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By Ruchir Sharma. In April last year I caught up with Chile’s richest man, Sebastian Piñera , in the surprisingly modest Santiago office to which he returned after leaving the presidential mansion. A billionaire who made his money in the credit card business, Piñera served as president from 2010 to 2014, and he reflected on the defeat of his party after he stepped down, limited by law to one term. His center-right government had presided over an economic boom, with growth averaging 6 percent, yet his party was driven from power amid street protests against rising inequality. Supporters of the new president, Michele Bachelet, had promised to “take a bulldozer” to the Chilean model of lean government and low taxes. As we spoke, they were pushing for a bigger government, higher spending to help the poor and higher corporate taxes to pay for free university education. Chile’s shift under Bachelet reflected “the long history of Latin America,” Piñera said, with only a hint of frustration. “When times are good, countries turn to the left, and when times are bad, they turn to the right.”

It was only a few months later that Latin voters soon started to reverse the “pink tide,” which had seen a range of bright to light-red socialists rise to power in a dozen Latin countries, from Argentina to Chile, in the previous decade. The pink tide was supported by good times, as high global prices for commodity exports—soybeans in Brazil, oil and gas in Bolivia and Ecuador, copper in Peru and Chile—allowed socialist governments to support generous welfare spending. In 2015, however, as commodity prices plunged to multi-year lows, hard times came back with a vengeance in Latin America. Regionwide, economic growth turned negative, and inflation hit 15 percent, its highest since the currency crises of the 1990s.

The worst economic environment in a generation led to the fall of one left-wing government after another. The cascade began last November in Argentina, where zero growth and 25 percent inflation set the stage for the defeat of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her populist party. A month later in Venezuela, with inflation in triple digits, the opposition wrestled the national assembly majority away from the socialist ruling party, and pushed for a recall vote to depose President Nicolas Maduro. Approval ratings plummeted for once popular socialists like Bachelet and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, who announced he would not run for a third term.

More: http://time.com/4358194/the-anti-incumbency-wave-is-changing-the-politics-of-latin-america/

Note: #politics #southAmerica #economics