Left-wing ex-president of Uruguay, Pepe Mujica. Wikimedia Commons. All Rights Reserved.
This article is part of the series "Persistent inequality: disputing the legacy of the pink tide in Latin America" produced in alliance with the Institute of Latin American Studies and at the Instituite of Sociology of the Freie Universität Berlin.
There are three sources of disempowerment encroaching
upon Uruguay’s regional relevance and singularity which result in a decrease in
national self-esteem and an exhaustion of its utopian energies.
Number 1 is as follows: Upon accessing power, the
left, far from implementing a jubilant, triumph-driven radical discourse,
ceased to promise radicalism or to consolidate change.
Instead, they talked
about "people-like capitalism", and "capitalism in
earnest", as its most charismatic and popular leader, the legendary Pepe
Mujica, put it during his second term as President at the head of a Broad Front
(FA) government.
Two is as such: The country’s proud sense of
self-esteem as an original singularity, originating from as far back as its
political-administrative status under the colonial government, has been
weakened by the powerful invasion of great narratives of modernity, which have challenged
the idea that Uruguay is somehow unique.
The country, which proudly considered
itself to be the 'Switzerland of America', and the 'Athens of the Rio de la
Plata', which used to think that 'there’s nothing like Uruguay', the small
model-country which thought it could carry out social experiments akin to the Welfare
State without being dragged down by the weight of old historical conflicts like
in Europe.
Ideological globalization reached Uruguay through Communism,
Socialism and Anarchism at the beginning of the 20th century; through Third
Worldism, Christian Democracy and a first version of developmental
neoliberalism in the late 1950s; through Maoism, Trostkyism, Dependentism and
Foquismo (Cuban revolutionary ideology) in the 1960s. Thus, the pride in the
odd singularity became diluted.
Three is the following: The exercise of the duty
of government impedes any expansion of utopias and radical ideologies. The
political routine entails concessions, ideological de-radicalization,
leadership dominance, distancing from the bases and party bureaucratization.
This is exacerbated by the granting of a ministry to each fraction with a
substantive constituency within an increasingly multi-faceted coalition.
Short-term tactical manipulation of strategic teleology takes place, and the
gentrification of the party correlates with entropy and exhaustion.
Continuity
in power is not relinquished to manipulate pragmatic euchronias at elections
and in appointments of personal allies to key positions.
Professional surveys conducted immediately after the end of the dictatorship showed the military at the bottom of the ranking; but just a few years later, if a plebiscite were held on the formation of National Guards and their involvement in internal security matters, the majority of the population would probably be in favour.
Four can be summarised as: This entropic
exhaustion coexists with a weakening of the ideal of democracy, which Uruguay
embodies as a precocious regional model, and a world leader.
Professional surveys
conducted immediately after the end of the dictatorship showed the military at
the bottom of the ranking; but just a few years later, if a plebiscite were held on the formation of National Guards and
their involvement in internal security matters, the majority of the population
would probably be in favour. Popular memory is worryingly short.
The decline
of debate in the public sphere
Uruguay lacks, in relative terms, a sense of civil
society. It is a State-centred nation, created by a leviathan and demiurge
State, and managed within a binary system by two catch-all parties (White and
Red), the hegemony of which has been at play for more than 150 years, right
until the arrival of the Broad Front as a plausible contender in 1999, and then
as a winner in 2004.
Despite the fact that Uruguay is a highly
urbanized and demographically concentrated country, the public sphere is not
characterized by an ascending and proactive relationship but by a top-down
application of decisions, and an inclination towards complaining and
threatening electoral punishment than to the kind of criticism that defines a
mature democracy.
Plans and programs play a rhetorical role in exhibiting
government capacity, but their content is unknown to nearly everybody; their
other function is to measure the relative force of different fractions of the
coalition on different topics.
The emergence of national and regional public
opinion polls produces figures and spreads issues which grant popularity and
legitimacy without debate. The media have less and less time for debates, and
carry increasingly brief and explosive, less analytical content.
Television time is replacing radio and the
written press in building a political spectacle, and social media (Uruguay is
the country with the highest internet and social media use in the region)
exacerbates the increasing lack of debate and proposals.
Following the trend
set by advertising and commercial marketing, politics is rapidly replacing
attempts to convince through rhetorical cognitive persuasion, efforts of
emotional, poetic seduction.
The political parties, which were born from a
struggle between 'caudillos' and 'doctors' and then became parliamentary
forces, have been ‘re-caudillizing’
in the last 20 years.
