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EU–Latin America Academic Synergies

Leading Together: Values, Democracy, and Politics in a Fragmenting World

At nearly every summit between the European Union and Latin America and the Caribbean, the same phrase recurs: our relationship is founded on shared values—democracy, human rights, and multilateralism. These terms generate consensus in spaces of public debate, but if one steps away from official discourse and looks at what is happening within societies, the picture becomes considerably more uncomfortable. The public square has become a hostile arena where neither values nor the democratic spirit of consensus-building carry weight; what prevails instead is the intensity of grievance, the use of emotion as an electoral mechanism, and the capacity to frame the other as a threat. 


The World Values Survey (WVS) is the most important transnational study of human values, beliefs, and attitudes. Underway since 1981, it tracks how perceptions of democracy, tolerance, gender, religion, and the environment evolve, and it is the only academic study covering approximately 90% of the world's population across all cultural zones (WVS, 2026). Its findings from the most recent wave (the eighth), gathered between 2024 and 2026, do not measure electoral preferences but something deeper: how democratic people feel, how much they trust their institutions, and what connects them to public life.


The results from Bogotá, Colombia, encapsulate that tension in a revealing figure. Eighty-five percent of the capital's residents consider democracy a good system of government, yet 59% would support a strong leader capable of governing without Congress or elections. At the national level that figure rises to 63% and has grown since the previous wave, as has the percentage who prefer military government (28%). This is not a statistical contradiction; it is the most precise thermometer of the political moment we share.


The Year the World Went to the Polls

2024 was a year of intense electoral activity in Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay, El Salvador, India, Indonesia, the United States, and much of Europe. In nearly all of those processes, something recurred with a consistency that can no longer be read as coincidental: political language migrated from the grammar of the adversary to the grammar of the enemy, and differences ceased to be seen as potential for collective construction and became barriers instead. An adversary is someone you compete with, negotiate with, and can defeat the ballot box before encountering them again within the same institution. In neo-populist discourse, however, an enemy is someone whose very existence represents a threat—not merely their ideas, but their presence, their voice, their legitimacy. Politics that speak in terms of enemies do not seek to win a debate; it seeks to foreclose the very possibility of debate.


This displacement occurs simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. In Latin America and the Caribbean, populism—whether of the right, the left, or any other label—constructs its narratives around the permanent denunciation of a threatened 'us' defined against various 'others': internally, corruption, insecurity, or inequality; externally, migration, wars, or foreign powers. The same pattern is replicated in Europe, where the sustained advance of forces such as the Rassemblement National in France, Alternative for Germany, or Fidesz in Hungary can no longer be read as an anomaly on the periphery of the system. It is a structural tendency that has permeated the political centers of the continent. The polarized environment has been felt in electoral contests in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and is now evident in the Colombian context, with first-round results offering options at the extremes of the ideological spectrum.


The numbers support the diagnosis. Between 2009 and 2020, institutional trust declined steadily in Latin America while satisfaction with democracy fell in parallel, according to the UNDP (2021). The Economist's Democracy Index 2025 records a ninth consecutive year of deterioration in the region. In Europe, several countries that were reference points a decade ago now face serious challenges to judicial independence and press freedom. According to the WVS, in the majority of Latin American countries interpersonal trust stands below 10–20%, and in several cases falls below 10% (in Colombia it reached 4% in the most recent wave). In Europe, levels are higher, though heterogeneous: above 60% in the Nordic countries, between 30–50% in Western Europe, and between 15–30% in the East and South. No meaningful convergence of values is possible without basic trust in the other, and as theory demonstrates, that trust is a strong predictor of institutional trust.


The Gap Between Believing in Democracy and Living It

The WVS results allow a distinction between abstract support for democracy as an ideal and real satisfaction with its everyday functioning. That gap is the breeding ground in which leaderships flourish that offer shortcuts - particularly the strongman who claims institutions have been captured, or the outsider who promises to break up with the status quo. Distrust toward representative institutions, the sense that elites are not listening, and the inclination toward heavy-handed solutions are not exclusive to young democracies. They appear in both regions, against the same backdrop: an erosion of responsible political tone and a growing frustration with the slowness of the state.


The most striking finding is the generational fracture. In Bogotá, only 48% of young people prioritize living in a democracy, compared to 71% of those over 56 and 74% at the national level. That gap is the clearest signal that democratic systems are not translating their promises into concrete experiences for those who have just entered political life. The debt owed to young people is not only economic but also systemic: it must be demonstrated that democracy represents real rights and real opportunities. That begins by assuming shared responsibility and acknowledging the role each of us plays in organizing, co-leading, and building community.


