For Latin America’s new right-wing heads of state, these days present a welcome opportunity to demonstrate their power on the regional stage. For several newly elected right-wing heads of state, things are already going terribly wrong, just a few months into their terms. The underlying conditions that helped the right come to power in the first place – anger over crime, inflation, corruption and the feeling of having been let down by one’s own government – have not disappeared. The task is to demonstrate convincingly that problems such as security, inflation and economic stagnation can be resolved without dismantling social welfare and democracy. Whether the pendulum swings back will therefore not depend on whether the new right fails, but on whether the left can prove by then that it can do better.