The discovery of attractive leaders allowed the left
to abandon its unpopular conceptual elitism in the region. Max Weber’s
prophetic fear, in 1917, that democracies could become charismatic populisms,
is shining today in all its splendour.
In these times of 'sophisticated' plot
developments on Twitter – in 'philosopher king' Trump style -, it is much
easier to satisfy than to convince public opinion, and to 'sell' a charismatic
candidate rather than a thoughtful ideologue.
A volatile
parliamentary base
This has been, and still is, undoubtedly a
governance problem in most countries of the region, especially in those that
have a high number of political parties and a federal political and administrative
structure.
But in urban concentrated Uruguay in which a unitary system with few
relevant parties reins, the Broad Front has always enjoyed the backing of a
parliamentary majority, not very large but nevertheless sufficient, except for
passing the few laws that do require special majorities.
Its main legislative problems have been internal,
endogenous ones: first, when it had to obtain an ad hoc majority because of a
dissident in its ranks or someone in Congress seeking to 'sell' his or her
agreement.
Second, when the objectives of the classical propositional left,
post-fiscally redistributive, clashed with those pursued by younger
parliamentarians, a 'young liberal left', which successfully promoted issues
such as State regulation of the marijuana cycle, an approach to abortion from
the perspective of a reproductive health law, and same-sex marriage.
Young
people got away with it but had to support their elders even on issues such as
public safety in which the laws passed were shamefully conservative and
punitive, especially with regards to minors. The elders also had to vote for
'liberal' rights-based guarantees in exchange, with which they did not agree
either.
This exchange of favours produced fragile and laboriously-reached
majorities, but the government never had to resort, as in other countries, to
ideologically suicidal alliances (such as in Brazil).
When it resorted to
calling for a wide agreement on State policies, as in security matters, this
was done to disguise its lack of decision to apply really leftist measures: the
call to others was not intended to reach any agreement, but to put the blame on
others for the lack of inter-party consensus – hypocritical faint-heartedness
when you enjoy the support of a majority which does not require you to seek an
inter-partisan consensus.
If in other countries, the governments could not
carry out what they wished for due to a lack of a sufficient majority, in
Uruguay, on the contrary, the FA destroyed its own majority by calling on
dissidents to reach an agreement without any real need, then it ran into
difficulties with its own majority for endogenous reasons.
The
difficult voter loyalty of the middle classes
One of the most striking recent problems
experienced by the left in government (especially in Brazil) has been the
insufficient political-electoral loyalty of many beneficiaries of its
redistributive policies.
In Uruguay, this has not been the case: many of the
'loaned' votes in 2004 were not lost in 2009 and 2014. There are two main reasons for this:
One. As a candidate, Tabaré Vázquez asked several
times for 'borrowed' votes from citizens whom he supposed were probably
supporters of the historical majority parties.
The vote for the FA did not always imply ideological affinity, it was often only a punishment vote against the traditional parties due to the string of crises endured, and also a vague hope expressed in the popular dictum: "a new broom always sweeps well".
Although he secretly hoped to
conquer and retain them – which is in part what happened – it would not have
come as a surprise if some of these votes had eventually gone back to their
origin.
The vote for the FA did not always imply ideological affinity, it was
often only a punishment vote against the traditional parties due to the string
of crises endured, and also a vague hope expressed in the popular dictum:
"a new broom always sweeps well".
Added to this was the fact that the
blockade of Cuba, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a certain familiar air of
the leftist candidates had de-stigmatized the Left.
Two. There are more powerful and comprehensive
reasons to understand the regrettable lack of voter loyalty on the part of the
beneficiaries of government policy-generated redistribution.
A) We know that there is no coherence between the
structural position of class in stratification and the 'situation' of classes
in the process of taking concrete decisions.
The conservative distance between
both dimensions has been qualified as 'alienated class consciousness', a
concept which is perhaps applicable in the case of those who benefited from the
government policies of a given party and who now change their vote as
post-beneficiaries.
B) At least two other reasons explain that
'alienated' and 'treacherous' infidelity.
B.1) Changing political-electoral interest. In
part, people are utilitarian: they pursue their interests without caring much
about political allegiances.
The beneficiaries of redistribution who left
poverty behind and entered the middle classes, statistically and psychosocially
will now vote for whoever assures them they will keep improving their lot.
