Understanding the Crisis of Democracy in Brazil

Scholars, activists, and politicians are still debating the meaning of the June 2013 mobilization in Brazil that began as a series of small street protests in São Paulo against a 20-cent increase in bus fares and exploded into national demonstrations without a clear agenda and with a social composition that ranged from the far left to the reactionary right. The initiators of the São Paulo protests had some of their origins in the World Social Forum gatherings in Porto Alegre and sought to encourage democratic, horizontally structured organizing that emphasized a decentralized decision-making process and relied on social media for communication and mobilization. In many ways, the demands that they made sought to expand the promises of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) government coalition led by former labor leader and president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010) and his successor Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016), who had been a guerrilla fighter in her youth but had later become active in the Partido Democrático Trabalhista (Democratic Labor Party—PDT) and then the PT. Scattered throughout the marches were signs calling for better transportation, health, and education, as well as a questioning of government spending priorities of building stadiums for the 2014 World Cup soccer championship matches instead of investing those resources in solving the country’s outstanding infrastructural or social deficiencies.

At the same time, other forces joined the mobilizations in their second week that were unfamiliar to those who had been active in Brazilian social movements over past decades. These seemingly novice protesters objected to the participation of left-wing party banners and flags in the marches and denounced the corruption of Brazilian politics as a whole with a focus on the PT. Some even called for the return of the military to power. As the demonstrations grew nationally and took on an antigovernment tone, the mainstream media, which by and large defend a conservative political, social, and economic agenda, suddenly switched their coverage from criticism of the protests to informing the public where the next demonstrations were to be held. Something strange was taking place.

The June 2013 protests dissipated over the next month, but a clear polarization had developed in the country that was reflected in the 2014 elections. As in the previous presidential races, the electorate split sharply between a PT-led coalition of the left under the leadership of Rousseff, who had served as Lula’s minister of mines and energy and then as his chief of staff, and a center-right bloc headed by the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (Party of Brazilian Social Democracy —PSDB). However, in contrast to the last three PT presidential victories, this was one with only a 3 percent margin, although Rousseff received 54 million votes.

The following year the disgruntled losers in the presidential race began calling for her impeachment. For the first time since the military came to power in 1964, hundreds of thousands mobilized in the streets with a right-wing agenda. In 2016 Rousseff was ousted from power by an insurgent Congress that had shifted to the right and had charged her with creative bookkeeping of the annual federal budget, although no corruption allegations were lodged against her. It was a feeble pretext, but Rousseff had lost majority backing in Congress, in part because of her unwillingness to engage in bargaining with sectors of the right and her own anticorruption efforts against members of her electoral coalition. The new government quickly embraced a right-wing neoliberal political agenda. At the same time a massive federal investigation into corruption, money laundering, and influence peddling, leveled mostly against the PT and its allies and based on plea-bargaining agreements, led to the sentencing of Lula to 12 years in prison even while he headed polling for the October 2018 presidential race with a 30 percent favorability rate

What has happened in Brazil since the generals orchestrated a slow-motion exit from power in the late 1970s and early 1980s, pushed by labor and social movements and encouraged by politicians seeking a moderate transition to democracy? Why did the moderate social democratic program of the PT fail to maintain a strong enough base of support to remain in power? What has foiled the PT’s efforts to address some of the historical demands of labor and social movements and elevate the living standard of the poorest of the poor? Why is Brazil currently in crisis?

The three books under review directly and indirectly address these dilemmas in contemporary Brazilian politics. Emir Sader’s edited collection of articles about the Lula and Dilma governments, published during the year of the June mobilizations, is a registry of the accomplishments of the PT in power written largely by participants in the left-wing government or by intellectuals who have supported its goals. In this regard the volume is an important compendium of evaluations by politicians and academics actively involved in shaping and appraising the policies of Lula and Dilma in power. The subtitle, however, immediately raises an important theoretical question. What exactly is a post-neoliberal government? What kind of agenda does it pursue? Is it possible to implement a radical social democratic program in the context of a globalized capitalist economy? Put more succinctly, can a government that does not challenge the underlying logic of early-twenty-first-century capitalism offer a successful set of social reforms and programs for the poor and marginalized without running into direct confrontation with the traditional economic and political elites that have controlled the country for centuries?

Lula summarizes the PT’s strategy in an interview in which he posits that his goals were to carry out “the necessary, the possible, and the impossible.” The collection outlines the pragmatic reforms and government policies of the PT ranging from forging a new foreign policy, which relied on more alliances with the Global South while elbowing Brazil’s way into the power centers of the Global North, to innovations in science and technology. In this regard the volume is an important source book for the socioeconomic changes that were achieved during the first 10 years of the PT in power. The charts and statistics point to a significant drop in unemployment and a rise in the minimum wage as infant mortality declined and literacy increased, among many positive social indicators.

Few could have predicted in 2013, when this book was written, that Dilma would be impeached three years later and Lula prohibited from running for the presidency in 2018. Coming out when the PT’s popularity was at its height, it is an optimistic look back at a decade of social change. Yet, the book considers the successes of the PT governments without foreseeing that the “impossible” that Lula strived for would receive so much push-back from conservative sectors of Brazilian society.

Although the downturn in the world economy in 2008 and the subsequent drop in export demands slowed down Brazilian growth, it is hard to argue that the Lula-Dilma program was a direct challenge to capitalism or was intended to be so. Lula was an expert in negotiating with entrepreneurs, and the construction and oil boom enabled many businesses to line their pockets, as corruption investigations of major Brazilian companies have shown. Why, then, the effort to impeach Rousseff and jail Lula in order to prevent him from becoming Brazil’s next president? What is it about the PT’s agenda that was so threatening to the conservative order, keeping in mind that the country did not face nationalizations, widespread land takeovers in recent years, or a radicalization of social movements? Why such social polarization if a revolutionary situation was not at hand?

