That Chávez Thing Is Over If his foes triumph, he will be pushed to the fringe. The Chávez road will have led nowhere. By Ruchir Sharma Newsweek International
May 29, 2006 issue - Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is the new rock star of world politics. His impassioned rants against globalization, with animated poses to match, make front-page headlines almost daily. The commentariat—particularly in Europe—seems to buy Chávez's line that Latin Americans are so disenchanted by their short tryst with liberalism that they now prefer a strongman to spread the benefits of a commodity boom. The recent moves by a Chávez soulmate, Evo Morales, to renationalize the energy resources of Bolivia reinforce a growing perception that Latin America is lurching to the radical left.
But it's not. While Chávez does seem to rekindle a certain romantic Western nostalgia for Latin American guerrilla movements, the underlying trends point in the opposite direction. Voters in Latin America, far from crying out for a radically new economic model inspired by Caracas, are in fact rallying powerfully behind leaders and parties who promote more-orthodox economic policies. As candidates espousing Chávez-style populism have plummeted in the polls in Mexico and Peru, their camps have tried to distance themselves from the Venezuelan leader. Elsewhere, incumbent presidents like Alvaro Uribe in Colombia and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil have won plaudits as economic managers, and look likely to be reelected.
This is good news for Latin America. It shows that political societies have evolved to the point where most people realize that, in a globalized world, they have to stick to a reformist path. Consider the maturation of Peruvian front-runner Alan García, who in his first stint as president let government spending run out of control, launched a disastrous attempt to nationalize the banking sector and left office in 1990 with the economy in crisis. He has promised to promote foreign investment, free trade and macroeconomic stability if re-elected. That has inspired Chávez to hurl invectives at García in an effort to help his left-wing challenger, Ollanta Humala. But Peruvian voters are unimpressed; García recently moved into a decisive lead in the polls. In Mexico, ruling-party candidate Felipe Calderón's team has pressed the claim that if leftist Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel López Obrador is elected, he would undermine the country's economic stability by following Chávez's "irresponsible" playbook. Calderón, too, has unexpectedly surged in the polls.
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Sharma is a co-head of global emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.
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full: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12892228/site/newsweek/
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Colin Brace
Amsterdam