They will not vote for those who threaten to
redistribute wealth from them to those who now have less than them, even though
they benefited precisely from that when they were worse off.
They are no longer
in the position of needing redistribution, they can now lose in relative terms
from the redistributive impulse. So, they will no longer vote for the
redistributor who benefited them in the past because he will no longer favour
them and could even perhaps harm them.
B.2) Social psychologists and sociologists discovered
in the 1940s that in contexts in which mobility already exists, mobility is
more demanded than in contexts without mobility.
So a caste-based society
demands less mobility than a meritocratic one because the perception of some
ascending motivations generates dissatisfaction among those who are not as
mobile.
That would not happen in societies with no mobility and no
mobility-related expectations, with models which are difficult to emulate, and
in which there is no relative dissatisfaction or fear of immobility – or
relatively less fear – before the mobility of others.
So, redistribution may not build its
beneficiaries' loyalty as expected, partly because it is no longer in their
best interest, and partly because they think that their previous voter allegiance
will no longer satisfy their expectations of mobility – which were previously
dormant, and have now been awoken.
All this is not surprising; on the contrary,
what is surprising is that some are surprised at all. There exists a
lyrical-romantic imaginary about real people which is tragically wrong, a
radical product of the idea of popular sovereignty projected on a Rousseauian
backdrop.
The elites
save their profits
In Uruguay, you could draw up an extensive list
of the successes of the left in government, in fact, it has already been done.
It is actually quite clear, as in the case of the other countries governed by
the left, that the overall results have been better than if the right had been
in power.
It should suffice to compare the Gini indexes of current and trend
inequality between countries governed by the left and the right.
In the case of Uruguay, and in relation to change, the governments of the left have not gone as far as expected nor as they could have considering the relative advantages they enjoyed.
However, huge doubts remain about the achievements
of the governments of the left if we compare them with the expected results of
leftist management.
One: In the case of Uruguay, and in relation to change,
the governments of the left have not gone as far as expected nor as they could
have considering the relative advantages they enjoyed, especially right after
their election victory and accessing power. They had, in fact, a number of very
significant advantages:
a) A boom in commodity prices which made possible
a redistribution model that reduced formal thresholds of poverty without
touching the most exclusive elite.
This model became less viable when the boom
came to an end, which, in addition, delayed the possibility of overcoming of
the agro-export and under-industrialization model affecting the countries in
the region in general;
b) A favourable psycho-social context for
electoral change through punishment voting, with voters lending votes or
exchanging them in hope of a 'new broom' to sweep things clean;
c) The exit from a deep crisis from 2003 onwards,
the result of which magically benefited those in government – the FA, since
March 2005 -, even though it could not be ascertained whether the merits of
that success could in fact be attributed to the government.
Two. The country showed clear evidence that a
re-primarized export and financial capitalist model had been maintained and
nourished – a model that the Left in government ought not to have allowed to
reproduce itself extensively:
a) In addition to many improvements in
unionization and some minor though real redistributions in Uruguay, the
ownership of land and production was further concentrated and foreignized.
The
landowners' profits from the price of properties of more than 200 hectares
amounted to 30 billion dollars in 20 years, with a tax burden on agriculture of
only 1.2% (taxation was also very low on equity, real estate, income, profits):
in addition, the price of the hectare quadrupled, its yield doubled and the
price of agricultural products increased;
b) Regarding the evolution of the relative
participation of capital and labour, the value of land increased six-fold while
real wages barely doubled;
c) In a country where 50% of the lower-income
population accounts for only 23% of GDP while 20% of the higher-income
population gets 45%, GDP since 1968 has slightly more than doubled, while real
wages have grown only by 70%.
Since 1993 GDP per capita has increased 40%,
while real wages remains the same. Can a government of the left be satisfied
with these macroeconomic results in a context where it has enjoyed the relative
advantages we have described?
Finally and briefly: it is unlikely that continuity
of the left in government can strengthen change in Uruguay.
The international
economic situation is less favourable, the ideological similarity with regional
governments is lower, and the friendly neighbors are worse; and the Left has
forgotten the Gramscian dictum that economic and political domination must be
strengthened by changes in the political culture of civil society.
In Uruguay,
management evaluation is liberal, and the culture is consumerist,
individualistic, hedonistic, and mimics glamorous jet-set patterns.
The Left
will not make any proposal outside that imaginary, because it would put at risk
voter allegiance, which is considered today the supreme value by its
alternative, previously utopian leadership.