“What we are seeing is a new right wing nostalgic for the authoritarian past.”

The Department of Political Science of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of the Republic (UDELAR) of Montevideo, Uruguay, and CLACSO organized the International Seminar on October 3 “Ultras, radicals, new, alternatives? The emerging right wing in Latin America”One of its participants was the Argentine academic Juan Pablo Luna, PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina and professor at the Catholic University of Chile.

He analyzed that "andIn the Latin American case in particular, what we have is a center-right or a right wing of the 90s and 2000s that was more globalizing, focused on economic liberalization, and, in cases where we came from military dictatorships, on cleansing our image and acquiring democratic credentials, and so on. And what we are seeing today is this new right wing nostalgic for the authoritarian past, often with pro-military ties, with a much more ambiguous relationship with the authoritarian past, and sometimes openly permeated by those logics. And that puts the more traditional right wing in front of the dilemma of what to do, which is the dilemma that the European right wing has faced, and the dilemma in general. And what we have learned from those cases, at least, is that this new right wing sweeps aside what Kast calls the Chilean center-right, "the cowardly little right wing," the right wing that doesn't dare to break with political correctness, that doesn't reclaim what needs to be reclaimed from the authoritarian past, that eventually compromises with the center-left, and that negotiates. In that sense, on the one hand, these new parties pose a strong threat to the more traditional parties, but what we are seeing everywhere is that the power of votes, the power of electoral logic, ends up causing the traditional right-wing parties to usually be consumed by these new right-wing parties.”

He added that, in his opinion, in the population “There is an underlying discontent with the system, discontent with what is beginning to be referred to as a new lost decade in Latin America, in which sectors that are probably not too intense, not too radical, finally decide to vote for a candidate of this type… There is an underlying discontent that sometimes mobilizes it to the left, sometimes mobilizes it to the right, but what it has as its minimum common denominator is a discontent with the system, with the results, with what amounts to the capacity of the State in terms of solving people's lives or not complicating people's lives further.”

Seminary "The emerging right wing in Latin America"