Blowtorching Freirean Thought Out of Bolsonaro’s Brazil: Alagoas’s Escola Livre Law

Punctuated-Equilibrium Theory

Therefore, this article draws on Baumgartner and Jones’s (1991; 2009; see also 2002; Jones and Baumgartner, 2005; Baumgartmer, Jones, and Mortensen, 2014; and Goertz, 2003) punctuated-equilibrium model of policy change, according to which a single process can explain both periods of extreme stability and short bursts of rapid change: the interaction between “beliefs and values concerning a particular policy,” which they call “policy image,” and “the existing set of political institutions,” which they refer to as “institutional venues” (1991: 1044–1045).

The point of departure of Baumgartner and Jones’s (2009: xxiii) theory is the assumption that policy-making processes are shaped by bounded rationality. Because “political systems, like people, can focus intensely only on a limited number of public policies,” policy making ends up taking place in policy subsystems, each of which favors specific actors who are uniquely positioned to create and maintain policy monopolies. Although policy monopolies tend to be conducive to path dependencies, stability, and ultimately incremental change, “there remain other institutional venues that can serve as avenues of appeal for the disaffected” (Baumgartner and Jones, 1991: 1044)—avenues through which emerging agendas challenge prevailing ones, punctuations are initiated, and monopolies collapse. Doing so is not a simple undertaking, however, and requires a dual strategy: “On the one hand, [political actors] try to control the prevailing image of the policy problem through the use of rhetoric, symbols and policy analysis. On the other hand, they try to alter the roster of participants who are involved in the issue by seeking out the most favorable venue for the consideration of their issues” (1991: 1045).

Policy Images

Public policies can be associated with multiple images, which do change over time. At times a constituency or interest group’s understanding of a policy issue is rooted in ideology or some other intangible goal, and at others it is informed by evidence and experience. Significantly, Baumgartner and Jones (2009: 7) distinguish between “positive” and “negative” policy images, the former being a precondition for the creation of monopolies. In fact, they go so far as to suggest that monopolies require images “so positive that they evoke only support or indifference by those not involved (thereby insuring their continued noninvolvement).” The creation of policy images may be influenced by a range of factors. One such factor is a given policy’s level of complexity, especially the way in which such complexity is communicated. When discussed in terms of scientific minutiae, for example, policy-making processes are likely to be dominated by experts; conversely, discussions centered on “ethical, social, or political implications” are likely to include a larger roster of participants (1991: 1047). Closely related is whether one emphasizes the “empirical” component of a policy or its “evaluative” component, also referred to as its “tone” (2009: 26).

Policy Venues

Policy venues are “the institutional locations where authoritative decisions are made concerning a given issue” (Baumgartner and Jones, 2009: 32). Simple though it is, the definition comes with important caveats that call for consideration. First, it is assumed that, rules and regulations notwithstanding, one cannot determine with certainty which policy venue should enjoy policy-making authority over a specific policy issue (and such authority may in fact be shared among several policy venues). Second, Baumgartner and Jones have a rather broad understanding of the term “institution,” which here extends far beyond formal, “hard” organizations such as legislatures or political parties: a policy issue “may be assigned to an agency of the federal government, to private market mechanisms, to state or local authorities, to the family, or to any of a number of institutions” (1991: 1047). Combined, these factors are referred to as “the venue problem.”

Positive Feedbacks and Punctuations

Drawing on the scholarship of Schattschneider (1960), Cobb and Elder (1972), and others, Baumgartner and Jones (2009: 36) approach the key interaction between policy image and policy venue through the concept of conflict expansion. The thrust of their argument is that political actors who find themselves unable to win certain political battles “have the incentive to look for allies elsewhere.” Pluralistic societies offer a wide range of policy venues, each of which is made up of a specific set of actors with its own agendas and strategies. Some of them, the argument goes, may be reasonably expected to see a given policy issue in a more favorable light than key actors involved in the original debate surrounding it, thereby allowing participants “to change their losing position into the winning one, as more and more people become involved in the debate on their side” (1991: 1047). ⁶ Such a change in venue thus both creates and requires a change in the prevailing image surrounding a policy issue, and the interplay between new image and new venue generates the positive feedback that allows for sudden and drastic reversals, regardless of the strength of previously established policy monopolies (2009: 37):

With each change in venue comes an increased attention to a new image, leading to further changes in venue, as more and more groups within the political system become aware of the question. Thus a slight change in either can build on itself, amplifying over time and leading eventually to important changes in policy outcomes. The interactions of image and venue may produce a self-reinforcing system characterized by positive feedback.

