| Summary: | The ongoing crisis of Latin America’s pink tide seems to confirm the warnings of populist decline that first emerged in mainstream political science in the early years of the twenty-first century. At the heart of this view is a sharp distinction between moderate centre-left governments on a supposed path to progress, and a radical left bound towards economic crisis and authoritarianism. Under almost three decades of near exclusive center-left governance in Chile, as witnessed most recently in the October 2019 state of emergency, the result has not been a gradual and linear path to democratic engagement and progress, but rather the undermining of the country’s democratic institutions; and with the recent electoral victories of right-wing parties and coalitions, also the return of authoritarianism. This democratic decline is directly attributed to the centre-left’s incapacity to adequately meet the demands of the student movement, applying what I call the “neostructuralist bargain” to diffuse the movement’s ambitions to directly participate in educational reform. However, the recent emergence of the Frente Amplio coalition suggests a possible answer to the growing reality of authoritarianism in Chile. © Manuel Larrabure. Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
|
|---|
