politics on both sides of the atlantic looks a lot more latin american these days. there is a rise in the cult of personality and the notion that a charismatic figure or caudillo can resolve a country<u+2019>s economic or political failings. claims multiply that the corrupt old order needs to be overturned. and as corruption becomes more and more the coin of political discourse, opponents are portrayed as having no motives but personal gain. institutions are politicized, with leaders in some european countries attacking the independence of judiciaries that they view as obstructing their governments. the election process itself has even been questioned, including for the first time in the u.s. by no means are all these <u+201c>latin american<u+201d> attributes evident everywhere in europe and north america, where political history and experience ranges widely. nor have all these characteristics been present everywhere in latin america<u+2014>and where they have been, many countries have moved on. latin american politicians haven<u+2019>t, by and large, had much to say about immigration either, a prominent theme in european and u.s. politics today. one common claim losers have made in latin american national elections was that the vote was rigged against them. and unlike in u.s. national elections, it often was. but the losers<u+2019> focus on election rigging had a major consequence: it meant that opposition politicians could never be reconciled with the result. they and their followers were therefore estranged from the political system, which they condemned as unjust, and therefore excluded from shaping policy. former mexican president ernesto zedillo recognized this problem in the mid-1990s in his own country, at that point the longest surviving one-party state in the world. <u+201c>the problem with mexico<u+2019>s political system is that each time we have elections, one side declares in advance the illegitimate nature of the rules and therefore refuses to accept the results,<u+201d> he said in an interview at the time. he introduced changes to address this, and power now shifts among mexico<u+2019>s political parties. apart from his insinuations about the coming election<u+2019>s fairness, republican presidential candidate donald trump has also challenged the legitimacy or competence of institutions once considered off-limits to politicians, including the federal reserve, the intelligence services and the country<u+2019>s top generals. for the u.s. this represents a sharp shift from 30 or 40 years ago, when the political debate was often polite to the point of being decorous. <u+201c>thirty years ago you would have talked about the dominance of ideology in latin american politics, whereas the u.s. was willing to compromise. now it<u+2019>s the other way round,<u+201d> said victor bulmer-thomas, an economic historian of latin america and a former director of the chatham house think tank. the recent referendum campaign in the u.k. marked a similar shift in political tone. campaigners for brexit accused several government institutions of bias, including the bank of england and the treasury, assailed for their pessimistic economic projections if britain left the eu, and even the electoral commission, which oversees elections. and this from people who said they wanted to bring power back from brussels to british institutions. elsewhere in europe, governments in poland , hungary and greece are confronting the judiciary, which they depict as an obstacle to the democratic will of the people. nationalist parties in opposition in france, the netherlands and now even germany are all calling for radical change from longstanding consensus policies, and are likely to play major roles in election campaigns in those countries next year, even if they don<u+2019>t win. big corporations and banks are under widespread scrutiny too, their power viewed as subverting democracy. politicians on both sides of the atlantic are channeling the frustrations of large numbers of people who<u+2014>like many latin americans before them<u+2014>feel let down by politics and don<u+2019>t value their country<u+2019>s political and economic institutions. even if they don<u+2019>t reach power, they shift the center of gravity of the political debate. the policies these figures favor rarely lead to wealth creation, and that presents a challenge for western economies, whose success depends on the complex interaction of institutions, rules and markets. and, unlike latin america through the 20th century, these economies are at the core of the global economic system.
politics is looking more <u+2018>latin american<u+2019> these days    - wsj
stephen fidler