The Tumultuous Past and Present of Brazilian Politics
Image created by Alec Gossage
On Oct. 30th 2022, Brazilians went to the polls for one of the most consequential elections in the country’s modern history. The two choices fittingly represent the troubles of the past decade, including a crippling recession, the impeachments of two sitting presidents, the jailing of another, the continuing destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and executive negligence during a deadly pandemic.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, simply known as “Lula,” is the candidate for the Workers Party. An influential union leader who once led popular dissent against the Brazilian dictatorship, Lula rose to become a popular two-term president whose social programs lifted millions from poverty. However, Lula’s reputation was tarnished by his implication in a massive corruption investigation known as “Operation Car Wash,” which uncovered an extensive network of bribes and graft perpetrated by numerous Brazilian politicians with the state-owned oil company, Petrobras. The former president received a controversial prison sentence in 2018 until his charges were annulled by the Supreme Court in 2021, allowing Lula to declare his candidacy against incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain during the years of military rule, rose to prominence as a populist candidate during the 2018 presidential election. Bolsonaro possesses a strong base of support among Brazilian evangelicals and the business community, though his derogatory remarks against women and minorities and repeated praise of Brazil’s dictatorship have earned a great deal of criticism. Furthermore, Bolsonaro’s incompetent handling of the COVID-19 pandemic combined with his peddling of pseudoscience and false information contributed to the death of nearly 700,000 Brazilians since 2020. Though the 2022 election may be crucial in directing the course of Brazil’s modern history, it is also essential to illuminate the historical background and general political trends that render it such a crucial race.
“Today is Freedom Day,” said a jubilant Bolsonaro to a supporter on March 31st, 2020, as he left the Presidential Palace in Brasilia. In fact, Jair Bolsonaro was alluding to the very date in 1964 when democracy in Brazil fell into eclipse. Bolsonaro has frequently made similar comments in praise of Brazil’s military dictatorship that ruled the country with an iron fist for twenty years. At the height of the Cold War, the United States feared the spread of communism in its backyard, and convinced conservative figures in the militaries of various Latin American states to depose their elected, often left-wing, governments. When the presidency of João Goulart introduced an expansive agenda for political and social reform, including rent control, the nationalization of Brazil’s oil industry and the expropriation of unproductive farmlands, the United States government backed his deposition in 1964. The incumbent Brazilian president seemingly did not realize that his comments reached deep into his country’s checkered past of reforms met by military resistance, and how this cycle was even at the core of its establishment as a republic.
Before 1889, Brazil was a constitutional monarchy with an emperor and elected legislature. Though this political system permitted a ruthless system of slavery until 1888, the empire was paradoxically liberal for the time period. During the reign of Emperor Pedro II between 1831 and 1889, elections were held regularly and their results respected by the military and economic class. However, the monarchy’s abolition of slavery in 1888 drew the ire of the country’s elite planter class that profited from cash crops like sugarcane and coffee. By 1889, this group of wealthy aristocrats planned a coup with the help of the army, which they launched on Nov. 15th, currently celebrated as “Republic Proclamation Day.” The monarchy fell without resistance, as Emperor Pedro refused to shed blood for his throne and left the country to die in exile in Portugal two years later. For the next four decades, a clique of landowners from the dairy and coffee industries governed the new Brazilian Republic as an oligarchy with military support.
During Brazil’s most recent iteration of military rule from 1964 and 1985, the country’s previous four past presidents developed their political careers. Incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro was an army captain. His direct predecessor, Michel Temer, became a lawyer and distanced himself from any political expression. Former president Lula da Silva was a labor organizer and eventually founded the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party) with other union leaders in 1980, as a direct political response to the dictatorship. Lula da Silva’s ally and successor, Dilma Rousseff joined a series of militant Marxist guerilla organizations and was promptly arrested, tortured and jailed for nearly two years. After the end of military rule, Brazil wrote a constitution that aimed to rectify the abuses of the previous regime through strong protection of civil liberties and the placement of legal roadblocks to prevent future military takeovers.
Inscription written in protest of the 1964 Military Coup that reads “Down with the coup of April! Out with the foreigners!”