Here it must be stressed that the somewhat misleading term “positive” is not to be construed as the quality of possessing inherently good attributes and characteristics. By “positive feedbacks” the authors mean processes that enhance a given change or effect and by “negative feedbacks” processes that reduce that change or effect.

From Theory to Application

Since the redemocratization of the 1980s, the image associated with education policy in Brazil (and, by extension, with teachers) had been a fundamentally positive one. In 1988 the country adopted a constitution whose language, doubtless influenced by Freirean thought, explicitly prevents the educational enterprise from being exclusively grounded in economic achievement (Article 205): “Education, which is the right of all and duty of the State and of the family, shall be promoted and fostered with the cooperation of society, with a view to the full development of the person, his preparation for the exercise of citizenship [emphasis added], and his qualification for work.” Insofar as freedom to teach is concerned, for nearly three decades education policy underwent a stasis that not even the dramatic political changes ushered in by the electoral cycles of 1994 and 2002 could disrupt. Throughout this period, Brazil would flirt with populism, fully embrace the neoliberal experiment, and then strongly repudiate the latter in favor of a leftist agenda, but freedoms in general and freedom to teach in particular remained at all times insulated from ideological contagion. Public and technocratic understandings of the issue seemed to coincide, and strong monopolies at the Ministry of Education and state legislatures were formed as a result. The educational subsystem, remarkably, remained subject to a negative feedback process that kept the few pressures that emerged at bay, despite the inherent susceptibility to manipulation of education policy’s image. ⁷

The subsystem would be governed by negative feedbacks until the interaction of three phenomena—the return of the right in Latin America, the rise of the evangelicals, and the advent of the School Without Party movement—that fundamentally changed the way many Brazilians perceived the educational endeavor, especially the use of pedagogical approaches premised on critical inquiry. Teachers had come to be seen as a detriment to students, and the conditions were in place for a takeover of education policy. Nevertheless, as Baumgartner and Jones (2009: 27) point out, such conditions “do not automatically generate policy actions,” for “arguments must be made and accepted that a given problem can be solved by government action.” In Alagoas, those arguments would be provided by state deputy Ricardo Nezinho, the Escola Livre law’s author. Nezinho’s conflict expansion strategy centered on the fertile ground for policy change provided by the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, which offered a countrywide audience for the debate on freedom to teach. This audience proved open to policies predicated on political neutrality, skills development, and parental rights. More than that, it proved inflexibly resolved on change in classroom practice.

The new venue provided by Rousseff’s impeachment both facilitated and solidified the new rhetoric on education. As attention to the issue increased, so did the number of new groups driving the debate. “Indoctrination” became a flagship issue for Bolsonaro, who had already announced his desire to run and whose meteoric ascent to the national stage can only be matched by the sudden downfall of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT). The political pendulum had swung to the opposite extreme, and criticism of leftist ideas had become so virulent that no coalition could be formed to defeat Nezinho’s bill. The interaction between a new, unopposed image and a new venue that encompassed virtually the entirety of the electorate thus ignited a positive feedback process that culminated in the enactment of the Escola Livre law.

The Return of the Right in Latin America

The first phenomenon that contributed to a change in the way education policy is discussed in Brazil is what can be loosely called “the return of the right” in Latin America, a process that is relevant to the extent that it fundamentally challenges the notion of education as an empowering, liberating human right. After decades of dictatorship, 1998 marked a watershed year in Latin American politics with the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. The victory of Chávez, however, was only the beginning of a trend that would shortly take over the region, including Brazil (Salvador Peralta and Pezzuto Pacheco, 2014). The “Pink Tide,” as the movement has become known, was, however, short-lived. The 2000s commodities boom, which had allowed leftist administrations to implement wildly popular and successful antipoverty programs—the population living in poverty in the region fell from 45 to 25 percent between 2000 and 2014 (Levy, 2016)—has come to an end, and the reduced demand for Latin American goods has pushed leaders in the region such as Brazil’s President Rousseff to turn to crippling austerity measures.

