The Latinobarómetro Corporation issued a new report warning of the “democratic recession” in the region, but also singled out Uruguay as one of the countries with the best records.
The democratic situation in Latin America it is increasingly precarious, according to the new Latinobarómetro for this year. The reasons for this “recession” lie in “the decline and vulnerability that countries have reached after a decade of continuous and systematic deterioration of democracy”.
“The recession is expressed in the low support that democracy has, the increase in indifference to the type of regime, preference and attitudes in favor of authoritarianism, the collapse of the performance of governments, and the collapse of the image of political parties. Several countries are in a critical state of their democracy, others have already gone to not have democracy”, the report indicates.
In this sense, it is argued that in those governments in which a “low satisfaction with democracy” there was a “collapse”. As an example of this situation, various elements were listed that “symbolize the weakness of the elites” in the figure of the leaders; and it points out that there were 21 presidents convicted of corruption, 20 presidents who did not finish their terms and others who “force their stay in power by breaking the re-election rules.”
The democratic scenario in Uruguay
As has been the case for several years, and to the satisfaction of the local political system, In Uruguay the panorama is far from being like that of the region in democratic terms. Therefore, it also has the best records —barely surpassed in some particular items— among the 17 countries included in the Latinobarómetro.
For example, one of the mechanisms used in this study to measure support for democracy consists of asking the citizens with which sentence they feel most in agreement: if with “democracy is preferable to any other form of government”, with which “in some circumstances, an authoritarian government may be preferable to a democratic one”, or with “to people like one, a democratic regime does not matter to us as an authoritarian one”.
The results show that Uruguay registers the highest percentage of accessions to the first sentence in support of democracy with a 69% In second place is Argentina with 62%, followed by Chile with 58% and Venezuela with 57%. The Latin American average stands at 48% and the worst levels of support for the democratic preference appear in Guatemala with 29%, Honduras with 32% and Mexico with 35%.
In addition, Uruguay has the lower percentage of support for authoritarianism with 9%surpassing Honduras and Venezuela, which reached 12% of opinions that responded to this type of regime.
The report also aims to assess the level of satisfaction that exists among the citizens of each country with democracy. Uruguay also leads this indicator, and is only surpassed in the percentage of satisfaction with The Savior. In this sense, the country governed by Nayib Bukele registers 64% satisfactionwhile the one led by Luis Lacalle Pou reaches 59%.
On the other hand, it is indicated in the text that “only Uruguay has a reserve of dissatisfied democrats of 30 percentage points.” And he adds: “Even in El Salvador, which enjoys high satisfaction with democracy, it only has a contingent of 14 percentage points of dissatisfied democrats.”
“This means that there is no capital left in society to absorb the mistakes that governments make. Either they perform as the public expects or they will be replaced by others in the next election, ”he concludes.
Source: Ambito
