Ana Iparraguirre: ‘Trump will get more radical if he loses the next elections’

In an interview with Modo Fontevecchia, broadcast on +Perfil and Radio Perfil (AM 1190), political scientist Ana Iparraguirre analysed the run-off in Brazil, the upcoming midterms in the United States and the advance of the new right in the Americas.

Iparraguirre warns that a possible Republican defeat in the US Congress would lead US President Donald Trump to take his administration in a more radical than moderate direction and explains how the succession tussle between Marco Rubio and J. D. Vance could reduce the margin of support for President Javier Milei’s government in Washington. She also pointed out that the permanence of the current conservative wave in Latin America will depend on its capacity to produce concrete economic results.

Iparraguirre is a political scientist, strategist and analyst with an international career of almost two decades in strategic consultancy, electoral campaign design and public opinion analysis. She currently works as a partner and senior vice-president of GBAO, a consultancy focused on research and political strategy.

Previously Iparraguirre founded and headed her own consultancy firm, Dynamis Consulting, advising presidential candidates, governors, mayors, corporations and NGOs across Latin America and the United States. She was also vice-president at the international firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.

This interview was conducted prior to the run-off in Brazil last Sunday.

Nice to have you here and after all that introduction and given your international experience, I don’t know where to start! Argentina, the United States or Brazil?

Well, we could start in chronological order with Brazil, couldn’t we? Elections where the assumption was that after the first round results, [Flávio] Bolsonaro was going to coast to election. 

I was recently talking to a Brazilian marqueteiro who told me: "In the first round the question was 'Do we want Lula or not? And the people said ‘No.’ In the second round the question has changed to 'Do we want Bolsonaro or not? And the people are saying no.'" 

There is obviously much dissatisfaction with the entire political leadership affecting right and left alike.

How do you resolve ‘Bolsonaro no’ and ‘Lula no’?

Well, but that was what the voters were saying from the start, that they did not like either of the options, but the electoral offer ended up being those two options …

The other week the latest study of Latinobarómetro was published with many interesting questions but one which really caught my attention was: "What has the state done in the last three years to sort out or improve the lives of you and your family?" And among the three countries where this sentiment of the state doing something for people is most felt is Argentina – indeed it has fallen off more in Argentina than Venezuela, for example. And what we are seeing is a chronic dissatisfaction among the citizenry with the results they are receiving from their governments, which do not suffice to cover an increasingly changing reality.

How does that play out in the United States?

In the United States we are going to have a very interesting election where the tide is in favour of the Democratic Party. We will see if that transforms into a tsunami which sweeps both the House of Representatives and the Senate. That seems increasingly probable, given all the indicators, but it is still not certain and here one of the errors of interpretation which can be made enters – that this election is an endorsement of the Democratic Party and the reality is, when you look at the image of both parties…

… is that they are saying no to Trump.

Yes, ‘No to Trump’ – which is not the same as embracing the Democratic Party. And the day after we are going to have a very interesting challenge, which I believe to be strongly correlated with something going on in Argentina, where the Democratic Party will have to define what it represents from here on. 

We are going to have a more progressive wing battling with the more moderate wing. Here we should watch very closely what happens in Michigan with Abdul El-Sayed, a socialist Democratic candidate competing in a more conservative state. We shall see if he does well or not. 

Within the Republican Party we are going to have a fight between those in favour and against globalisation so we will have to see how that plays out. I think that this result will have the least impact on Trump.

Let’s see.

Because everything he has done until now was without passing through Congress – the things which most affect us, right? – so having a more adverse Congress will not have much impact. And, possibly, since he has no loyalty to the Republican Party, if as a consequence of his presidency the Republican Party cannot win an election in the next 50 years, that is not his problem because he has no intention of looking after the Republican Party so he is going to continue doing whatever he likes. The other day an analyst said: "Well, perhaps he will be much more intense like a company heading into bankruptcy tends in those last stages to make random attempts to perform magic to see if they can manage to save it somehow and end up entering into more problems." Well, perhaps we can see a Trump who is not more moderate on the basis of this result but more radicalised.

Yet more radicalised, very interesting. And how would that affect Argentina?