Implicit in almost every article in the collection on Lula and Dilma is the argument that the social changes, as moderate as many of them might have been, confronted the socioeconomic status quo in ways that left sectors of the elites and the middle classes profoundly unsettled with the PT-led governments. This line of reasoning has almost become a standard trope of the left in arguing that the underlying causes for discontent with the PT were that Afro-Brazilians had achieved new opportunities through affirmative action programs and that airports heretofore reserved for the upper and middle classes had turned into bus stations, among other similar phenomena. While these assertions remain anecdotal, socioeconomic changes and/or the perception that they were taking place, as documented in this volume, were undoubtedly factors in the broad rejection of the left by discontented sectors of the well-to-do. Just as angry white Trump supporters, whether working- or middle-class, feel that they have been left behind by affirmative action, an influx of immigrants, and the social changes that have taken place since the 1960s, many within the Brazilian middle classes consider that their social status has eroded as their maids have become educated and acquired new labor rights and traditional socioeconomic barriers seem to be becoming more and more porous. While Lula’s life trajectory from shoeshine boy to president has been an inspirational symbol for many to imagine expanded possibilities for their own children’s future, he also represented a dangerous inversion of the social order.

Many scholars point to the slump in the Brazilian economy, as a belated aftermath of the 2008 worldwide economic crisis, as one of the main reasons large sectors of the population withdrew their support from Rousseff and the PT and favored her impeachment. Schneider’s collection of essays on development and its relationship to democracy, written after the June mobilizations and prior to the impeachment of Rousseff, attempts to understand the recent economic successes, their long-term implications for Brazil, and whether the downturn and its aftermath will have a lasting effect on democracy in Brazil. Schneider’s intention is to gather together articles that offer a longer-term rather than conjunctural examination of the Brazilian political economy and place it in a more comparative perspective. With some exceptions, the contributors remain optimistic about the consolidation of Brazilian democracy.

Of particular note in the collection is Marcus André Melo’s analysis of the reasons for the June 2013 mobilizations—poor public services, increasing taxes, and news of corruption. Melo argues that the expansion of inclusionary policies combined with the decline in export commodities put a strain on the social democratic programs that had been significantly expanded under the PT government. He warns of an increase in inequality in the immediate future. While not directly in dialogue, F. Daniel Hidalgo and Renato Lima-de-Oliveira’s examination of mass participation in Brazilian legislative elections from the end of World War II until 2014 shows that it has expanded considerably, especially since 2002, but incumbent politicians still have a significant electoral advantage. They postulate that negative sentiments against the political system might be due to the sense that citizens are being poorly represented by politicians who have a reelection protective shield that is built into the system.

Another significant contribution to this volume is the examination of state-run enterprises such as Petrobras, the state-owned oil company. Sarah M. Brooks and Marcus J. Kurtz argue that natural resource abundance is not always a curse. They show how the state’s active investment in research and exploration has paid off with large oil field finds, although they are quick to note that it has not protected the company from corruption schemes usually associated with oil-rich African countries. Similarly, Aldo Musacchio and Sérgio G. Lazzarini examine the role of state banks in economic development, noting that despite the recent scandals “state capitalism will likely remain a defining feature of the Brazilian economy in the foreseeable future” (130).

Finally, Marta Arretche and Timothy J. Power in separate articles look at recent efforts to reduce inequality in Brazil, noting a significant decline in recent decades. Arretche considers the effects of the centralized state on local social programs and initiatives and argues that the relative ability to pass and implement legislation on a national level without requiring a supermajority prevents regional interests from blocking legislative initiatives. Power looks at the causes and consequences of the reduction of poverty and inequality, pointing out that significant changes took place only after 2003, during the Lula government, largely because of labor policies that increased the minimum wage over the rate of inflation and, less important, cash transfer programs such as Bolsa Família. Those gains have slipped in recent years.

Kingstone and Power’s edited collection takes on the tensions in Brazil on the eve of the presidential election and is a follow-up anthology to their volumes Democratic Brazil: Actors, Institutions, and Processes (2000) and Democratic Brazil Revisited (2008). Drawing from an array of Brazil, European, and U.S. scholars, the volume argues that the mobilization of Brazilian citizenship during the process of democratization, the years in which the PT was in the opposition, and its years in power created a greater sense among citizens of accountability with regard to corruption and misgovernance. The PT-led administrations strengthened the institutions that permitted the Brazilian state to monitor malfeasance. As the editors point out, in spite of the political instability of recent years none of the contributors argue that Brazilian democracy is being challenged. However, what is suggested in the text and made evident in preelection polls is that the crisis of the PT is part and parcel of a generalized crisis in the political leadership of the country. With Lula sidelined as a political actor, the traditional center-right, whether it is the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (Brazilian Democratic Movement—MDB) or the PSDB, has not managed to fill the vacuum, which in an alarming way has been occupied by the far, semifascist right in the form of Rio de Janeiro Congressman and former Colonel Jair Bolsonaro, who surprised most observers by winning the October 2018 presidential elections.

As the volume argues, Brazil is currently deeply divided, and in that regard the country is in line with trends in other parts of Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Will the institutions of democracy sustain themselves with a weakened traditional right, a muted left, and an insurgent right-wing populism that has traction among varied sectors of the population? As does Sader’s collection, this volume offers us some answers about the successes of the PT and the resulting backlash by examining efforts to combat corruption, environmental policies, the effectiveness of the Bolsa Família program, the Truth Commission, and recent economic policies. The editors remain optimistic about the stability of democracy, the strength of its institutions, and the ability of the country to overcome its economic crisis. Only time will tell if they are correct in their assessment.