Across three Andean capitals this election season, the winning coalitions share a profile that would have been unelectable a generation ago: young, technocratic, indifferent to the left-right axis their parents fought over, and united by a single economic thesis — that the region must stop exporting its minerals raw.
Lithium is the test case. The incoming governments campaigned on coordinated refining and battery-precursor capacity rather than competing concessions, reviving an integration agenda that has embarrassed its predecessors for decades. Investors, initially wary, have noted that resource nationalism with a business plan looks different from resource nationalism without one.
The risks are familiar: commodity cycles do not respect manifestos, and regional coordination has a long record of dying in committee. But demographic arithmetic favours patience — the new electorate is the youngest in the hemisphere, and it has shown it will reward leaders who talk about value chains the way earlier generations talked about sovereignty.