The Populist Response to the Pandemic: Perspectives from Brazil and Mexico

Abstract

Some governing officials and segments of populations have shown an unwillingness to treat the virus as a serious health risk at all. Rather than a standard case of politicization dividing the left and right, judgments of the threat posed by the coronavirus do not clearly align with traditional cleavages, as both left- and right-wing leaders have disregarded bad news about the pandemic. This paper examines the responses of the right-wing Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and the left-wing Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, both of whom trivialized and often dismissed the pandemic. These leaders share a populist style of politics which posits a struggle between a wholesome people on the one handand a class of parasitic elites on the other. This totalizing struggle in which the people must prevail mandates an agenticand oppositional posture toward national problems. Thus, populists spend more time attacking their perceived enemies than they do underlying conditions - like a virus - that can have no malevolent intentions. Populist movements therefore upend the capacity for recognizing material threats to public well-being, calling into question the capacity of populist governments to meet challenges likely to emerge in a post-COVID environment.