The Arithmetic Problem
Something has changed in how Latin America governs itself. Not the loud ruptures — coups, constitutions, economic implosions — but something quieter and harder to reverse: the fragmentation of political majorities. Across the region, from the Andes to the Southern Cone, presidents increasingly arrive at office without anything close to a working legislative majority, and they stay in office only by constructing, week by week, the coalitions that let them function at all.
Brazil makes the point most vividly. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned to the presidency in 2023 having won one of the most razor-thin elections in Brazilian history — less than two percentage points separated him from Jair Bolsonaro. In the Chamber of Deputies, the left coalition that brought Lula to power commands nothing like a working majority. So his government does what Brazilian executives have practiced since the return of democracy in 1985: it practices the "centrão" method, distributing ministries and public resources to a shifting bloc of centre-right parties whose loyalty is transactional rather than ideological. It functions, barely. Every important vote is a negotiation; every budget line is a concession. The system works until it doesn't.
Different Countries, Same Equation
Colombia presents a variation on the theme. Gustavo Petro, the first left-wing president in Colombian history, entered office in 2022 with strong popular support and a fragile coalition in a Congress he never fully controlled. The subsequent months followed a now-familiar script: initial overture to the centre, progressive estrangement, cabinet reshuffles, and a government that has found it easier to produce reform bills than to pass them. The health reform, the labour reform, the pension reform — each became a months-long ordeal of lobbying, partial rewriting and inconclusive votes. Petro's response has been to escalate the rhetoric, appealing directly to the street when the corridors of the Capitol fail him. That move — presidentialism without parliamentary muscle — has precedent across the continent, and it rarely ends tidily. The dynamic it creates is one that analysts of court–president relations know well: executives who cannot legislate begin to govern by decree, which in turn invites judicial challenge and institutional deadlock.
Chile offers a colder version of the same lesson. Gabriel Boric arrived in 2022 as the youngest president in Chilean history, backed by the broadest coalition of the left in a generation — and promptly watched two successive constitutional drafts that the Chilean electorate rejected in referendum. Without a constitutional settlement and with a Congress split three ways, Boric has governed through the centre of his coalition, abandoning the more ambitious structural reforms that defined his campaign. The truncation is real: this is what minority government actually looks like in practice — less transformation, more management.
- 1985Brazil's return to civilian democracy; origin of centrão coalition politics
- 2022near-simultaneous left-wing election wins in Brazil, Colombia and Chile
- 2023Lula takes office; Colombia's major reform bills stall in Congress
Why Majorities Are Harder to Build
The deeper question is structural. Across the region, party systems have undergone sustained fragmentation. In many countries, the old left-right duopoly — Liberals versus Conservatives, APRA versus Acción Popular, PT versus PSDB — has decomposed into a wider spectrum of smaller parties, movements and personalist vehicles. Each new entrant to the party system is a potential veto player inside any coalition. Meanwhile, voters have grown both more volatile and more demanding: they punish perceived betrayal faster than earlier generations, which makes the patient, incremental coalition-building that durable majorities require ever harder to sustain.
There is also a regional irony here. The wave of outsider candidates who ran against "the political class" — anti-establishment, anti-party — has tended to produce governments least equipped for the grubby, indispensable work of coalition management. You cannot disdain the deal and then make it. Executives who campaign against the establishment generally discover that they still need its arithmetic.
The result is a continent mid-negotiation, always: presidents governing in permanent coalition season, their reform agendas moving at the speed of the slowest partner in the room.