Moving Beyond the Washington Consensus: The Resurgence of the Left in Latin America CRISTÓBAL ROVIRA KALTWASSER * S ince the late 1990s, neoliberalism has been losing support in Latin America. In fact, almost two-thirds of Latin Americans are currently governed by leaders who consider themselves to be to the left of the political spectrum(Roberts 2008: 328). How can we explain this fact? Even though this question has been answered in many different ways, most scholars apply a bottom-up perspective, explaining the electoral victories of left-of-center governments as the result of the patient con­struction of the organizational and coalitional capacities needed to con­front neoliberal ideas and policy reforms(Silva 2009: 1). New Movements Against the Imposition of Market Fundamentalism According to this analysis, the Washington Consensus itself sowed the seeds for waves of protest against its further implementation. Several authors(Oxhorn 2009; Perrault 2009; Roberts 2007, 2008, 2009; Silva 2009; Taylor 2009) refer to the work of Karl Polanyi, who in his classic work»The Great Transformation«(1944) argued that the construction of a market society produces its own opposition. The expansion of a free market tends to reduce everything in society to the level of commodi­ties, and creates social tensions that inevitably generate a protectionist counter-movement. However, this process is not automatic. In the case of Latin America, the implementation of the Washington Consensus not only produced economic and social exclusion, but also weakened and fragmented the labor unions. Moreover, the transition to democracy gen­erally tended to demobilize civil society as political parties became the * I want to thank Nancy Bermeo, Sofia Donoso, Wolfgang Merkel, Cas Mudde, and Susie Taylor for their comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. This research was made possible by a post-doctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Hum­boldt Foundation. 52 Rovira Kaltwasser, Resurgence of the Left ipg 3/2010