Mauricio Macri. President of Argentina. Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Latin America has been showing in recent years a growing progressive government fatigue. Not so much with the policies of these governments, but with their way of doing politics. Mauricio Marci’s victory in Argentina seems to confirm the change of direction of the Latin American pendulum. However, it is unclear whether these changes will affect politics, as society is demanding, or only policies.
As we learned in school, socio-political transformation processes in Latin America tend to go in waves. So it was with the independence revolutions, the conservative republics, the military coups, the return to democracy and, more recently, the new left movement set in motion by Hugo Chávez in 1999. Dilma Rousseff’s poor electoral showing in Brazil, the loss of major cities by the governing Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement for Socialism – MAS) in Bolivia, and social mobilization in Venezuela and Ecuador, all seem to indicate that a new wave is coming.
