The Right Starts to Look Rebellious

The shift among young voters is less a doctrinal conversion than a sign of fatigue with bureaucracy, insecurity and inherited political narratives.

When the Right Starts to Look Rebellious
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano

For decades, it was taken for granted that Latin American youth were naturally progressive.
To be young seemed to mean looking to the left, distrusting the market, demanding more State intervention and embracing every cultural cause presented as inevitable.
But that association was not a sociological law.
It was a historical circumstance.
And it is changing.
Recent surveys by Equipos Consultores in Uruguay show an uncomfortable fact for the dominant narrative: among young people aged 18 to 29, ideological identification with the left and the right is now almost balanced.
According to data reported by El País, in 2000, 37% of young Uruguayans identified with the left and 27% with the right.
In 2025, the relationship appears reversed: 29% on the right and 26% on the left.
It is important not to exaggerate.
Uruguay did not become right-wing overnight.
Nor is there a massive conversion to classical liberalism or conservatism.
What is happening is more subtle: the left is losing its symbolic monopoly over the future.
For much of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the left managed to present itself as the natural home of social concern, rebellion, justice and hope.
The right, by contrast, appeared associated with the old order, privilege and the defense of the past.
That emotional distribution of politics is beginning to shift.
For many young people, the left no longer represents transformation.
Sometimes it represents bureaucracy, forms, committees, regulations, taxes, permits, slogans and moral superiority.
Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro had already warned, from within the left itself, about the problem of bureaucracy. In Bureaucracy and Socialism, published in 2008, he pointed to the tension between the socialist ideal and the administrative machinery that ends up deforming it.
Today, that warning seems broader: bureaucracy does not kill only socialism.
It kills every political promise that becomes an apparatus.
Insecurity is central to this process.
For a generation that feels more exposed, the old language of procedural guarantees can sound distant or indifferent.
That is why figures such as Nayib Bukele inspire admiration far beyond El Salvador. Not because all his admirers share his model, but because he conveys something many feel has disappeared: order.
The economy completes the picture. Young people who grew up hearing speeches about rights and inclusion reached adulthood facing impossible rents, precarious jobs, insufficient wages, absurd procedures and a State that promises protection but often makes life harder.
It is not enough to accuse them of being manipulated, superficial or reactionary. Young people are not reacting only against an ideology. They are reacting against an experience: that of a politics that speaks a lot about them, but almost never from them.
The woke agenda also enters this scenario. Not because all young people reject it, but because many perceive that cultural politics has replaced real politics. Words are policed, but paths are not opened.
That is where certain right-wing movements found space: more digital, more irreverent and more defiant.
They do not always have sound doctrine, but they do have a feel for the times. They understood that frustration is a political force.
The paradox is clear: the right starts to look rebellious when the left starts to look like the system.
That does not mean the right has already won. In many cases, what it receives is conditional credit, borrowed votes and organized impatience.
If it promises freedom and builds obedience, it will be punished.
Uruguayan youth are not shouting an ideological revolution.
They are withdrawing trust.
They are not asking for sermons.
They are asking for a future: to live without fear, work without being trapped, start a business without being treated as suspicious and progress without asking permission.

Youth and ideological change
The left’s symbolic decline
Bureaucracy and disillusionment
The right as rebellion

Continue reading in Global Order and Geopolitics