ON THE night of October 12th, after comfortably winning a third term as the president of Bolivia, Evo Morales was in full rhetorical flow. Having dedicated his victory to Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, he went on: “How much longer will we continue to be subjected to the North American empire or the capitalist system? This triumph is a triumph for anti-imperialists and anti-colonialists.”
So far, so reminiscent of 2007. That was when Chavez’s anti-yanqui continental alliance, known as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), hit its zenith. It had gained two new recruits with the election of Rafael Correa in Ecuador and of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Having won a new term by a 26-point margin, Chávez pledged himself to “21st-century socialism”. A year earlier Mr Morales, a socialist coca-growers’ leader of Amerindian descent, had won Bolivia’s presidency proclaiming that he was “the United States’s worst nightmare”. In Argentina the election in 2007 of Cristina Fernández, an ALBA fellow-traveller, prolonged the regime of her husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner.
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Analysts lumped these leaders together as radical populists, for want of a better term. Yet despite a shared bent for autocracy, there were always differences among them, not least because of their countries’ differing circumstances. Seven years on, their fates are distinct. In Venezuela Chávez bequeathed a toxic economic legacy to his lacklustre successor, Nicolás Maduro. A country that claims the world’s biggest oil reserves has been so badly mismanaged that it is scraping around for dollars. As for Ms Fernández, having plunged Argentina into stagflation, she is down and almost out, despite her last-gasp effort to turn her argument over debt with a New York court into a nationalist epic.
Their difficulties are in sharp contrast with Mr Morales’s continuing popularity. True, he has been in power for a shorter period. But his success has recently owed less to “anti-capitalism” and much more to his accommodation with economic orthodoxy and local capitalists. After a turbulent early period when he pushed through a new constitution, quashed the opposition and nationalised foreign-owned oil and gas producers and utilities, he has presided over several years of political stability and economic growth. And he has made his peace with private business.
The ALBA presidents all claim to be leading durable “revolutions”, not just any old government. In practice, all of them (save Mr Ortega) built their popularity on recycling a huge increase in rents from the commodity boom into subsidies for the poor and expanded social provision. But Mr Morales has been much less wasteful than Chávez and the Kirchners, having run a fiscal surplus every year since 2005.
Mr Correa, like Mr Morales, is becoming more pragmatic. He has invested his oil windfall in roads, schools and hospitals. He recently negotiated a trade agreement with the European Union and has restored normal ties with the IMF. Last month he watered down a new banking law under which the state was to dictate the destination of private bank loans. As for Mr Ortega, who has long been chummy with private businessmen, his espousal of a quixotic, Chinese-backed and environmentally damaging scheme for a trans-Isthmian canal looks like a search for elusive rents to sustain his family’s grip on power.
Mr Morales and Mr Correa, who won re-election last year, may be riding high now. But there are clouds on the horizon for their “revolutions”, too. Despite the rhetoric, these do not include the United States: Barack Obama’s response to ALBA has been to yawn. Their first problem is the end of the commodity boom. Three-quarters of Bolivia’s exports are of natural gas or minerals, whose prices are falling. Ecuador invests much more than Bolivia. Mr Correa has boosted non-oil exports. He has done more than Mr Morales to try to diversify his country’s economy, with so far uncertain results. But his “citizens’ revolution” is showing signs of financial strain. Ecuador is heading for a fiscal deficit of up to 7% of GDP this year. And the oil price is crashing.
The second difficulty that all the ALBA autocrats face is that their regimes are highly personal. Neither Mr Morales nor Mr Correa shows signs of wanting to groom a successor. When the economic going gets tougher, populists typically find it difficult to take necessary but unpopular decisions. The question they will face in due course is whether they are prepared to relinquish power voluntarily—whether, in other words, their “revolutions” are one-way tickets.
So far, so reminiscent of 2007. That was when Chavez’s anti-yanqui continental alliance, known as the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), hit its zenith. It had gained two new recruits with the election of Rafael Correa in Ecuador and of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. Having won a new term by a 26-point margin, Chávez pledged himself to “21st-century socialism”. A year earlier Mr Morales, a socialist coca-growers’ leader of Amerindian descent, had won Bolivia’s presidency proclaiming that he was “the United States’s worst nightmare”. In Argentina the election in 2007 of Cristina Fernández, an ALBA fellow-traveller, prolonged the regime of her husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner.
In this section
Related topics
Analysts lumped these leaders together as radical populists, for want of a better term. Yet despite a shared bent for autocracy, there were always differences among them, not least because of their countries’ differing circumstances. Seven years on, their fates are distinct. In Venezuela Chávez bequeathed a toxic economic legacy to his lacklustre successor, Nicolás Maduro. A country that claims the world’s biggest oil reserves has been so badly mismanaged that it is scraping around for dollars. As for Ms Fernández, having plunged Argentina into stagflation, she is down and almost out, despite her last-gasp effort to turn her argument over debt with a New York court into a nationalist epic.
Their difficulties are in sharp contrast with Mr Morales’s continuing popularity. True, he has been in power for a shorter period. But his success has recently owed less to “anti-capitalism” and much more to his accommodation with economic orthodoxy and local capitalists. After a turbulent early period when he pushed through a new constitution, quashed the opposition and nationalised foreign-owned oil and gas producers and utilities, he has presided over several years of political stability and economic growth. And he has made his peace with private business.
The ALBA presidents all claim to be leading durable “revolutions”, not just any old government. In practice, all of them (save Mr Ortega) built their popularity on recycling a huge increase in rents from the commodity boom into subsidies for the poor and expanded social provision. But Mr Morales has been much less wasteful than Chávez and the Kirchners, having run a fiscal surplus every year since 2005.
Mr Correa, like Mr Morales, is becoming more pragmatic. He has invested his oil windfall in roads, schools and hospitals. He recently negotiated a trade agreement with the European Union and has restored normal ties with the IMF. Last month he watered down a new banking law under which the state was to dictate the destination of private bank loans. As for Mr Ortega, who has long been chummy with private businessmen, his espousal of a quixotic, Chinese-backed and environmentally damaging scheme for a trans-Isthmian canal looks like a search for elusive rents to sustain his family’s grip on power.
Mr Morales and Mr Correa, who won re-election last year, may be riding high now. But there are clouds on the horizon for their “revolutions”, too. Despite the rhetoric, these do not include the United States: Barack Obama’s response to ALBA has been to yawn. Their first problem is the end of the commodity boom. Three-quarters of Bolivia’s exports are of natural gas or minerals, whose prices are falling. Ecuador invests much more than Bolivia. Mr Correa has boosted non-oil exports. He has done more than Mr Morales to try to diversify his country’s economy, with so far uncertain results. But his “citizens’ revolution” is showing signs of financial strain. Ecuador is heading for a fiscal deficit of up to 7% of GDP this year. And the oil price is crashing.
The second difficulty that all the ALBA autocrats face is that their regimes are highly personal. Neither Mr Morales nor Mr Correa shows signs of wanting to groom a successor. When the economic going gets tougher, populists typically find it difficult to take necessary but unpopular decisions. The question they will face in due course is whether they are prepared to relinquish power voluntarily—whether, in other words, their “revolutions” are one-way tickets.
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