Good morning! Today is Saturday, Dec. 27, 2025.
Today in History:
2007: Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto assassinated.
1949: Indonesia gains independence from the Dutch.
1831: Charles Darwin begins his five-year journey on the HMS Beagle.
Birthdays today include: Actor Gérard Depardieu, Marlene Dietrich, Louis Pasteur.
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About the first week of Dec. 2025, I pointed out that the left was losing its grip on voters, on a worldwide basis. I pretty much expected to be greeted with suggestions that I was being overly optimistic. I was not disappointed in the least. Yet there are a LOT of upcoming elections in Latin America that play heavily on my prediction.
Powerline’s Bill Glahn:
Politics in Latin America continues to shift to the right. Honduras is the latest example. From Reuters,
Trump-backed Asfura wins Honduras presidency after disputed election.
Reuters describes the winner, Nasry Asfura, as “conservative.” They report,
The Honduras electoral authority, known as the CNE, said Asfura won 40.3% of the vote, edging out center-right Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla who garnered 39.5%. The candidate of the ruling LIBRE party, Rixi Moncada, came in a distant third.
The election happened back on November 30, but it took this long to count the votes and declare a winner.
Well, we shouldn't be too shocked about the time frames involved. Leaving aside the logistics involved with that nation, its geography and its unique pockets of corruption, it was never going to be faster than, say, Bush vs Gore. In fact, they still haven't got all the votes in, and as a result, all we know that the far-left ruling party lost.
Reports are sketchy, and figures vary depending on where you're getting reports from. Some suggest it was a close election, and others report the outgoing ruling party was a distant third. It will be interesting to see how persuasive the left is at convincing the voters that the election was stolen. Isn't that how the left operates, given what we've seen here in the U.S.?
Meanwhile, AP reported last week that Chile now has its most conservative, pro- business president in decades.
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Chile’s ultra-conservative former lawmaker José Antonio Kast secured a stunning victory in the presidential election Sunday, defeating the candidate of the center-left governing coalition and setting the stage for the country’s most right-wing government in 35 years of democracy.
Kast won 58.2% of the votes as Chileans overwhelmingly embraced his pledge to crack down on increased crime, deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants without legal status and revive the sluggish economy of one of Latin America’s most stable and prosperous nations. Kast’s supporters erupted into cheers in the street as results trickled in, shouting his name and honking horns.
We can add Bolivia to the list, where last August, no candidate secured a majority in the presidential election, which led to a runoff on Oct. 19 between Senator Rodrigo Paz of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) and former president Jorge Quiroga of Libre. Paz won with 55.0% of the vote. Meanwhile, the then-ruling party (Movimiento al Socialismo, or MAS) president didn't even run, knowing very well he wouldn't be elected, mostly because of loud dissatisfaction over the lack of essential goods. You know... like, for example, food. Gee, sounds familiar, doesn't it?
That change, by the way, marks the first time in Bolivian history that the presidency changed hands through a runoff election, and more importantly, it ended two decades of MAS power in Bolivia.
Next up: Costa Rica, which will hold its elections on Feb. 1. The two challengers there are Álvaro Ramos Chaves and Natalia Díaz Quintana. They're both making claim to being center-right.
Peru is up after that, on April 12. This one's a little harder to predict, because of fragmentation in the party structure there. Some 120 people are running for president. At the moment, there are three apparent leaders in the race, but with that many candidates and that much happening, one never knows. It's interesting, though, to note that each of them is also making pretense to center-right politics, which is a change from what they've had there for some years.
Colombia has its election on May 31. In that case, all three ideological blocs are represented: center, left, right. This is too far off to judge, really, but at the moment, the smart money is on María Fernanda Cabal, the most pro- business and most anti-socialist of the bunch, given what I'm seeing in the opinion pages there.
At issue with all of this is how it might or might not affect our own upcoming midterm elections. Latin American immigrants have voted much more strongly for Trump the last couple go-rounds. Will elections in their former homes push them in the same direction this time? That seems to be a pertinent question. It's one I won't try to speculate on just yet.
Thought for the day: Stop trying to get everyone to like you. Even you don’t like everyone...
I'll see you here tomorrow.
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