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June 2, 2006 Putting Uribe’s “Mandate” into Perspective Following President Alvaro Uribe’s election victory last week with 62 percent of the vote, his supporters and many analysts began throwing around terms like “mandate” and “vote of confidence.” While Uribe clearly won the election, what has gotten lost in all of the hullabaloo, including claims that he has single-handedly stopped Latin America’s shift to the left, is the fact that he actually received the weakest electoral mandate of any South American leader in recent years. Only 45 percent of Colombia’s eligible voters bothered to vote, therefore, the 62 percent who cast their ballot for Uribe translates into only 27 percent of eligible voters choosing to re-elect the country’s president. This figure pales in comparison to the percentage of eligible voters that cast ballots for the winning candidates in other recent presidential elections in South America. While media outlets such as the Christian Science Monitor declared that Colombians “gladly came out to vote for him,” the reality is that only a small minority actually cast ballots for Uribe. The Colombian president garnered only 27 percent of the country’s eligible vote, while other first round winners in recent elections in the region performed significantly better. For example, 42 percent of Bolivia’s eligible voters cast a ballot for Evo Morales in 2005 and 46 percent of Uruguayans turned out for Tabaré Vázquez a year earlier. Also in 2004, 42 percent of Venezuela’s eligible voters came out in support of President Hugo Chávez in that country’s recall referendum. The pattern is the same in those elections that went to a second round of voting. Michele Bachelet proved victorious this past January when 47 percent of Chile’s eligible voters cast ballots for that country’s first woman president. Meanwhile, Inácio Lula da Silva won in Brazil with 46 percent of the eligible vote back in 2002. In fact, the only recent victorious South American presidential candidate to receive as low a percentage of the electoral vote as Uribe did last week was none other than Uribe himself four years ago. In 2002, only 24 percent of Colombia’s eligible voters turned out in support of Washington’s closest regional ally. Despite the fact that every center-left president in South America was elected with significantly more popular support than Uribe, somehow in the eyes of many analysts it is only Colombia that has a functioning democracy. As Investors Business Daily noted after Uribe’s victory last week, “Colombia’s re-election of Alvaro Uribe not only stands conventional wisdom on its head about Latin voters’ rejection of free markets. It also proves that democracy lives south of our border.” Apparently, in the eyes of both the right and Corporate America, an election—and by extension a country—can only be deemed democratic when their candidate wins. And, in the case of South America, only their candidate in Colombia is deemed to have received a strong electoral mandate even though most of the region’s center-left presidents captured 20 percent more of the eligible vote than did Uribe.
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