As the region shifts to the right, its leaders face daunting challenges in an era of slow economic growth and deeply polarized societies.

To a significant extent, those difficulties are the product of policies and expectations leftist leaders set in motion. Austerity measures intended to reduce inflation and balance budgets in countries like Brazil and Argentina stand to anger large segments of the population that came to see such things as free education and generous pensions as basic rights.

In Chile on Monday, leftists were feeling deflated as they began to contemplate an era of lower spending on social programs and education.

“Students still remember vividly when Piñera said that education was a consumer good,” Javiera López, the secretary general of the student federation at the University of Chile, said in an interview, making a reference to a remark Mr. Piñera made in 2011 when he was grappling with student demonstrations as president. “The student movement will continue demanding free education as a basic right on the streets and in Congress.”

Senator Gleisi Hoffmann, the president of Brazil’s Workers’ Party, which governed from 2003 to 2016, said the left in the region began to buckle as the 2008 financial crisis in the United States set off a period of global economic uncertainty and retrenchment. Right-wing leaders, she said, seized the opportunity to portray leftist governments as fiscally irresponsible.

“People had reached a level of well-being in which they had food, access to public services, and they began making other demands,” Ms. Hoffmann said in a recent interview. Leftist leaders, the senator said, were not in a position to deliver and did a poor job at convincing voters that their improved lot in life was the result of leftist policies.