This has created a scenario of economic turmoil and general discontent that has proved open to the solutions offered by right-wing groups. ⁸ A common feature of those agendas is a heavy reliance on skills as a panacea for increasing employment and economic growth and, ultimately, reducing inequalities. Accordingly, much of Brazil’s attention has turned to issues such as the country’s educational apparatus, curriculum reform, and pedagogical practices. Because the right-wing alternative is one that changes education from a tool for social and cultural change to a tool for labor productivity improvement, ESP-inspired bills emerged as one of the leading political responses to Brazil’s economic challenges despite their lack of economy-related provisions. In a sense, this approach to the educational experience became the tacit economic component of the Escola Livre law, a piece of legislation that, at first glance, seems to be primarily a product of social conservatism. By emphasizing the importance of skills development and job placement, the right-wing agenda filled a gap in the program, which was limited to outlining what teachers are not allowed to do in the classroom.

Nothing encapsulates the articulation and mutual reinforcement between the social character of ESP-inspired bills such as the Escola Livre law and the economic focus of the new right-wing regimes better than Bolsonaro’s historic stance on education reform. His Government Plan, for example, provides that “teaching must be changed, both in content and method. More mathematics, science, and Portuguese, NO INDOCTRINATION AND EARLY SEXUALIZATION. In addition, initial priority must be given to basic, secondary, and technical education” (Bolsonaro, 2018: slide 41). Interestingly, not only does Bolsonaro consistently allude to the opposition between skills-based educational systems and indoctrination-based educational systems (as the only possibilities of a binary system) but also he tends to equate the promotion of critical thinking with indoctrination: “Go and ask a 15-year-old Chinese, Japanese, Israeli boy; he knows how to balance chemical equations, he can recite Isaac Newton’s physics book by heart, he already knows derivatives and integrals. Our boys only have critical thinking; to know whether they are becoming men or women, that is their lives’ big decision” (Bolsonaro, quoted in Bresciani, 2018). Therefore, whereas ESP-inspired bills focused on what teachers should not be doing, the revived right-wing movement strengthened their message by saying what teachers should be doing instead: teaching skills and skills only.

The Rise of the Evangelicals

The second major phenomenon that contributed to a change in the way education policy is perceived can be described as a shift among Christians that pushed the country farther to the right on the political spectrum. This shift is relevant to the extent that it contributed to the increase in the proportion of the population that is likely to support bills predicated on parental rights and prerogatives. Brazil has the world’s largest Catholic population, 123.3 million. This fact in itself should indicate that the country is, at least in principle, open to and supportive of bills that speak of “parents’ right to have their minor children receive a moral education free of political, religious, or ideological indoctrination” (Article 1 of the Escola Livre law). Recent demographic shifts, however, have refocused interest and debate on key social issues, and, as a result, Brazil is quickly becoming an even more conservative society.

Between 2000 and 2010, whereas the number of Brazilians who identified as Catholic dropped from 125 million (73.6 percent of the population) to 123.3 million (64.6 percent), the number of evangelicals soared from 26.2 million (15.4 percent) to 42.3 million (22.2 percent). For an idea of how unprecedented the 9-point decrease in the Catholic population is it is sufficient to recall that it took virtually a century, from the country’s first census in 1872 to the 1970 survey, for the proportion of that population to shrink 7.9 points (from 99.7 to 91.8 percent). Evangelicals, in turn, amounted to a mere 5.2 percent of the Brazilian population in 1970 (IBGE, 2012).

In Brazil, Catholics and evangelicals practice their faith in markedly different ways. For example, the percentage of evangelicals who say they pray daily, attend services weekly, and consider religion very important in their lives far exceeds that of Catholics (60 percent vs. 23 percent). The same applies to the proportion of evangelicals who say they pray at least once a day outside of religious services (78 percent vs. 59 percent) and those who say they read or listen to Scripture at least weekly outside of religious services (62 percent vs. 17 percent). Remarkably, 83 percent of evangelicals, compared with 67 percent of Catholics, believe that the Bible is the word of God and should be taken literally (Pew Research Center, 2014: 19, 44, 48, 54). Evangelicals also are distinguished in that they seem to be particularly motivated to pursue an active and involved religious life. Whereas only 13 percent of Catholic churchgoers are members of church councils, lead small groups or ministries, or teach Sunday school, 36 percent of evangelicals show that level of involvement with congregational life (Pew Research Center, 2014: 47). Similar patterns of commitment hold true with respect to their political attitudes and behavior, and, unsurprisingly, evangelicals have become one of the most powerful caucuses in Congress, with 84 deputies and 7 senators (Damé, 2018).

