamics, and governance capability of the countries in both the national and international spheres.
The high levels of corruption have, naturally, caused severe civil unrest and a high dissatisfaction of citizens with their governments. Henceforth, this resulted in a wave of populism within the Latino countries, as Latino people see in them the chance of changing their corrupt governments and to punish those who have mismanaged the countries’ resources. Nevertheless, according to experts, the election of populist leaders is not as efficient to fight corruption as the constituencies have expected. This is the case as proof shows that populism does not only fails to deliver its promises of “cleaning” the corruption out of governments to increase the efficiency of economies but instead, populist governments have even significantly increased the corruption levels they inherited from past administrations.
The Endless Corruption Problem
Over a decade ago, there were several Latin American states which had been forecasted to lead economic and social development. Indeed, it became widely known that Venezuela had the most extensive reserves of oil in the world and experiencing unprecedented financial growth; Brazil is considered one of the most promising 5 countries in the world (BRICS), Mexico significantly increasing its celebration of multilateral trade agreements. Overall, forecasts of economic growth within the region were very optimistic, such that the expectations for economic and social stability, seemed to be of a promising nature, not only within the governments of the countries but also within the international community and foreign direct investors.
Nevertheless, despite many nations within the Latino community improving their financial performance, corruption kept being a latent problem within these states. Hence, even when it appeared that nations were rising their financial gains, these were held by the countries’ elite groups – including government officials. Thus, the concentration of wealth by small groups of people due to corrupt practices, divided societies, mainly, into two social classes: the bourgeois (high) and the proletariat (low) social classes. Evidently, then, the high levels of corruption and unequal distribution of wealth reduced (or, in some cases, disappeared) the middle class, causing confrontation between the two remaining groups.
The latter phenomenon caused a feeling of “underrepresentation” of the working class amongst Latin American countries within their governments. Hence, as the statistics gathered by the International Transparency organization showed, Latin Americans (with the notable exceptions of Uruguay and Costa Rica) felt growingly reproachful against their governments due to the lack of transparency and accountability regarding the administration and distribution of resources.
Populism as a way for the people to regain control?
Parallelly, Latin America has also been known by experts as a “land of populism”. This is the case as the continuing high levels of corruption within the governmental spheres among nations, causes an unequal distribution of economic factors and divides societies into those who have an excess of wealth and those who do not have any. Even when Latin American nations seemed to boost their prospects for development, this trend remained.
As a consequence, then (and considering that during the 2000s and 2010s most Latino nations were democracies), the people showing great dissatisfaction towards their corrupt governments, the election of populist leaders was (as some experts argue) a natural democratic response to the high perceived levels of illicit activities within the administrations.
As a matter of fact, “populism”, as a term, refers to leaders claiming that they represent the “popolo”, that is, the people. Hence, in Latin America, populist leaders (from both left and right-wing orientations) gained overwhelming support by promising to structurally change the governments of the countries and “clean” them from corruption. These leaders promised the lower social classes to give them a much-desired “representation” and a “fairer” distribution for resources and opportunities – usually using discourses of nationalist sentiments and taking strong positions on economic philosophies of capitalism or socialism, using rhetorics of “us” and “them”. Yet, these charismatic populist leaders become infamous for being extremist in their propositions and basing their speeches on finger-pointing other politicians like the ones to blame, rather than by creating proposals based on solid political and economic grounds.
Have populist leaders delivered?
The election of populist leaders, then, shows the rising demand for Latinos towards having their leaders approach policymaking in a different way, as well as it demonstrates an ever-growing rejection of political elites. Nevertheless, contrary to what people have expected, populism has historically shown to not deliver its promises of corruption-elimination.
In many ways, the politicians who rise to power in an overwhelming democratic victory, have failed the people who voted for them in the first place.
The most extreme case of populism delivering the exact opposite to what it had originally promised, occurs when populist leaders – even when they are democratically elected – change their constitutions and modify the law in order to hold on to power. Hence, infamous governments, such as that of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and Evo Morales’s Bolivia, instead of providing governmental institutions with increased transparency and accountability to eliminate corruption, completely dismantle their countries’ institutional structures and closes transparency doors. Needless to say, additionally to not fulfilling the promises of increasing the representation of the lower classes, the cases of Bolivia and Venezuela resulted in massive economic shrinking and social (as well as humanitarian) crises.
Nevertheless, even when not all populist leaders end up holding on to power as Morales Chavez or Maduro, that has not meant that the other populist Latin American presidents have actually managed to make their countries corruption-free. This can be seen in the two populist heads of state that lead the two largest economies in Latin America: Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Even when they both belong to opposite economic philosophies (Bolsonaro is right-wing and AMLO left-wing), they both promised during their campaigns to structurally change their governments such that the elimination of corruption would allow the countries to a much greater economic and social development. As such, they both rose to power with unprecedented popular support like their countries had never seen before.
In the case of Mexico, statistics have shown that, after AMLO’s first year as president, not only has corruption not been abolished, but it has significantly increased compared to past years. Yet, even when these statistics have been ratified and communicated by several institutions and worldwide media, the Mexican president still argues that during his time in office, corruption is being continuously and overpoweringly eliminated. Naturally, this has had an impact on his overall approval rate which seems to be incessantly decreasing.
Similarly, Brazilians had voted for Bolsonaro and his commitment to eradicating corruption from the government. He had, some would argue, even a greater burden to carry his promises as he is the successor of Lula da Silva, who had faced corruption scandals during his time as president. Nonetheless, during his time as head of state, he has been implicated in several scandals that include him and his family in corruption scandals that involved paramilitary forces of the country. Thus, his credibility on fixing a government that has suffered from incessant illicit acts within the governmental sphere has been severely questioned by both the public and the international community.
These, and many more examples of several other populist Latino leaders, have then shown how Latin America has been involved in a toxic circle of corruption and populism. This is so, as the Latin America region has been battling for years against a system that favors the elites and makes an unequal distribution of resources that produce deep societal divides. As a response, the people elect populist leaders who promise to give more representation to the poor and deal with social injustice (mainly by using the social divides in their favor to gain followers rather than by creating viable strategies to change the structural flaws of the governmental system), but that, at best, fail to clean the government institutions from corruption.
Given that populist leaders ultimately do not perform the miraculous fixing of corrupt governmental structures, the electorate then punishes their leaders by voting in favor of the opposition (which is commonly another populist figure) in the following elections. However, political experts declare that to effectively eliminate the state institutions from corruption, more than one term in power is necessary. Hence, this would require politicians to work together between political parties, such that an entirely different strategy is not carried out every time a leader is elected from a different party. What has become clear, though, is that the Latin American people are not willing to keep on being “invisible” and “underrepresented”, and as their populist leaders have been failing them, some have started to strike the streets of their country (such as the case of Chile where citizens recently accomplished to have their government create an entirely new constitution). Hence, it becomes evident that if leaders do not want to face further civil unrest, they must start to think more critically on how to satisfy the demands of representation and resource distribution more efficiently (instead of only promising to do so to get to power) if they want to avoid future stringent social instability. Particularly in unprecedented times as these, where the lack of efficiency to carry out promises of wellbeing and lack of corruption, impacts the people’s health, economy, and freedom of movement in such a direct way.
Experts argue, then, that Latin American leaders should stop promising to do politics in a new way and start to approach policymaking from a different perspective.
