After former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva’s win in Brazil’s election on Sunday, the left is now in charge of Latin America’s seven largest countries (the others being Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, and Chile). As I write in my latest piece for Reason, da Silva, who will become the first Brazilian president to serve a third term, has come a long way since founding the São Paulo Forum alongside Fidel Castro soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall:

In 1990, da Silva and Fidel Castro founded the São Paulo Forum, a bloc of left-wing political parties that vowed to ‘wage a popular and anti-imperialist struggle’ just when ‘neoliberalism’ seemed to reign supreme. The bloc’s most ardent representative in the following decades, Hugo Chávez, counted with then-president da Silva’s outspoken support as he dismantled Venezuela’s republican institutions. In early 2023, when da Silva becomes the first Brazilian president to serve a third term, the São Paulo Forum’s member parties will be in power in all but a handful South American countries. Yesterday’s anti-imperialists are today’s new ruling class, and 77-year-old da Silva has become Castro’s successor as their leading gerontocrat.

What will it take to overturn the new statist establishment? While soft-spoken “gradualists” or Christian Democrats such as Argentina’s Mauricio Macri, Chile’s Sebastián Piñera, and Colombia’s Iván Duque clearly failed to prevent leftist onslaughts, so too did Bolsonaro’s firebrand style of politics. Might I suggest that the region needs a new generation of leaders who are fiscally conservative, laissez-faire in terms of global trade and regulations, and at the same time tolerant in terms of civil liberties and moral matters? Uruguay’s popular president, Luis La Calle Pou, might provide a good model to follow.