Connected Cities and the Territories Left Behind

There is a dimension that major bi-regional agreements tend to overlook: the geography of values is not homogeneous. The results from Bogotá illustrate a dynamic replicated in São Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Paris, and Berlin—these globally connected capitals are laboratories for the transformation of values, characterized by greater openness and greater institutional skepticism, while vast peripheral and rural territories maintain distinct frameworks, often more cohesive but more removed from the globalized system.


In Bogotá, for example, the rejection of having gay neighbors fell from 31% to 13% within a generation. Yet in peripheral localities of the same city, three in ten people still express that rejection. If that disparity exists within a single capital, the distance from the country's interior is even greater. Major agreements are negotiated in capitals but implemented—or blocked—in municipalities, neighborhoods, and communities. The concentration of population in cities connected to the global system paradoxically produces two simultaneous effects: first, it accelerates value change in those hubs; second, it deepens the distance from the rest, generating the fertile ground for territorial discontent that populisms are adept at exploiting.


The Leadership We Need Has No Single Name

Faced with all of this, the most common response has been the heroic leader—an extraordinary individual who arrives to resolve what institutions failed to sustain. It is a model that seduces in periods of collective frustration, but one that almost invariably ends up deepening the very problems it promised to solve, because it concentrates power and turns personalization into a substitute for democratic deliberation.


Research on collective leadership developed at the School of Government of Universidad de los Andes proposes something different. Its central argument is that leadership is not the sum of exceptional individual capabilities, but a dynamic and relational process that emerges from the interaction among people, networks, and contexts in pursuit of public value (Forero et al., 2023). The question is not who the best leader is, but rather what conditions allow entire communities to exercise leadership in a sustained and co-responsible manner. This shift is also a political response to the grammar of the enemy, because collective leadership does not operate on a binary narrative of us versus them. It requires horizontality, collaboration, and recognition of diversity as a resource rather than a threat.


The UNDP identifies a pattern that points precisely in that direction. While trust in institutions falls, trust in close communities is maintained or grows. People no longer trust parties or parliaments, but they do trust their immediate networks (family and friends primarily) and the community organizations they know firsthand. There lies a fundamental clue. Democratic fabric is not rebuilt solely from the institutional apex downward, but from the territories upward.


Three Concrete Strategies to Begin

Shared values are not a point of departure; they are a horizon to be constructed. The WVS shows that European and Latin American societies share democratic aspirations in the abstract, while at the same time being traversed by fractures those aspirations have not managed to bridge: the generational gap, the distance between globalized capitals and invisible territories, and the paradox of someone who supports democracy but would also support a leader willing to suspend it if that promises to resolve their urgent problems. This is the current democratic panorama in both regions—not a terminal crisis, but a real tension between the ideal and everyday experience.


From this diagnosis, at least three concrete ideas emerge for the EU–Latin America cooperation agenda. The first is to train leaders who read values of data as relevant information about fractures and opportunities, not as obstacles to be managed. A public servant who knows that institutional trust in their country is at historic lows must design their interventions in a radically different way—treating the reconstruction of trust as a foundational element of legitimacy and governance.

The second is to integrate the territorial perspective into training programs at universities, think tanks, political parties, and other social and political spaces. How to govern with low trust and high polarization has no answer from ministerial offices or from summits. It requires reaching municipal leaders, civil society organizations, and those who have spent years building trust in adverse contexts—precisely the actors that connected capitals tend to render invisible.


The third is the most structural: break with heroic leadership as a formative ideal. Our Latin American and European environments continue to produce, far too often, professionals who have internalized that leading is a property of exceptional individuals and of technical rather than relational and human skills. What the research of Forero et al. (2023) urgently highlights is the need for collective leaderships capable of sustaining processes without requiring a savior, and of making plurality a strength. That is also, at its core, what democracy promised from the very beginning.


References:

Nathalie Méndez is an Associate Professor at the Alberto Lleras Camargo School of Government at Universidad de los Andes, and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Texas A&M University in the United States. She is the chair of the Master in Public Administration (MPA).


Her current work focuses primarily on Public Management and Leadership. She is the Principal Investigator of the World Values Survey for Colombia and coordinates public leadership topics at the School of Government. Her main areas of interest are Public Management, Collaborative Governance, Leadership, Local Development, Decentralization, and Public Administration. She has also pursued topics related to peacebuilding and political culture.


The opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of the EULAS Network.

 
 
 

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