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Next year will be a big election year for Latin America, a region where democracy in many countries is only decades young, and where the shadow of corruption stretches wide and long. Half of the population across the region is being called to cast ballots. Here are the main points of note concerning the polls in regional economic heavyweights Brazil and Mexico, as well a newly pacified Colombia and troubled Venezuela.
The Odebrecht scandal, an affair of tentacular graft involving a Brazilian construction firm that is alleged to have paid millions of dollars in bribes to Latin American government officials to secure juicy public contracts, has rocked the region.
It has led to Ecuador's vice president being imprisoned for six years, and last week nearly resulted in Peru's president being impeached. But the scandal is just part of a much bigger picture of corruption, according to Gaspard Estrada, director of an Observatory of Latin America at Paris's Sciences-Po institute. "Corruption phenomena are deeply rooted in the region, and persist," he said.
"This will have an impact on the next political cycle," said Fiona Mackie, in charge of Latin America for The Economist Intelligence Unit. The Odebrecht scandal, she added, "is really shaking up the political scene." The disheartening multiple cases of embezzlement and personal enrichment by officials in region has engendered "an impatience now in the electors, because they are so fed up," Mackie said.
"Elections in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico will be dominated by voter anger against the political establishment and demand for change, making them hard to predict and opening up room for negative surprises," the Eurasia consulting firm said in a recent report.
"Candidates that better capture this sentiment will be the most competitive, and the risk of negative surprises is high," as attested to by an unexpected surge for the left in a recent Chilean presidential election, the report said.
That "should serve as a reminder not to underestimate voter frustration," it said. The electoral landscape in Latin America in 2018 is dotted with an increasing number of candidates from outside the political system. This can be put down to public disgust over the many instances of graft that has "disqualified the traditional political class," Estrada said.
He deplored a regional "leadership crisis" and feared political outsiders would fuel discourse that undermines democracy, as in Brazil where an extreme-right soldier-turned-politician, Jair Bolsonaro, has emerged as a contender. Some traditional politicians were presenting themselves as outsiders "because that's a good thing to do in term of popularity, but they are insiders," Macki told AFP. "An outsider needs to ally with a party that has a machinery. You need to have a political movement behind you," she added.
Eurasia said Mexico "is headed towards its most uncertain and consequential elections in decades on 1 July."
A leftwing candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, appears best placed for a win right now, it said. A former mayor of Mexico City, Lopez Obrador is aiming for the presidency after a long political career. He has spurned the traditional leftwing PRD party to start the Movement for National Regeneration, known as Morena.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2018

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