On October 28, an extreme right candidate, Jair Bolsonaro from the Social Liberal Party (PSL), won the Brazilian general elections with 55 per cent of the total vote in the second round against leftist frontrunner Fernando Haddad.
Why? Similar to other observers of Brazilian politics, I keep asking myself what explains this victory? First Haddad’s campaign and discourse was not very persuasive. As the successor of Brazil’s well-regarded economic and social policies that were achieved under the Worker's Party's (PT) Lula Inacio da Silva, Haddad had a tough road ahead. He came in late to the game and it was a game that few expected him to enter, never mind get to the second round.
But he was, why? There simply were few alternative candidates whose political parties and reputations had not been tarnished by Brazil’s long entrenched corruption scandal.
Who is Bolsonaro? A wild-card candidate that up until March did not even have affiliation with the political party whose label he competed under, the PSL. He legitimises everything from racism, misogyny, to homophobia, to outright violence against society.
There is simply no potential of ‘diversity’ within his conception of ‘national unity’, which appeared in his victory speech today. Forget the Trump comparison, this is not the US. In Brazil, sliding down an authoritarian road is not ‘the fear of the unknown’. So why did over 50 per cent of the population elect him?
As an academic colleague from Barcelona commenting about Catalonia’s recent equally irrational sequence of events said this week in Canberra, "it’s not the end result we need to understand, it’s what happened beforehand".
In 2013, Brazilians took to the street to protest against a string of corruption allegations facing the decade ruling Worker’s Party including other members in its ruling coalition. Regardless of the ensuing corruption scandal, former President Dilma Rousseff won her bid for re-election in 2014. As it became increasingly known in the public and media that the PT, Lula and Dilma, as presidents from the same ruling party that had governed since 2003, had purchased support from congress to pass legislation, Brazil entered an institutional crisis. Then because of Dilma’s economic mismanagement and style of governing, they simultaneously entered an economic crisis. From 2014 onwards, violence increased, unemployment increased, and Brazil entered a period of economic decline.
Unlike Australia, now known as 'the coup capital of the 21st century', Brazil is a presidential system of government. They cannot hold votes of confidence, there are no potential spillovers, and there is no institutional capacity to depose of a president who become incredibly unpopular. Therefore, my hypothesis is that they had no choice as Dr Grau Craus similarly suggests for Spain, but to "externalize the crisis". There was no other possible alternative. Therefore, the right and centrist right in Brazil began to use the judiciary as a means in 2015 onwards, to remove not only Dilma from office, impeached in 2016 for breaking ‘budgetary laws’, but also to imprison former president Lula, and considerable figures of Brazil’s democratisation movement that began in 1985. Institutionally, there were not many remaining figures of Brazil political parties, or elites, after the right-led judicial war on the left.
The left? They took to the streets. With few institutional alternatives, they attempted to reactivate civil society via mass popular demonstrations to revamp their cause; Lula’s legitimacy to run in 2018. They relied on the empirical reality that they had brought progress to Brazil, regardless of how. But there was a political and institutional vacuum emerging, and Jair Bolsonaro filled it.
With no institutional exit, Brazil’s economy continued to decline, citizen’s approval for democracy fell, and support for an authoritarian regime increased from 19 per cent to 55 per cent in three years. The established right had externalised to the courts, and the established left to the streets, there was nothing remaining but a space for an outsider, even one that is not charismatic, to rise into the power of an empty space promising vaguely in his victory speech: ‘neoliberalism, plus centralisation of power in the executive, in the name of a unified Brazil’. Folks, this isn’t how this goes - neoliberalism in a democratic context accompanies a reduction of the size of government and decentralisation - a weakening of centralising state power in the name of economic efficiency, effectiveness, and efficacy.
Neoliberalism, plus the centralisation of national executive power, coupled with a fragmented congress that now includes a record number of over 30 different political parties, does not bode well for the future democratic governance of Brazil.
Dr Tracy Fenwick is a political scientist at the Australian National University who specialises in Brazilian politics.
