Leftist lawmakers gather to answer a question: How to beat the global right?

Los Angeles Times

2 days ago

MEXICO CITY — In recent years, the far right has been remarkably organized, with leaders from far-flung countries sharing advisors, strategies and talking points.
The Conservative Political Action Conference, a gathering of right-wing activists and elected officials that started in the United States, has gone global, hosting mega-events in Brazil, Argentina and Hungary. Foreign leaders, including Argentina President Javier Milei and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, have raced the stage at CPAC, slamming socialism, calling for tougher policies on crime and railing against all things 'woke.'
Now, the left is trying to compete.
This week, political leaders, activists and strategists from a dozen countries across the Americas gather in Mexico City for what organizers are billing as the 'CPAC of the left.'
The second annual Panamerican Congress includes a diverse range of participants, from a guerrilla-fighter-turned-politician from Colombia to U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).
The event's program acknowledges that leftists have not been in conversation across borders in the way the right has, and vows to 'remedy this crisis of hemispheric coordination.'
In closed-door meetings and public events, participants will seek to address hemispheric themes such as migration, climate change and Trump's tariff threats. And they will debate existential questions: With elections looming across the region, what are winning strategies for the left? And how can it combat the growing influence of conservative, anti-establishment populists who are both inspired by — and influencing — the American right?
'We need solutions not only at the individual country level, but also at the continental level,' said Giorgio Jackson, an event organizer who served as minister of social development under Chilean President Gabriel Boric. 'We need broad, democratic, progressive alliances.'
Chile's upcoming presidential election highlights just how much the ideological landscape of the Americas has shifted. Just a handful of years ago, the left was ascendant, with its candidates winning presidencies in one country after the other: Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Colombia and Brazil.
Boric, a former student protest leader who was just 36 when he took office, embodied the trend, which some christened a 'new pink tide,' likening it to the period in the 2000s when Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Bolivia's Evo Morales dominated regional politics.
Boric campaigned on a promise that Chile would be the 'grave' of free-market orthodoxy and promoted a new constitution that would enshrine gender equality, environmental protections and Indigenous rights.
But a national referendum on the constitution failed. And amid a sluggish economy and growing fears about organized crime and high levels migration from nearby Venezuela, his approval rating has slumped to less than 30%.
Conservative José Antonio Kast, a Trump acolyte who has vowed hard-line security policies, is now leading in the polls for Chile's November presidential election.
Vowing to fight crime has been a winning strategy for the right across the region, from Ecuador, where conservative President Daniel Noboa has declared war on organized crime, to El Salvador, where Bukele's mass incarceration of alleged gang members has brought down violence even while sparking concerns about violations of human rights.
'Polls in most countries suggest populations want harsh crackdowns,' said James Bosworth, the founder of Hxagon, a company that provides political risk analysis in Latin America. A strong hand — 'mano dura' — is popular, he said.
The left, he said, needs to find a similarly powerful message.
It's no coincidence that the conference is taking place in Mexico, where leftist President Claudia Sheinbaum won election last year in a landslide. Her Morena party holds a majority in both chambers of Congress and governs most states.
The party's founder, former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was an economic populist, decrying the 'mafia of power' that he said controlled Mexico and vowing to 'put the poor first.'
Celeste Ascencio Ortega, a Morena congresswoman from Michoacán state, said other countries should consider replicating Morena's popular welfare programs, which funnel state money to students and the elderly.
'We have to talk about an accumulation of wealth that benefits everyone, not just a few,' she said.
Economic populism has also proved to be a winning strategy in New York's mayoral race, where Zohran Mamdani beat out establishment candidates in the Democratic primary by focusing on poverty and affordability.
But leftists coming into office in the hemisphere now are hamstrung by harsh economic conditions.
Long gone is the commodities boom that allowed Lula and others to spend generously. Today, inflation drives up food and fuel prices and the threat of a worldwide recession looms.
Leftists also must contend with the aggressive politics of the region's global superpower.
President Trump has cracked down on migration and has repeatedly threatened nations across Latin America with tariffs, recently saying he'd levy 50% taxes on imports from Brazil, citing a 'witch hunt' against Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right former president, who is on trial for allegedly plotting a coup.
In Mexico, whose economy relies largely on exports to the U.S., Trump is threatening 30% tariffs on Mexican imports unless the country does more to combat drug trafficking and migration.
The new taxes are set to go into effect Friday, just as the congress meets in Mexico City. Perhaps to avoid antagonizing Trump by appearing alongside prominent Democrats, Sheinbaum will not be participating in the event, although she may formally welcome its guests, and prominent Morena party members will take part.
The left has suffered a number of losses recently. Kamala Harris lost to Trump. In Argentina, far-right firebrand Milei won on a promise to privatize much of government. Polls in Brazil suggest Lula is nowhere near as popular as he once was heading into next year's presidential vote. .
But whether those shifts reflect real ideological changes in the region is up for debate.
Many see the pendulum swing from left to right as a feature of politics in the hemisphere, where voters often clamor for change. From to 2018 until 2023, some two dozen national elections went against the incumbent party.
'For approximately 15 years now, there are practically no goverments across the continent that have been reelected,' Jackson said. 'These are very difficult conditions for any party.'
Significantly, there will be no representatives at this week's event from Venezuela, Nicaragua or Cuba, countries with leftist leaders who have taken hard authoritarian turns.
Bosworth said it was incumbent on the left to address those repressive governments, particularly Venezuela, where more than 6 million people have fled political, economic and humanitarian crises in recent years.
'Venezuela is the great failure of the left in Latin America, and it struggles to move beyond that,' he said. 'If this movement is going to do anything, they can't ignore the fact that Venezuela exists.'