Oddly, they have found in President Bolsonaro the fiercest champion of their social agenda. Bolsonaro, who is Catholic (since the 1980s, when he first ran for City Council, his campaign motto has been “Brazil above everything, God above everyone”), has always shown a shrewd understanding of the importance and potential of a growing evangelical community in Brazilian politics. In 2013, for example, his wedding with Michele Firmo, who has an evangelical background, was performed by Pastor Silas Malafaia, the leader of the evangelical Pentecostal church Assembly of God Victory in Christ and one of the most influential conservative religious leaders in the country. In May 2016, at the exact same time that the Senate was voting to hold the Dilma Rousseff impeachment trial, Bolsonaro was in Israel leaning back into the River Jordan in a white robe to be baptized in the arms of Pastor Everaldo, the president of the Evangelical Social Christian Party, who had himself run for president in 2014 (Extra, 2016).

Few issues have been more strategically targeted by the alliance than those of homosexuality and gender identity, with attacks insidiously cloaked in discourses based on more palatable jargons of “moral conduct” and “sexual morals.” The spread of evangelical morality, Bolsonaro quickly learned, resulted in higher levels of intolerance toward the gay community. For example, an astounding 83 percent of Evangelicals believe that homosexual behavior is morally wrong (compared with 57 percent of Catholics), and only 25 percent of that population favor same-sex marriage (Pew Research Center, 2014: 21, 75).

This partly explains the convoluted nature of Bolsonaro’s pronouncements and Government Plan with respect to education reform in general and ESP-inspired bills in particular. Although some of the ideas he tries to convey, such as the connection between mathematics education and job placement, are self-explanatory, elaborating on notions such as “indoctrination” is a much harder task. By reducing dialogical experiences in the classroom to the sexual indoctrination of children, however, not only does he add some concreteness to the core component of those bills but he does so by exploiting one of the notions evangelicals hold most dear: the “traditional family.” Since he announced his candidacy in 2014, he has capitalized on the connection between indoctrination and early sexualization, and so have the authors of the first ESP-inspired bills. By 2015, the discourse had gained such a broad base of support that the new bills, in essence, equated “indoctrination” with “sexual indoctrination.” One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon is the opening paragraph of the Escola Livre law’s legal justification:

It is a notorious fact that teachers and textbook authors have been using their classes and works in order to try to obtain the adherence of students and certain political and ideological currents; and to have them adopt judgment and moral conduct patterns—especially sexual morals—incompatible with those taught to them by their parents or legal guardians.

Powerful though they may have been, a general inclination toward a renewed emphasis on productivity improvement and demographic shifts within the Christian population were not enough to allow for a successful manipulation of the image of education policy in general and the issue of teachers’ duties in particular. Here enters the ESP, a nationwide movement that for over a decade had been gathering support, followers, and attention and educating policy makers about the promotion of parental rights.

The Escola Sem Partido Movement

The third contributing factor to the creation of a new image of educational services and the catalyst for action against freedom to teach in tangible and practical steps is the advent of the ESP. Rooted in the belief that “an organized army of militants acting as teachers” takes advantage of “classroom secrecy” to impose its worldviews upon students (Nagib, n.d.), the ESP has two main fronts. The first, which has inspired the Escola Livre law and a plethora of similar bills across the country, consists of efforts to promote laws against the perceived abuse of freedom to teach at the federal, state, and local levels. The second, equally important in that it provides an indispensable support for these bills, consists of the construction of an ever-growing informal association of parents and students confronting the “insurmountable refusal” of educators and entrepreneurs in the education sector “to admit the very existence of the problem” of indoctrination (Nagib, n.d.). Miguel Nagib, who launched the movement, has clearly drawn inspiration from the U.S. experience in developing the movement’s overall strategy. For example, he cites the now-defunct NoIndoctrination.org in the United States, self-described as “an organization of parents who are disturbed that sociopolitical agendas have been allowed to permeate college courses and orientation programs” (Wright, n.d.), as the experience to be emulated (Nagib, n.d.). That initiative, in a nutshell, logged accounts of alleged bias in the classroom. The logic is that, by “giving voice to the voiceless,” it informs the public about “the frequent lack of balance” in the classroom (NoIndoctrination.org, n.d.).

