South American voters are rejecting left-wing parties, reports Bloomberg News:
Empty fuel tanks and scarce dollars in Bolivia, chronic economic crises in Argentina, fears over runaway migration and violent crime in Chile. But they’re all driving the region in the same political direction.
On Sunday, Chileans sent arch-conservative José Antonio Kast to a presidential runoff next month, likely making him the latest South American leader to ride a crest of disillusion with leftist politicians who have failed to make people feel safe or economically secure. The emerging right-wing cadre is promising to revive growth, lock up gangs and get on the good side of Donald Trump. MAGA gear is even popping up at some of their rallies.
In Argentina’s midterm elections last month, voters overwhelmingly backed allies of libertarian President Javier Milei and his economic reforms. Bolivians ended two decades of socialist rule in October by electing Rodrigo Paz, a pragmatist who has moved quickly to mend ties with Washington and multilateral institutions. Now Kast is tapping into outrage over Chile’s porous borders…
Conservative candidates such as former Lima mayor Rafael Lopez Aliaga, alias Porky, are polishing platforms that are anti-crime, anti-statist and pro-US — hoping for a bear hug and trade deals from Trump [who recently provided a $20 billion US Treasury lifeline for Argentina, whose leader is a regular in Trump’s orbit.]
The White House’s full-throated embrace of [Argentina’s] Milei sent a signal to neighboring countries that a Trump alliance carries economic benefits. The US rescue package helped the Argentine leader score a political comeback in last month’s congressional elections after his party was trounced in a key provincial race in September. His austerity drive has caused widespread pain [for people who relied on government programs], but Argentines were loath to hand power back to the long-ruling Peronists, whose policies are blamed as the root cause of country’s current crisis.
The promise of change drove Bolivians to vote for the pro-business Paz in this year’s elections, rejecting the socialist movement that has dominated politics since former President Evo Morales took office in 2006.
And while Kast still has to square off against communist Jeannette Jara in the Dec. 14 runoff, Chile’s rightward lurch seems inevitable. Nearly 70% of voters backed right-leaning candidates in Sunday’s vote, underscoring the hard turn underway in a once fast-growing nation that elected leftist President Gabriel Boric just four years ago.
In 2023, Argentina, ruled by the left-wing Peronists, was broke, in a recession, and experiencing hyperinflation. But then it elected the free-market economist Javier Milei as its president, and he stopped Argentina’s decline. Milei got rid of lots of government red tape and fired many bureaucrats. Due to Milei’s policies, Argentina’s inflation rate fell from 25% per month to about 2.3% per month in October 2025. Argentina’s economy began growing again, at a rate of about 6% in the second quarter of 2025, even as Argentina slashed regulations, tariffs, and trade barriers, reported The Doomslayer:
Javier Milei’s Argentina is rapidly becoming the exemplar of prudent economic policy in the Americas. According to Argentina’s national statistics agency, the poverty rate in the second half of 2024 was 38.1 percent—a 3.6 percentage point drop from when Milei took office in December 2023. Monthly inflation is now hovering between 2 and 3 percent, down from 25 percent in late 2023.
It’s worth noting that part of Milei’s strategy involves unilateral trade liberalization. Since taking office, he loosened import limits, slashed tariffs, and scrapped customs regulations, giving Argentinian consumers access to a bounty of cheap foreign goods and forcing domestic producers to become more competitive.
Before Milei was elected, Argentina experienced decades of decline. Argentina had once been one of the richest nations on earth, richer than Canada, Australia, and all but a handful of countries. But by the time Milei was elected, Argentina had fallen behind around 70 countries, including countries that were once much poorer than it, such as Turkey, South Korea, and Panama. Arbitrary regulations and red tape did much to cause its economic decline.
But after being elected, Milei repealed many of his country’s regulations. Argentina has one of the biggest red-tape burdens on earth, although Brazil has a more complicated tax code, and France has a higher tax burden. At the time Milei was elected, Argentina ranked 23rd worst out of 165 countries in terms of its regulatory burden, imposing more red tape than many European countries with much better health, safety, and labor conditions.
In December 2023, Milei issued a decree that repealed or reformed 300 laws to begin reversing “decades of failure, impoverishment, decadence, and anomie.” Milei had his work cut out for him — Argentina ranked very low in economic freedom — 158th out of 165 countries ranked — and ranked a pitiful 163rd in trade freedom.
Milei’s decree covered a wide range of regulations. Some of the deregulations include:
• Repeal of the law regulating the rental of real estate. The restrictions on length of the rents, conditions for enforcement, method of payment, were so rigid and unreasonable that the result has been a nationwide housing scarcity, high prices, and the growth of an informal rental market.
• Repeal of the supply law and the shelves law that required stores to stock their shelves according to rules governing which products (by company and by national origin) could be displayed and in which proportions.
• End to price controls, which predictably generated scarcity.
• Repeal of the law that prohibits the privatization of state‐owned enterprises.
• Liberalization of the labor law.
• An end to the prohibition of [various types of] exports.
• Strengthening of contract law to secure the freedom of contract.
• Law reform to allow for contracts made in foreign currencies to be upheld. In practice, this legalizes transactions in dollars and other currencies, including exchanging pesos for dollars and including the use of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
