Pía Mancini and Daniel Innerarity during the conference "What Democracy?" at São Luiz Theater, Lisbon. Nuno Ramos. All rights reserved.
Manuel Serrano: What can you tell our readers about the state of democracy in Latin America, about the turn to the right in several countries in the region and, particularly, in your country, Argentina?
Pía Mancini: I think that this turn to the right has to do with a political system that is trying to respond to the demands of a society that has changed, and failing. I think that, at least in some parts of Latin America, we are perpetuating the logic of populism, which is something that worries me very much. I do not agree with Chantal Mouffe’s proposal that populism of the right should be countered with populism of the left. I lived in Argentina through all of the Kirchnerist years and populisms of the left frighten me as much as those of the right. Populism is populism. Latin America, it seems to me, has always moved in a pendulum. We have lived through various forms of government in the region - military governments, the return of democracy, the rise of neoliberalism in the nineties followed by left-wing populism, and now, back to the right – which have lasted very similar periods of time. I think ours is very much a pendulum movement. There are cycles, and Macri’s election is the response to 12 years of exacerbated, absolutely corrupt leftist populism, which in the end was hardly leftist, only by name. The people in government were the same who voted in favour of the neoliberal reforms in the nineties, so we can say that their populism was nothing more than a ploy to seize power.