Though Brazil has not experienced any military takeovers since 1964, there are events in the country’s recent history which point to a willingness by the country’s economic elite to use political strategies to consolidate their power. In 2016, as the administration of President Dilma Rousseff became embroiled in a recession, economic crisis, and numerous corruption scandals, the Brazilian Congress issued articles of impeachment. Despite Rousseff’s wide unpopularity, the impeachment and removal of the president was widely viewed as a politically-charged move by the Brazilian Congress to supplant the center-left president with a more sympathetic administration. Her supporters even used the term golpe, or coup. Rousseff’s successor, her vice president, Michel Temer of the conservative MDB party, initiated large tax cuts for Brazil’s wealthy while amping up austerity measures against the country’s lower classes. Temer’s seven-percent approval rating made him the most unpopular president in recent Brazilian history, even outstripping the public anger towards his predecessor. The country’s economic troubles worsened as it fell into a deep recession which worsened extreme poverty in the country by 11 percent in 2017 alone.
In 2022, Brazil once again stands at a critical point in history, but with votes cast in ballot boxes rather than artillery fire, bayonets or palace coups. The 2022 Presidential elections are also consequential on a global scale, as the past four years of Bolsonaro’s presidency have witnessed the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest by logging and wildfires at an alarming rate, while indigenous lands continue to suffer encroachment with the President’s blessing. The agency, Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI), whose role is to protect the rights of Brazil’s indigenous population and oversee enforcement of the delimitation of indigenous lands, has also witnessed the erosion of its autonomy. The President attempted to delegate crucial agency functions to the Agriculture Ministry, while he also appointed notable figures in the agribusiness lobby to positions of power within FUNAI.
Brazil’s history is exemplified by a struggle between the reformative and progressive aspects of its political culture, and the forces of regression that wish to keep the status quo in place. In previous years, the military served as an effective reactionary tool, but since the return to democracy in 1988, the Brazilian military has increasingly accepted its role in the background of a civilian-ruled society. Even as Bolsonaro signaled he would fight the results of the election if they were to be against him, and that his only options were “prison, death or victory,” military rulers indicated they would accept the election’s results. However, the biggest challenges to Brazilian democracy have increasingly manifested themselves in the weaponization of public anger to suit a political cause.
In the case of Dilma Rousseff and Lula da Silva, their adversaries in the conservative establishment utilized the economic meltdown of 2016-2017 to silence their center-left opponents with charges of corruption and mismanagement. This indicates that Brazil suffers from a phenomenon similar to that of the old German Republic in the 1920s and 1930s, in that it is a “democracy without democrats'' or harbors political leaders that disrespect the constitution, the rights of voting citizens, and who choose to wield politics to vanquish their enemies rather than work towards the betterment of the nation. However, Brazil is lucky since it does have many democrats, otherwise its transition from dictatorship to democracy could not have succeeded. Much like the 2020 presidential election in the United States, this current election in Brazil fields two candidates who possess fundamentally different backgrounds, values and driving ideals. On the one hand, a union leader who worked to end a dictatorship, and a former military man who worked for an institution that crippled his country’s democracy. One candidate who spent the fruits of his country’s economic success on programs that provided education and food relief to millions, and another who peddled lies during a deadly pandemic. Regardless of corruption charges or the comments one candidate has made, it is also Brazilian history and political development that play a crucial role in determining which candidate is the best for Brazil’s lasting stability as a democratic state.
In the first round of the presidential election held on Oct. 2, Lula da Silva won 48 percent of the vote compared to Bolsonaro’s 43 percent. This result was unexpected since polling data predicted Lula would beat Bolsonaro by a much larger margin, even suggesting the former president would win outright in the first round of the election. The first round result reflected Bolsonaro’s consistently wide appeal among Brazilian conservatives and the growing evangelical community. In the second round four weeks later on Oct. 30, Lula won a slim 51 percent of the vote compared to Bolsonaro’s roughly 49 percent. I was not particularly surprised by this result, since the 2014 presidential election saw a similarly narrow margin of victory for Lula’s ally, Dilma Rousseff. It is nevertheless surprising that a statesman world-renowned for his domestic popularity, won the presidency with a margin of barely two percent. However, much like the United States, polarization and ever-increasing social divides have created a new electoral playbook. Despite the optimism of Lula’s victory among pro-democracy voices, minority groups and working class voters in Brazil, the general election results were relatively mixed. Bolsonaro’s right-wing Liberal Party made large gains in the Brazilian Congress, meaning President-elect Lula must reckon with a more conservative legislature to enact social programs that mirror those of his first two terms. Overall, Bolsonaro’s defeat is a victory for Brazil’s nascent democracy, which still bears the scars of military takeovers and elite political maneuverings that date back more than a century.
Edited by: Nour Taha