Twenty years ago, there were around 80 million people—mostly Italians—living in a democracy where right-wing populists governed nationally. By 2020, that number had grown to 2.5 billion with right-wing populists in power in the largest (India), second largest (United States), fourth largest (Brazil), and sixth largest (Philippines) democracies in the world. As Cecilia Lero writes, “countries in the Global South, and the Philippines and Brazil in particular, have not had recent large waves of immigration or notable demographic shifts and have experienced real income growth across all classes over the past 15 years” (110). Thus, the rise of right-wing populists like Rodrigo Duterte and Jair Bolsonaro in “two countries previously considered relative success stories of democratization in their region” is puzzling and one of the key themes of Right-Wing Populism in Latin American and Beyond, edited by Anthony Pereira. Although half of the contributors are based in Brazil, and nearly all work in the country, the volume is truly comparative, as populism in Columbia, Peru, Italy, India, the Philippines, the United States, and Venezuela is covered in some depth. Substantive themes include right-wing populist responses to COVID—including “medical populism” and the creation of a transnational “Hydroxychloroquine Alliance”—along with standard chapters on theory, political economy, and institutions. It is one of the first books to chart the largest change in right-wing populism over the last decade: its rise to governance in democracies in the Global South.

On September 13, 2022, a young Kurdish Iranian woman named Mahsa Amini, known to her family as Jina, entered a police station in Tehran, under detention for not sufficiently covering her hair with a headscarf. Within hours, Amini was transferred from the police station to a nearby hospital in a coma. At the hospital, her family told journalists that she had been beaten by law enforcement officers. When Amini died on September 16, 2022, demonstrators gathered outside the hospital demanding an inquiry into Amini’s death. Over the next several days, protests multiplied across Iran demanding more freedoms for women, including the right to show their hair in public, and more freedoms for all Iranians, including democratic reforms and the removal of the leader of the Islamic Republic. Suppression of the protests led to the deaths of more than five hundred protestors and the arrest of tens of thousands (UN HRC 2024, 4–6).

The dramatic shifts in policies and practices of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the course of its tumultuous 75-year history underscore the decisive importance of political leadership. Institutionally, China closely resembles other former and surviving Communist regimes. Operationally, however, its dynamic patterns of governance reflect the shifting concerns of a succession of visionary Communist Party leaders.