Pink-Tide Governments: Pragmatic and Populist Responses to Challenges from the Right
by Steve Ellner
The downturn in international commodity prices after 2008 heavily impacted leftist and center-leftist Latin American governments, leading to economic contraction and political confrontation and culminating in a series of setbacks beginning in 2015. Adversaries to the right ascribed the problems to the flaws inherent in the model that those governments had adopted. As could have been expected, some government critics pointed to the model of leftist-style populism as the root cause. Ironically, the Mexican scholar Jorge Castañeda, who had viewed Brazil’s Workers’ Party as the quintessence of the “good left” in contrast to the “populist left” personified by Hugo Chávez, by 2015 classified the nation’s president Dilma Rousseff as a populist and pointed to her allegedly populist policies as responsible for her downfall (Castañeda, 2015; Castañeda and Morales, 2008: 9–11). Other analysts on the right attributed the political and economic woes faced by progressive governments to economic interventionism, a model they considered to be tantamount to socialism (Ellner, 2015; 2016).
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