What do Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez have in common? They’ve all been branded as populists, both celebratorily and scathingly. As Brazil heads to elections on October 7, all eyes are on ultra-conservative candidate Jair Bolsonaro – who brazenly rejects political correctness, defends Brazil’s authoritarian past and promises to upend the establishment – as the latest in a line of political strongmen turning citizen malaise into electoral success. Charismatic populist leaders present society as divided into two separate and homogeneous entities: the corrupt elite, and the pure people who the corrupt have oppressed. Proclaiming their direct link to the people (often enabled by social networks), they tend to eschew representative institutions and checks and balances. While left-wing populists take a class-based approach pitting working and middle-class people against a greedy economic elite, right-wing populists typically define the people as an exclusive group along ethnic, racial or national lines.

For NDI and its Honduran local partners, addressing violence against women in politics is critical to promoting strong and inclusive democratic societies. Violence against women in politics is a barrier to their active participation in democratic spaces and limits their ability to lead and be heard by their communities. It is important to place this issue on the political agenda and advocate for legislation to prevent, respond to, sanction and eradicate all forms of violence against women. In an effort to document violence against politically-active women in Honduras, NDI supported the creation of the Women’s Political Violence Observatory during the 2017 electoral process. The Observatory documented and followed 14 cases of violence against female candidates in San Pedro Sula, including Councillor Fátima Mena Baide, throughout the pre-electoral period.

When I started out as a junior State Department diplomat at the close of the Carter Administration in the dark days of the Cold War, the state of democracy in Latin America was abysmal. Military dictatorship was the norm throughout the region. During my early State Department years I worked to support, sustain, and contribute to the so-called third wave of democracy in the Americas that helped make the Latin America region, as the Economist recently said, “the most democratic region of the developing world,” behind only North America and Western Europe.

On November 30 in Constitution Hall of the Honorable Congress of the Republic of Colombia, an important event took place for the country’s democracy, particularly its legislative institutions. Leaders from the Senate and Chamber of Representatives came together to publicly present the first Open Parliament Action Plan of the Colombian Congress, which lays a series of benchmarks toward making the congress more visible and accessible to citizens. Colombia’s Open Parliament Action Plan is notable regionally and internationally – it is the third such plan developed in Latin America and the sixth in the world.