What Happened to Latin America’s Old Right?

On April 23, 2025, former Argentine president Mauricio Macri gathered his remaining provincial lieutenants in Mar del Plata. The center-right party he had founded, Republican Proposal (PRO), was in the process of being stripped for parts. President Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza (LLA) was drawing PRO officials into its ranks while insisting that any electoral alliance between PRO and LLA run under his banner. “The party leaders who had a price have already been bought,” Macri declared. “Those of us who remain have no price; we have values.”

Macri’s stance seemed like the beginnings of defiance, but by July it read more like an epitaph: PRO had accepted Milei’s terms, and the city’s mayor, Guillermo Montenegro—one of the men beside Macri that morning—was heading an LLA ticket in the region.

Macri is not alone in his woes. Over the past decade, Latin America’s establishment right or “old” right has steadily lost ground to a “new” wave of right-of-center political figures and parties. While much has been written on the trajectory of the new right’s ascent, relatively little attention has been paid to what will be lost as the old right recedes. More comprehensive examinations of the new right should consider it not only in contrast to the region’s left, but also in contrast to the old right parties and figures they displaced. 

Table 1. The establishment right and its challengers across thirteen countries, 2018–2026

Source: Compiled by the author from official returns published by each country’s electoral authority: Brazil (TSE), Argentina (DINE), Chile (Servel), Colombia (Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil), Ecuador (CNE), El Salvador (TSE), Costa Rica (TSE), Uruguay (Corte Electoral), Paraguay (TSJE), Honduras (CNE), Mexico (INE), Bolivia (OEP), and Peru (ONPE/JNE). Vote shares are percentages of valid votes except in Colombia and Honduras, where they are percentages of all ballots cast, including blank and null. Colombian 2026 figures are the Registraduría’s preliminary difusión count. Seat counts are as of July 2026. Party classifications and the displacement coding are the author’s.

The Two Rights

Neither camp is ideologically uniform, and their primary differences lie in their histories and how they operate. The old right is defined here as the party that held or credibly contested the presidency from the right during the 2010s on a platform of institutional continuity. In some places the category is relational, since Colombia’s Centro Democrático and Peru’s Fujimorismo, the movement around the Fujimori family, are hardline by any absolute standard. They qualify as establishment only because something more disruptive eventually appeared alongside them.

The new right is defined as the personalist insurgencies that displaced the establishment right parties or figures, and three traits cohere across their otherwise broad spectrum: security politics inspired by the Salvadoran model, an antipolitics aimed at the political class as such, and digital-native personalist organization.

In other areas of policy, the differences between the old and new rights are often indistinguishable from the differences within their own camps. Despite the new right’s strong association with Trumpism, alignment with Washington and friendly attitudes towards President Trump apply just as readily to old-right figures, among them Honduras’s Nasry Asfura and the Dominican Republic’s Luis Abinader. The economic doctrine also ranges widely, from Milei’s anarcho-capitalist outlook to Bolsonaro’s heterodox spending.

The new right also shows a stronger affinity for civilizational framing in politics and a skepticism towards institutions they see as having failed or been corrupted. Parties survive on brands their voters can distinguish, as Noam Lupu’s account of the region’s party collapses establishes,[1] and competence under institutional continuity became a poor asset in an anti-incumbent decade. The establishment right asked electorates to trust that they would be able to fix institutions with better management. The new right asks them to trust a person instead and treats institutional restraint as one of the things better management must break, regardless of whether that restraint was established by the right or the left.

New Movements, Same Voters

Much of the new right’s electoral success comes from winning over the old right’s voter base rather than making inroads with entirely new groups. Both camps tend to do best among relatively well-off voters. For example, Datafolha’s crosstabs from the June 2022 wave showed Bolsonaro leading Lula by double digits among Brazilians in the two upper-middle income brackets. However, some electoral differences between the two are still noticeable, particularly in education levels where higher-educated voters tend to favor old right candidates.