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| Jair Bolsonaro filled a political and institutional vacuum that was emerging in Brazil |
Why? Similar to other observers of Brazilian politics, I keep asking myself what explains this victory? First Haddad’s campaign and discourse was not very persuasive. As the successor of Brazil’s well-regarded economic and social policies that were achieved under the Worker's Party's (PT) Lula Inacio da Silva, Haddad had a tough road ahead. He came in late to the game and it was a game that few expected him to enter, never mind get to the second round.
But he was, why? There simply were few alternative candidates whose political parties and reputations had not been tarnished by Brazil’s long entrenched corruption scandal.
Who is Bolsonaro? A wild-card candidate that up until March did not even have affiliation with the political party whose label he competed under, the PSL. He legitimises everything from racism, misogyny, to homophobia, to outright violence against society.
There is simply no potential of ‘diversity’ within his conception of ‘national unity’, which appeared in his victory speech today. Forget the Trump comparison, this is not the US. In Brazil, sliding down an authoritarian road is not ‘the fear of the unknown’. So why did over 50 per cent of the population elect him?
As an academic colleague from Barcelona commenting about Catalonia’s recent equally irrational sequence of events said this week in Canberra, "it’s not the end result we need to understand, it’s what happened beforehand".
In 2013, Brazilians took to the street to protest against a string of corruption allegations facing the decade ruling Worker’s Party including other members in its ruling coalition. Regardless of the ensuing corruption scandal, former President Dilma Rousseff won her bid for re-election in 2014. As it became increasingly known in the public and media that the PT, Lula and Dilma, as presidents from the same ruling party that had governed since 2003, had purchased support from congress to pass legislation, Brazil entered an institutional crisis. Then because of Dilma’s economic mismanagement and style of governing, they simultaneously entered an economic crisis. From 2014 onwards, violence increased, unemployment increased, and Brazil entered a period of economic decline.
Unlike Australia, now known as 'the coup capital of the 21st century', Brazil is a presidential system of government. They cannot hold votes of confidence, there are no potential spillovers, and there is no institutional capacity to depose of a president who become incredibly unpopular. Therefore, my hypothesis is that they had no choice as Dr Grau Craus similarly suggests for Spain, but to "externalize the crisis". There was no other possible alternative. Therefore, the right and centrist right in Brazil began to use the judiciary as a means in 2015 onwards, to remove not only Dilma from office, impeached in 2016 for breaking ‘budgetary laws’, but also to imprison former president Lula, and considerable figures of Brazil’s democratisation movement that began in 1985. Institutionally, there were not many remaining figures of Brazil political parties, or elites, after the right-led judicial war on the left.
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| Supporters of Jair Bolsonaro celebrate in front of his residence in Rio |
The left? They took to the streets. With few institutional alternatives, they attempted to reactivate civil society via mass popular demonstrations to revamp their cause; Lula’s legitimacy to run in 2018. They relied on the empirical reality that they had brought progress to Brazil, regardless of how. But there was a political and institutional vacuum emerging, and Jair Bolsonaro filled it.
With no institutional exit, Brazil’s economy continued to decline, citizen’s approval for democracy fell, and support for an authoritarian regime increased from 19 per cent to 55 per cent in three years. The established right had externalised to the courts, and the established left to the streets, there was nothing remaining but a space for an outsider, even one that is not charismatic, to rise into the power of an empty space promising vaguely in his victory speech: ‘neoliberalism, plus centralisation of power in the executive, in the name of a unified Brazil’. Folks, this isn’t how this goes - neoliberalism in a democratic context accompanies a reduction of the size of government and decentralisation - a weakening of centralising state power in the name of economic efficiency, effectiveness, and efficacy.
Neoliberalism, plus the centralisation of national executive power, coupled with a fragmented congress that now includes a record number of over 30 different political parties, does not bode well for the future democratic governance of Brazil.
Dr Tracy Fenwick is a political scientist at the Australian National University who specialises in Brazilian politics.
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