In the early years of the ESP, most of its high-profile cases revolved around perceived abuses by leftist administrations and were political in nature. One of them involved the 2009 National Assessment of Student Achievement exam for students of communication. Administered during former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s second term, the exam became the subject of severe criticism for allegedly forcing students to take a positive stance toward him. For example, one item (INEP, 2009: 13) was:

When President Luiz Inácio da Silva said that the global financial crisis was a tsunami abroad but, in Brazil, it would be a ripple, several media outlets criticized the presidential statement. Now it is the international press that remembers and confirms Lula’s prediction. Considering the current reality of the economy, abroad and in Brazil, it is correct to say that critics have shown: (a) biased attitude; (b) irresponsibility; (c) free exercise of criticism; (d) media political manipulation; or (e) prejudice.

The notion that leftist administrations have sought to produce hegemony through apparatuses such as the Ministry of Education has been popularized by Olavo de Carvalho, a philosopher who, by all accounts, is the most influential conservative thinker in the country. De Carvalho (1997: 288) posits that in the wake of the 1964 military coup d’état that ushered in two decades of dictatorship in Brazil, leftist forces split into two major blocks: one that organized traditional Marxist guerrilla groups and was ultimately defeated by the regime and another that “took refuge in the cultural and academic ghetto, and there imposed a hegemony similar to that exercised by the right in the territory surrounding it.” The success of the latter group, his argument goes, is attributable to a textbook application of Antonio Gramsci’s neo-Marxist theory of cultural hegemony, at the heart of which lies the concept of the “organic intellectual.” In contrast to guerrillas, who often attempt to change traditional power structures through violence, organic intellectuals pursue the elimination of opposing forces through the occupation of key cultural and educational apparatuses and the gradual creation of broad consensus. During the dictatorship years, de Carvalho (2013: 262) argues, this process was facilitated by the fact that the military government was so obsessed with fighting guerrillas that it ignored the peaceful, “apparently harmless” advances made by educators and school administrators focusing on legitimation.

De Carvalho, thus, provides the construct under which the alleged instances of bias and indoctrination disseminated by Nagib’s ESP are subsumed. Interestingly, however, even though de Carvalho seems to be in full agreement with Nagib with respect to the origins of what they believe to be a structural problem plaguing the Brazilian educational system, the two could not be farther apart with respect to the appropriate response to it. A vehement critic of ESP-inspired bills, de Carvalho (2018) released a video titled “Warning to School Without Party” arguing that this was a battle to be fought in the intellectual arena, not the legal one (which would require extensive, quantitative documentation of the detrimental effects of leftist thought in schools and universities). In addition, he warned that any eventual victories of Nagib’s strategy would have been achieved by force, not persuasion, and would as a result generate nothing but hate and resentment toward conservatism.

Even though the two biggest names associated with the ESP do not necessarily speak in unison, the fact of the matter is that the narrative of systematic indoctrination connected with a hegemony project that goes back to the dictatorship years had become so deeply embedded in education policy discourse in Brazil that no state or local ESP-inspired bill could possibly be discussed in light of its own merits. Accordingly, the Escola Livre law debate never got down to the specifics of alleged instances of bias and indoctrination in Alagoas. In practice, it became just another thread of a broader, nationwide discussion around a monolithic image of education carefully crafted by the ESP within a context of economic upheaval and demographic change.

The Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff

We must now turn to the question of how the Escola Livre law’s author, Ricardo Nezinho, who was and remains relatively obscure on the Brazilian political scene, managed to steer a debate that would have otherwise been limited to the Alagoas Legislative Assembly into a novel, immense institutional arena that proved exceedingly receptive to his image of education policy: the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. ⁹

Hailing from Arapiraca, Alagoas’s second-largest municipality, Nezinho is a seasoned politician. After serving four consecutive terms as a city council member in Arapiraca (elections of 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004), he was elected state deputy in the cycles of 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018. In the legislature he has held highly prestigious positions throughout the years, including the chairs of both the Constitution and Justice Committee and the Budget Committee. He is affiliated with the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (Brazilian Democratic Movement—MDB).