Chile’s returns allow the closest look at how these intra-right voting dynamics manifest. The thirty-five communes where establishment right candidate Evelyn Matthei polled best in the first round are 31.4 percent tertiary-educated and 10.1 percent evangelical, against 13.4 and 27.7 percent in the thirty-five where José Antonio Kast polled best.[2] When the choice narrowed to two, the establishment’s strongholds mostly crossed over to Kast. Published estimates of how many of Matthei’s first-round voters went to Kast in the runoff range from 54 to 64 percent.[3]

Colombia illustrates a more direct form of displacement. Abelardo de la Espriella, the outsider right candidate, showed a stronger correlation with the electoral geography of former president Álvaro Uribe than Uribe’s endorsed center-right candidate, Paloma Valencia, did.[4] Municipal co-movement on its own cannot separate an inheritance of Uribe’s voters from the general stability of Colombia’s left–right geography, but the returns also show that Valencia’s first-round share predicts De la Espriella’s runoff gain almost one for one, and AtlasIntel found roughly three-quarters of her voters moving to him after the first round.[5]

These transfers matter because several of the region’s presidencies are now decided at the margin between two nearly even blocs. Keiko Fujimori won Peru’s June runoff by 0.27 points, and De la Espriella won Colombia’s by roughly a single point. In both cases the winning margin was far smaller than the vote inherited from the other right, so how completely one right movement’s voters transfer to the other has become the difference between being in government and being in the opposition.

The residual establishment electorate, where it can be measured, is affluent, university-educated, and attached to institutional vehicles, but it is not uniformly moderate: the most educated comunas of Buenos Aires gave hardliner Patricia Bullrich roughly three-fifths to two-thirds inside her own coalition’s primary.[6]

A 7-3 Winning Record

The new right’s record against the establishment is strong but not flawless. In the eleven elections that the new right contested in Table 1, displacement followed in seven and failed in three. Bolivia is a mixed case, since Jorge Quiroga remade the old right in the insurgent style but lost the runoff to a centrist.

The three failures are in some ways more informative than the seven successes. In each, the insurgency ran into an old right whose organization ran deep. Uruguay’s Cabildo Abierto and Paraguay’s Cruzada both failed to displace their institutionally entrenched rivals on the right. Peru was the closest call. Rafael López Aliaga’s Renovación Popular missed the runoff by some twenty-one thousand votes, and the presidency then went to perennial candidate Keiko Fujimori.[7]

The displaced parties did not all meet the same end. Jennifer Cyr’s account of party crisis in Latin America helps explain why: brand and organization can outlast an electoral collapse, while money, patronage, and elites tend to vanish with it.[8]

Even the successes are less total than the scoreboard suggests. De la Espriella won the Colombian presidency in June. When the new Congress was installed on 20 July, the Senate elected Honorio Henríquez of the Centro Democrático as its president, 56 votes to 45, over the candidate the president-elect had backed. The ballot was secret, but press reconstructions agree that Uribe’s bench prevailed with votes from the left-wing Pacto Histórico and roughly nine defectors from the government’s own coalition. De la Espriella’s coalition holds 38 seats in a Senate where most bills need about 55, so majorities will have to be built vote by vote.

The Paths Back

As Argentina has shown, the old right cannot simply wait for the new right to lose popularity in order to regain its voters When Milei’s standing sagged through 2025, the voters he shed drifted into abstention rather than back toward the establishment, and the October recovery went to his own party’s line, which took 40.7 percent of the legislative vote after getting a boost from the Trump administration in the form of a pre-election $40 billion credit swap.

The old right thus has four viable paths back to political relevance in the countries where it has been displaced. The first is co-optation of the new right from within. Milei’s economic program is run by Luis Caputo and Federico Sturzenegger, both senior Macri-administration figures, and his first security minister was Bullrich, who now sits in the Senate on his party’s list.

The second and third paths both run through a vehicle, one built from scratch and one salvaged. Durable new parties, the party-building literature finds, tend to emerge from sustained conflict with a polarizing incumbent.[9] The potential for this exists in the educated, party-attached stratum visible in the Chilean and Argentine returns. The standing risk, on both the historical and the Argentine evidence, is that a fresher outsider harvests the backlash first. Salvaging the electoral vehicle is also an option in places like Chile, where Chile Vamos kept its label, bench, and municipal base while conceding only the presidential lane.

The fourth path, issue depreciation, is the most speculative. If the Salvadoran security model succeeds and violence recedes as the region’s organizing question, the premium could shift back toward competence in administration, which the old right may be seen as having a better claim to. The old right’s long game may thus depend on its conquerors becoming too successful for their own good.

Conclusion

In most of the region, over the past decade the establishment right’s parties have been absorbed, taken over, or reduced to remnants, and its electorate has been annexed by movements that campaign against much of what it once claimed to represent.

But the old right is not dead across the board, and it remains a marginalized but decisive force in several countries where the new right needs its support in order to govern. Whether the new right’s leaders recognize this interdependence is another matter. Asked about Macri a few weeks after Mar del Plata, Milei suggested that his old ally should perhaps come to understand que su tiempo pasó, that his time had passed.

Read in Oxford Review of Latin American Studies.