On Sunday 13th August, voters in Argentina delivered a hammer blow both to the incumbent centre left and the conservative opposition. In the presidential primary election – an important precursor to October’s presidential and legislative elections – the far right candidate Javier Milei surprised pollsters and politicians alike by taking 30% of the vote, ahead of both mainstream candidates (Patricia Bullrich, herself more neocon than neoliberal, of United for Change; and Sergio Massa of the protean Peronists). It is tempting to dismiss Milei as a joke candidate, with his obsessions for dogs, 1970s right-wing economists, dogs named after 1970s right-wing economists, tantric sex, and 1970s hairstyles. But we have been here before: Trump, written off as absurd, a flash-in-the-pan; Bolsonaro, mocked as a hiccupping, COVID-denying coup-monger; Kast, coming within a whisker of victory in Chile despite channelling the dictator Pinochet. None of these people – or the movements they represented – turned out to be funny. A Brazilian fascist seemingly tried (and failed) to assassinate Argentina’s Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner; Bolsonaristas attempted to seize Brazil’s parliament by force; and the scale and effects of January 6^th 2021 are still being untangled in the United States.

Yet we are told that Latin America has turned to the left, and there is some truth in that. Global media hurried to celebrate or panic over the ‘new pink tide’ in Latin America following left-of-centre victories in Mexico (2018), Argentina (2019), Bolivia (2020), Peru, Honduras and Chile (all 2021) and Brazil and Colombia (both 2022). Only last week, the grandson of former Guatemalan president Juan José Arévalo was elected president, though he will face enormous hurdles in governing (and there is a question of whether he really represents the left – an anti-corruption sentiment is clearly politically pertinent in Guatemala, but social change will require rather more). However, to speak of a singular ‘tide’ without examining different ideological and institutional traditions or contrasting local and international contexts obscures much more than it reveals. In Chile, Colombia and Brazil, just about enough of the establishment held their noses and consented to a centre-left victory to keep out the hard right. Consenting to be governed by the centre left is another matter however, and in each of those countries narrowly-elected leaders are battling hostile media environments and intransigent legislatures. In Bolivia, Luis Arce’s 2020 victory was a restoration of longstanding MAS rule after the soft coup of 2019. Peru saw the historic victory of Pedro Castillo unravel into political farce; following his arrest, the country has been wracked by repression and violence. Mexico is another story altogether: President López Obrador remains remarkably popular approaching the final year of his term, but neither his rhetoric nor his policies can be described simply as ‘leftist’.

Current left-leaning governments in Latin America face tough structural conditions too, in sharp contrast to the optimistic period known as the ‘first Pink Tide’ (roughly 2005-2014). While Lula and Chávez (among others) were very successful in using the gains of the commodity boom in that period to ameliorate poverty and inequality, that tap has – for now -run dry. If export revenues don’t rise significantly in the next two or three years, these governments will come under further pressure since they won’t be able to perform their core function of reducing poverty and inequality. Moreover with broader global economic stagnation, as with poor management of COVID, there is a strong tendency to punish incumbent governments; thus the current crop of left-wing governments are vulnerable not only in the face of their own promises, but also to wider structural factors.

While the ‘new’ far right – Kast, Bolsonaro, Milei, Verástegui in Mexico, Cubas in Paraguay, Añez in Bolivia – is relatively united and coherent, the current Latin American left is not. Lula still has extraordinary pull as a unifying figure, able to bring together democratic and authoritarian strands from across the region, but cracks have emerged over human rights, democratic practice, and environmental policy. If left-wing governments are able to remain in place for several years then we may see progress in forging regional unity on these issues, but for now, hydrocarbon policy and political pluralism are particularly sharp fractures in a heterogeneous group which includes leaders as different as Boric, Petro, Maduro and Arce. It also remains unclear whether Mexico has a (potentially transformative) future role as a Latin American power, or whether its focus will remain elsewhere.

Argentina itself is a case sui generis. The Peronist movement – represented officially by the Justicialist Party – has for the last twenty years been seen as on the centre left, under the successive leadership of Nestór Kirchner (president from 2003-07), Cristina Fernández (Nestór’s First Lady, then president from 2007-15), and Alberto Fernández (no relation, president since 2019). Yet Peronism has always been a broad (and contradictory) church. Its candidate for October’s election is the centrist finance minister Sergio Massa, while Milei himself echoes another personalist leader, Carlos Menem, who moved the Justicialist Party sharply to the right and embraced neoliberalism in the 1990s. Peronism’s ideological flexibility has been a blessing and a curse – with brutal inflation and increasing poverty, voters likely will not see Massa as a champion of the poor.

It was always premature and reductive to celebrate a ‘new Pink Tide’; it is now clear that across Latin America the momentum is with the hard right, and a combination of public anger with ossified political elites and a middle class deeply hostile to anything resembling social democracy or redistribution may usher in a dark era for the region. We are unlikely to see the domino run of coups and military dictatorships which characterised the sixties and seventies, but an elected rogues’ gallery of gun-toting, misogynistic, queerphobic, white-supremacist, extractivist climate change deniers could wreak new havoc for Latin Americans. They are organised, globally networked (via the Madrid Charter), amply funded, and extremely dangerous, seeing the brutal political violence of the Cold War as a crusade to be admired, and even revived.