350 Million Latin American Voters Go To The Polls To Elect Their Leaders In 2018

The Guardian: More than 350 million Latin American voters to elect new leaders in 2018

Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica and Paraguay will elect new presidents in what could be a popular reaction against corruption.

The anti-establishment tide that has swept much of the world is set to break over Latin America in 2018. Some 350 million voters are due to head to the polls in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica and Paraguay to elect new presidents – and in several cases, potentially slam a defibrillator into their ailing political systems.

“Attempting to understand or interpret the elections for what they mean in a left-right swing would be a mistake,” said Christopher Sabatini, a Latin America expert at Columbia University. “What we are more likely to see is more popular reaction against corruption.”

Seizing the headlines in July will be Mexico, where Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the perennial candidate of the left, will face off against José Antonio Meade, the technocratic successor to Enrique Peña Nieto. Few will miss the incumbent, whose term of office has been stained by a failure to rein in the country’s soaring murder rate, and pervasive corruption – in which the presidential couple themselves have been implicated.

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WNU Editor: Mexico and Brazil are the two elections that I will be watching.