Chile vote is latest sign of region’s shift to the center

Santiago, Chile. Latin America lurched leftward during the last round of presidential elections, highlighted by the victory of Evo Morales in Bolivia in December 2005 to the re-election bid of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez a year later.

But as a new cycle is under way, with another dozen races this year and next, a different narrative is emerging. The biggest potential shift: Today in Chile, the leftist alliance that has governed for 20 years could lose to a conservative party for the first time since the fall of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.

But Latin America is not suddenly swinging right. Rather, analysts say the races this year overall confirm that centrism is the ethos of the day. Candidates from Uruguay and El Salvador to Chile and Panama have dropped a combative left-right discourse, and instead are appealing to a growing ideological center… more

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