Argentina not that much in the first instance. It seems to me that Trump’s intentions whether or not to help Argentina will not be affected by that. And Congress, even with a tsunami, is not going to have the votes in the Senate to advance with an impeachment against Trump. That will start to happen and I believe that as from mid-2027 and the end of next year the primary for the succession to Trump will begin. And there is where it seems to be where [Javier] Milei will see himself most affected because he will not have the support of half the US political system but perhaps a quarter, the most globalised wing within the Republican Party – the wing of [Marco] Rubio, if you like. But those closer to [Vice-President] JD Vance wants something different for the United States, more isolationist.

Now JD Vance is not doing so well or am I wrong? Doesn’t the Rubio camp have more possibilities?

No, I wouldn’t dare to say that at this moment. Indeed, JD Vance has one huge advantage, for example, that he is a great fundraiser. In this year’s campaign he covered many swing states  – i.e. Vance more than Rubio – because he has more connection with that kind of voter and is functioning very well as a campaign fundraiser, which is one of the main variables at stake in the primary process.

Ana, you, like us, dedicate yourself to a thankless task, which is trying to forecast the future by explaining the meaning of what is happening and hence what is going to happen. That’s impossible – if the future could be predictable, we’d be millionaires and that is not the case. What we do is something a bit better than an I Ching horoscope, which is trying to find rational explanations for possible scenarios. 

With that prologue, I’m going to ask you a question about the future. The "pink tide" lasted a while, indisputably, and this wave is now in the opposite direction. Is it more ephemeral? Is it a wave? Will it give birth to something lasting? Are we at the end of it, in the middle or the beginning?

I think there is definitely a wave, undeniably, but the wave has two components. One component is a rejection of the status quo, élites in general, the establishment and thus a wave for change of whatever kind – we’re going to trade this in for something else because we are not satisfied. Indeed, if you look today at the elections of the last few decades, beforehand being in government gave you more chances of winning. If I had to prepare a campaign, better with a government than the opposition because you had more funds, the power of the state, a whole bunch of things. Today in government your probabilities of winning are 25 percent as against 75 percent of losing, if you look at the last elections. So that’s one component of this wave. 

But the second component is ideological. Why do I say this? Because they are not trading in one left for a more radicalised left or a more moderate left – they are steering right and the right is enjoying an advantage at this moment in particular. When Milei took office, there were four right-wing countries in our region; if Bolsonaro now wins in Brazil, there would be eight, double. We’re talking about between late 2023 and today. 

So there is something on the right which is connecting more. But as to your question on how long this moment is going to last, well, that is going to depend on the results. The "pink tide" pulled a lot of people out of poverty in Latin America, as you know, and it was very effective and very efficient in producing results for many people, who embraced those ideas and defended them for a long time because they were producing results. The right has still not managed to produce results to pass from rejection of what has gone before to being convinced by and defending the ideas of the new right. So I think that is the challenge. Except for [Nayib] Bukele in El Salvador – with all the problems he causes for democracy but people see him as [heading] a government which has solved the country’s main problem – the other right-wing administrations still have not managed to make that transition and I believe that their permanence in time will depend on effectively showing concrete results.

Now, continuing with that analysis, Ana, it seems that neither the right nor left have managed to improve the economic conditions of the population because we have been going downhill in the last 15 years – and I would dare to say 25 – with a continuous regressive process in the distribution of income where the one percent richest are grabbing increasingly large percentages of total global income. In other words, this is not a problem of left or right: the problem is the impossibility of taxing the one percent richest. This being so, are we heading for an alternation of government of right and left, all unsatisfactory, until a kind of New Deal or welfare state is found or will the alternative be a more successful version of the revolutions at the start of the past century?

I like the way you’re thinking because I believe that we should start thinking of something more disruptive. These days people are thinking: "I don’t like this, I’d change it for that,” but nobody  thinks of changing the régime. Indeed, if you look at it, the numbers of adhesion to democracy have not varied in the region. So I believe that the conditions are changing. 

When there were major changes in society, they were generally driven by three things: significant demographic changes or major or conflicts – in general, armed – or big changes in modes of production. Nowadays there are all three things at the same time: artificial intelligence is changing our production; the number of global conflicts is at historically record levels when you look at the numbers of people estimated to be involved and the birth rate is falling with increasingly older populations, except Africa, 

So if all this  is changing, why assume that our voting and electoral systems and our forms of government are going to continue to be the same? It is very possible that we start off with a change of persons within the systems followed by a change in those systems which indeed should be able to respond better to the new society in formation.