Self-Saboteur: The Experience of Latin American Populism

Abstract This editorial perspective develops a theoretical critique of populism in Latin America, which it takes to be the predominant form that reformist politics has assumed in the region since the 1930s. It outlines an analytical approach pivoting on the five elements of hegemonic crisis, state arbitration of class struggle, asymmetrical multi-class coalition, top-down mobilisation of popular support through mechanisms of controlled inclusion and a self-undermining paradox common to reformism more generally. This framework is sufficiently abstract to enable portability across different times and spaces of modern capitalist development in Latin America. With the five analytical premises established as a backdrop, the editorial perspective then examines what is specific to Latin American populism in the twenty-first century, followed by a detailed investigation of the phenomenon in Ecuador. The editorial perspective demonstrates that it is impossible to understand the region’s present destituent impasse – in which the far-right enjoys considerable advantages – without a thoroughgoing autopsy of the preceding Pink Tide populist conjuncture from which it emerged.