The South American Pendulum: Electoral Volatility And The New Right Wing

South America is entering another cycle of right-wing governance, with recent victories in Colombia, Peru, and beyond recalling the region’s recent sharp turn between 2016 and 2022. Unlike that earlier wave, however, this resurgence is marked by weaker mandates and fragile coalitions rather than broad ideological conviction. Whether the right wing is able to entrench itself or unravels under public pressure remains the defining uncertainty of the era.

This year, South America is poised to see right-wing majorities in the region, following the elections of Abelardo de la Espriella, in Colombia, and Keiko Fujimori, in Peru. In addition, 2025 saw the right wing win elections in Bolivia, Chile and Ecuador. This mirrored the 2016 to 2018 period, in which a clear shift to the right was experienced after the elections of figures such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Argentina’s Maurício Macri, among others.

Importantly, in the last two decades, South America has gone through cycles of different political spectra. At one point, left-wing governments became a majority and continued to do so until mid-2016, when right-wing candidates who were against the left’s establishment began moving up into presidential office. This newly established right-wing majority lasted until around 2022, due to dissatisfaction with economic reforms as well as the wear and tear caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, South America went through two major alternated cycles, in which the majority gave the left leadership (2022-2026) and is now slowly leading to a right-wing revival.

The Pink Tide

The first decade of the 21st century in South America was marked by the left’s golden age in the region. Propelled by proposals for social and economic reforms, such as poverty reduction and hunger alleviation, South Americans embraced these governments with enthusiasm (Lissardy, 2022). This phenomenon was later called the Pink Tide (Onda Rosa, in Portuguese, and Marea Rosa, in Spanish) and reached its peak between 2006 and 2010, until mid-2014. The next graph presents the composition of governments’ political positions over the mentioned period:

This began to change around 2014, with the second election of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, the fall of commodity prices, and important changes made by Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela. The instability of the dominant left-wing began to unravel in 2015, leading to the ascension of the right wing to power, beginning with the Argentinian election.

The Shift to the Right Wing (2016-2022)

The year 2016 was marked in South America by dramatic political changes. In Brazil, for example, Dilma Rousseff was removed from power through a controversial impeachment process that made Michel Temer president. In Argentina, the newly elected government of Mauricio Macri established its first actions in search of solutions to the monetary instability that afflicted Argentinians (G1, 2015). Commodities faced substantial decline and Venezuela, dependent on oil exports, began to face its biggest humanitarian and economic crisis (Corazza and Mesquita, 2018). In addition, corruption and influence peddling were gradually exposed to the public, due to scandals involving twelve Latin American and African countries with the company Odebrecht, leading to the resignation of Peru’s Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in 2018 (DW, 2020).

This led to a paradigm shift in the region with a rise of the political right. In general, the right’s political discourse was in favor of political renewal and anti-corruption, seeking to contrast with the incumbent left-wing. Consequently, through elections and populist speeches, right-wing candidates gained power.

The Left-wing comes back to power (2022-2026)

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the right-wing governments gradually lost influence in the region. Speeches like Jair Bolsonaro’s, in which he feigned COVID-19-related choking, as well as the unpreparedness to deal with the pandemic’s consequences resonated poorly with the regional public. In addition, the pandemic imposed numerous challenges on countries due to quarantines and dramatic falls of stock exchanges and macroeconomics (Lissardy, 2022).

This context culminated in the rise of a new left-wing majority to South American power. Observe the distribution between right and left in the governments of the region at the height of this second leftist ascendance, in the year 2022:

Are we experiencing a new political cycle in South America?

The current political scenario in South American countries seems to be favorable for a new rise of the region’s political right. This is observed in Argentina (Javier Milei), Peru (Keiko Fujimori), Colombia (Abelardo de la Espriella) and Bolivia (Rodrigo Paz), which demonstrate that the right wing remains strengthened in the region (Bischoff, 2026). However, we may face another form of revanchism, which is manifested in the theory of “punitive vote.” According to Rennó and Hoepers (2010), the punitive strategic vote aims to punish a given candidate, even if the vote goes to another candidate with which the voter does not fully identify.

Once again, populism is at the center of political discussion. Candidates that do not offer viable or well-crafted government proposals present speeches that drive political divergence merely by an identification of “us against them” (Eisele, 2026). In this sense, the right again dominates the South American political scene.

While the right is ascendant, they are not the same political force they were during the period of 2016 and 2022. In the last elections, winners in countries like Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Peru exhibited narrow victories, and this lack of mandate will certainly reverberate in future elections as they attempt to maintain their fragile hold on power.

References

Bischoff, Wesley (2026). Esquerda x direita: veja como está o mapa da América do Sul após a eleição presidencial na Colômbia. G1. 22 Jul. Available at: https://g1.globo.com/mundo/noticia/2026/06/22/esquerda-x-direita-veja-mapa-america-do-sul-apos-eleicao-colombia.ghtml. (Accessed: 16 July 2026).

Corazza, Felipe; Mesquita, Lígia (2018). Crise na Venezuela: o que levou o país ao colapso econômico e à maior crise de sua história. BBC. 22 Oct. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-45909515. (Accessed: 16 July 2026).

DW (2020). O ocaso da Odebrecht DW. 28 Jul. Available at: https://www.dw.com/pt-br/o-ocaso-da-odebrecht/a-54350923. (Accessed: 16 July 2026).

Eisele, Ines (2026). Latin America: Why are voters turning to the right?. DW. 25 Jun. Available at: https://www.dw.com/en/latin-america-why-are-voters-turning-to-the-right/a-77711864. (Accessed: 16 July 2026).

G1 (2015). Macri é eleito presidente da Argentina e põe fim a 12 anos de kirchnerismo. G1. 22 Nov. Available at: https://g1.globo.com/mundo/noticia/2015/11/macri-e-eleito-presidente-da-argentina-e-poe-fim-12-anos-de-kirchnerismo.html. (Accessed: 16 July 2026).

Lissardy, Gerardo (2022). As diferenças entre avanço da esquerda na América Latina e ‘onda rosa’ de duas décadas. BBC. 04 Jul. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-61989885. (Accessed: 16 July 2026).

Rennó, Lucio R.; Hoepers, Bruno (2010). Voto Estratégico Punitivo: Transferência de votos nas eleições presidenciais de 2006. Novos Estudos, Mar. 2010, v.(86), pages 141-161.