Politics
Lessons from Lima
Sri Lanka’s liberals face a choice: they can ride the horse they’ve been riding for the last 30 years, or they can exchange that horse for one that can, and will, win the race.
The lessons from Peru and Mexico are clear. No socially progressive movement trying to tip the scales against a right wing Government or Opposition will win the race if it focuses on principles to the exclusion of material factors. The superstructure of ideological values does remain, and its relevance cannot be denied. But the material base – issues of class and privilege, relevant to not just ethnic but also economic minorities – continues to hold higher ground. Any Opposition that refuses to engage with these issues can only expect to remain where it is.
Since 1994, liberals have attempted to get closer and closer to their conception of the Sri Lankan polity, only to paradoxically get further and further away from it. That it has had to contend with the nationalist right, Sinhala and Tamil but predominantly the former, cannot be overlooked. Yet, as the recent backlash against neoliberal populism across the Americas, including not only Peru and Mexico, but also Bolsonaro’s Brazil (where a left wing candidate, Edmilson Rodrigues, won the 
The stakes were particularly high in Peru. Pedro Castillo, the populist who got through with a lead of a little more than 60,000 votes, didn’t just hail from the Left: a dedicated teacher turned trade unionist, he hailed from the country’s marginalised indigenous peasantry.
From the word go, Castillo made clear where his sympathies lay. His opponent, the right wing daughter of a neo-liberal-populist-authoritarian ex-president, indulged lavishly in red-baiting and anticommunist rhetoric. This may surprise some, given that 2021 marks two decades since the Cold War formally came to an end, but in Peru the Cold War never really ended: ruling elites and urban sectors alike continue to view politics through a Cold War prism, associating left wing politics, as Jacobin notes, “with terrorism and criminality.”
That explains not just how Keiko Fujimori could rally support from liberals despite her father’s human rights record, but also how Mario Vargas Llosa, who ran against her father in 1990 on a neo-liberal platform not too different from the latter’s, could lend her his support.
Castillo’s prospects were dismally slim. No less so were Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s, in Mexico. Obrador doesn’t fit the leftist’s mould; he’s more Populist than Marxist. Yet this didn’t help stave off a cascade of right wing alliances, including parties, cartels, and NGOs, from piling up against his party, MORENA, at recent midterm elections. MORENA got through with much better results than what it obtained in 2018, up from 191 seats to 203. As with Castillo’s alliance, however, it lost electorates swinging to the right, especially in Mexico City. Even there the vote bifurcated between working-class and middle-class districts.
If there’s one lesson to be drawn from these elections, it’s that class still matters. Fujimori ran on the promise of a $2,500 one-time dole to all families with at least one COVID-19 patient, plus a 40% tax on corporations engaged in mineral extraction (to be distributed among families living near mineral fields). But she also went about advocating free market reforms; unlike Castillo, she hardly touched the indigenous peasantry. In Mexico, Obrador didn’t really pass himself off as an anti-American populist, and yet his positions on multinational businesses whipped up almost as much anti-left hysteria as it did in Peru. It’s certainly not accurate to view these as pivotal shifts in Latin and Central American politics, but the shift is seismic: it promises to restore the balance from the region’s recent tilt to the neoliberal authoritarian right.
Ironically, Fujomori lacked even her father’s strongman appeal; the mould people expected her to fit into was that of a Benazir Bhutto. Yet due to the divisions that have come to define politics in Peru so dismally well, she found it difficult to cut such a figure. Gaffe after gaffe – including her remark, which, made at an indigenous electorate, sounded for many like a rebuff, that it took time to hitch a ride from Lima to the outstations – revealed the classist arrogance underlying her populist credentials. That a backlash was in the air was inevitable; not a landslide victory for the leftwing maverick, as many thought, but a victory all the same.
In his very radical programme, the man has prescribed a complete turnaround for the economy, reversing three-plus decades of neoliberal populism that has served to widen the divide between rich blancho centres and poor cholo outposts, getting the government to serve the most deprived, and regulating multinationals more tightly. That Lima’s stock exchange recorded a 7.7% drop is to be expected: this is perhaps the most reformist-radical candidate who has emerged in Peru in over a quarter century. While Obrador has made attempts to bridge the gap between his country’s elites and marginalised communities, Castillo, due to the tectonic plates that underlie disparities in his country, has declared war on the Spanish-speaking upper-class.
If Sri Lanka is to learn from Mexico, and more so from Peru, both Government and Opposition must take stock of the material factors that drove Obrador’s and Castillo’s campaigns. It’s a sign of the damage neoliberal authoritarianism has inflicted on Peruvian society that one of Castillo’s proposals is the formulation of a new Constitution. The Constitution is to be enacted by way of a referendum; unlike the reformist goals of liberals and left-liberals, it’s set to incorporate positive rights for marginalised communities, to restore what much of that country’s elite is considered to have taken back from those communities, to set things right. In other words, from constitutional reform onwards, Castillo seeks to restructure the material base underlying Peru’s social contract: a volte-face from how things have been there for over a quarter-century.
Commentators across the West, and elsewhere, have not unjustifiably censured Castillo for his social conservatism: he opposes abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender perspective education. This is not to say that those opposing him rank any better on such concerns. Fujimori herself has adopted similar positions on these issues: the only difference between them is that while one has advocated the continuation of policies that have perpetuated economic disparities, the other has called for a reversal of those policies. Regarding other concerns, the leftwing teacher turned trade unionist has remarked that, relevant as they may be, they remain, at best, secondary to the “battle between the rich and the poor, the struggle between the master and the slave.”
With marginalised indigenous communities in particular, material incentives, the promise of a better deal, resonate well. Despite having adopted controversial stances on single-issues, Castillo was able to communicate his understanding of the importance of such incentives. Sri Lanka does not have to adopt those controversial stances, but it can take a leaf from the Peruvian book based on how people responded to Castillo’s call. This is where both liberals and nationalists have gone wrong: the former believe institutional reforms will set everything right, the latter believe greater security will do the trick. Is it any wonder that our liberals and nationalists have ignored Obrador and Castillo? Not really. Their myopia is telling; they should wake up.
In the meantime, Sri Lanka’s Opposition must remould and recast itself in a Left Populist light, discarding its neoliberal heritage and embracing a model that focuses on both winning the race and winning hearts and minds. I believe Dayan Jayatilleka put it best: “[t]oday… it has proved almost impossible to defend liberal-democracy without populism, the market economy without social democracy, the centre without a left orientation.”
This becomes particularly relevant when one realises that the then Joint Opposition, led by the Mahinda Rajapaksa wing of the SLPP, touted a Left Populist Bonarpartist line. That it morphed later into a centre-right Bonapartist outfit, flanked on the one hand by a nationalist clergy and on the other by the Colombo bourgeoisie, should therefore inform the present Opposition’s strategy: unlike the JO, which gave way to the SLPP, the SJB cannot afford to give way and yield place to the UNP. To do so would be to risk political suicide. Peru and Mexico are reminders of what the Opposition can do. They are also reminders of what the Government should do.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com