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Surprised so few people talk about Brasil here. Their election (2nd round) is today. It looks like Lula is the slight favourite but even his supporters concede that Bolsonaro has a good shot. For those not in the know, Lula is the social democrat with Bolsonaro best described as "Trump of the Tropics".
Yet a complicating factor is that the new congress has already been elected and it was much more right-wing than expected. So Lula's room for maneuver will be significantly constrained if he happens to win.
There does seem to be a structural undercurrent at play here. A very fast-growing demographic in Brasil are the evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly favour Bolsonaro. Traditionally, Catholicism has been the bedrock of the nation's social fabric, inherited from the Iberians. So a very fervent form of Protestantism is unquestionably a break from the past where Catholicism was viewed as intertwined with national identity. Whoever wins this presidential election will have to grapple with this changed reality in Brasil.
Incidentally, this also suggests the lazy assumption that "as America gets more diverse it will invariably get more liberal" could potentially not come to pass.
I'm surprised this isn't a more widespread phenomenon in Catholic countries (or maybe it is and I'm just uninformed). Pope Francis is a walking counterexample to the infallibility of the Church. The natural response is either to give up the faith entirely, or go full sola scriptura.
The only "Catholic countries" left are in Eastern Europe and have cultural attitudes of "eh, we get bad leaders from time to time religiously as well as secularly". Latin America becoming more and more protestant is a widespread phenomenon partly tied to non-religious social dynamics in those countries and partly tied to the way in which the Catholic church politicized itself.
Could you elaborate on the Latin America factors? I don't know the social dynamics, and I'm curious how Roman Catholic politicization has gone there.
This is a very broad overview, but the TDLR is that Latin American gender roles and social dysfunction are pretty bad in much of it, and evangelicalism offers a socially acceptable reason to do things the way the church crowd tells everyone to do things- without the burden of convincing people you take catholicism seriously(most Latin American Catholics are more or less secularized and the church is often seen as discredited). For political factors, Latin America’s history in the latter 20th century was, well, I think you know the gist, and clerics who weren’t interested in cooperating with right wing authoritarian regimes sided with socialism, conveniently discrediting both sides. Add to that pope Francis like leadership(that is, erratic, corrupt, ineffectual, given to fringe ideas, nepotistic, and steadily worsening) in general and the effects of the sex abuse crisis, and you’ve got both the religious people mad at the church for being almost literally either communists or fascists and going too far with post-Vatican II experimentation and poor leadership and everyone else mad at it for being a train wreck that made astonishingly poor political choices.
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