With the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic challenging managers at all levels of power, millions of people went to the polls in the year that ended this Friday in electoral processes where themes such as combating the new coronavirus and climate, economic and had decisive weight.
While in South America political polarization was felt in fierce disputes, in Israel and Germany, parliamentary democracies, long-time leaders left power. However, in Nicaragua and other parts of the world, the heavy hand of repressive regimes ensured that nothing was changed and that democracy remained restricted to the discourse of those who only seek to perpetuate themselves in power. Check out some of the most memorable elections of 2021:
Israel
The parliamentary elections in Israel, held in March, which led to the formation of a new government in June, ended a political crisis that has lasted more than two years.
Likud, the party of then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, won the most votes in March but failed to form a government. Oppositionists Yair Lapid, leader of the secular centrist party Yesh Atid, and Naftali Bennett, of the right-wing Yamina alliance, announced a deal an hour before the deadline – without such a coalition, a new election would be needed, the fifth since April 2019 .
In the deal that ended Netanyahu’s 12-year tenure, Bennett will be Israel’s prime minister until 2023, while Lapid will head the executive for the last two years of his term.
Germany
Another parliamentary democracy that saw an era of more than a decade come to an end was Europe’s largest economy.
In December, Olaf Scholz, leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), became German chancellor after Angela Merkel’s 16 years in power. In September, Scholz’s initials had won German parliamentary elections with 25.7% of the vote, a narrow margin over Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) alliance, led by Armin Laschet, who got 24.1% of the votes.
In the following months, the former mayor of Hamburg formed a coalition with the Green and Liberal Democratic (FDP) parties to govern Germany for the next four years.
Nicaragua
In a year in which electoral processes in Russia (for the Duma, the lower house of parliament), Venezuela (local and regional) and Hong Kong (for the legislative assembly) were condemned internationally for restrictions on participants and evidence of fraud, the re-election of the dictator Daniel Ortega for a fifth five-year term in Nicaragua, the fourth in a row, drew attention not only for the customary arrests of opponents and the absence of observers, but for their consequences.
Nicaragua left the Organization of American States (OAS) after it criticized the process, US President Joe Biden banned Ortega and other members of the Central American country’s government from entering the country, and Managua failed to diplomatically recognize Taiwan , which signals a closer relationship with China.
There was also embarrassment in Brazil: the PT withdrew from the air a note congratulating the dictator and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva questioned why Angela Merkel “can stay 16 years in power and Daniel Ortega can’t?”.
Argentina
If midterm elections, as in the United States, indicate poor prospects for a president seeking reelection, the parliamentary elections in Argentina (which renewed half of the Chamber and a third of the Senate), held in November, pointed out that the Peronist Alberto Fernández will struggle to obtain a second term in 2023.
Former President Mauricio Macri’s (2015-2019) Together for Change coalition won the ruling Frente de Todos in most of Argentina. Peronism lost a majority in the Senate for the first time since redemocratization in 1983, and in the House it now has 118 seats, just two more than Juntos.
Despite the investment in social policies to mitigate the crisis generated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the perspective of 9% economic growth this year, the accumulated inflation in the first 11 months was 45.4% in Argentina (in accordance with the government’s projection for the entire 2021 it was 29%) and 43.8% of the urban population lives in poverty – in 2019, in the pre-pandemic period, the level was at 39.8%.
Chile
In December, former student leader Gabriel Boric “tied” the South American presidential election scoreboard to the left in 2021: with a 12 percentage point victory over conservative lawyer José Antonio Kast, he became the youngest president from Chilean history (he is 35 years old) in the same year that conservative Guillermo Lasso was elected in Ecuador and leftist Pedro Castillo won in Peru.
Claiming to be a supporter of a social welfare model, Boric will have to overcome the market’s distrust and pacify the country, whose public life has been shaken since the social protests of 2019 (in which he gained projection), which led to the election of a constituent Assembly. The proposal for a new constitution will be voted on in a plebiscite in the first year of the leftist president’s term.
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