The Escola Livre law’s tone has clearly been a primary concern of Nezinho’s and a point of departure for his strategy of conflict expansion. As evidenced by the bill’s justification, by relying on provisions such as Articles 5, VI (“freedom of conscience and of belief”), and 206, II (“freedom to learn”), of the Federal Constitution and Article 53 of the Child and Adolescent Statute (“right to be respected by educators”) and Article 12 of the American Convention on Human Rights (“parents . . . have the right to provide for the religious and moral education of their children . . . that is in accord with their own convictions”), he aimed at introducing the law as a protective statute, not a restrictive one.

Significantly, although inspired by ESP templates, the Escola Livre law is lighter in tone, as evidenced by the treatment given to the issue of sexuality. Whereas the templates provided for in the movement’s website dedicate a specific article to the issue (“The Administration will neither interfere in the process of sexual maturation of students nor allow any form of dogmatism or proselytism in the approach to gender issues”), Nezinho did not include any such provision in the bill (although, as we have seen earlier, the subject figured prominently in the opening paragraph of the bill’s justification).

While Nezinho and the ESP were on slightly divergent courses on the sexuality front, the same cannot be said about the wording, length, and clarity of the bill, which were subject to a rather unusual treatment as Brazilian law-making processes go. Similarly to most if not all of its ESP counterparts, it was short and focused on principles, refraining from governing every single possible scenario as is customary in the country (Nezinho, quoted in Imprensa RNZ, 2016):

I reaffirm with conviction that the intention is not to “gag” anyone. I would never do anything that would harm such an important class. My wife is a teacher, I have relatives and friends who are also, and I am fully aware of what I did. I suggest that you have the curiosity to read the project, which is short, has only two pages, to understand that it is not rocket science.

Nezinho thus managed to craft a short, straightforward bill that deliberately omitted any reference to skills development, sexuality, or any of the hot-button issues that usually swirl around ESP-inspired legislation but one that would nonetheless carry the movement’s imprimatur. Its ultimate success, however, would be determined neither by form nor content but by timing.

Baumgartner and Jones (2009: 32) maintain that “how an issue gets assigned to a particular arena of policymaking is just as much a puzzle as how an issue comes to be associated with one set of images rather than another.” To unravel the parts of the Escola Livre law puzzle, one needs to reconstruct the timeline of Rousseff’s impeachment, a seemingly unrelated crisis in the ambit of the federal executive branch that would itself become the arena in which many a debate would take place, including the one on education. Such a focus is of great importance, since the success of his strategy of conflict expansion is less a product of bargaining, compromise, and coalition building ¹⁰ than one of shrewd reading of shifts in public opinion and masterful use of windows of opportunity.

Rousseff’s impeachment, the second in the country within a quarter-century period, was tightly linked to two major corruption scandals. The first, called the Mensalão (Big Monthly Stipend), took the country by storm in 2005 and consisted of monthly payments to members of political parties in exchange for support of the PT minority government. The vote-for-cash scandal ultimately resulted in the arrest, in 2012, of José Dirceu, Lula’s chief of staff, and José Genoíno, president of the PT, among others. The second, labeled the Petrolão (Big Oily), consisted of the diversion of Petrobras (the state-owned oil company) funds to the PT and its allies. In sum, it has been found that the Petrolão financed the Mensalão. Having been unveiled in 2014, the scandal has consumed billions of dollars and decisively contributed to the retraction of Brazil’s GDP by 3.8 percent in 2015 and 3.6 percent in 2016.

By the end of the first quarter of 2015, Rousseff, who had been narrowly reelected in the previous October, already found herself in hot water when protesters started what would become a year-long cycle of uninterrupted demonstrations. The first major such demonstration, which gathered nearly 2 million protesters nationwide, took place on March 15, sending shock waves through the political community. The furor was such that Bolsonaro, a mere month later, announced that he would be leaving the Progessistas to pursue his “presidency dream” under a different banner (Passarinho, 2015).

Nezinho had big dreams himself. Although a formal announcement of his intention to join the 2016 Arapiraca mayoral race would be put on hold for over a year, his campaign, for all intents and purposes, began in March when he was designated MDB party leader in the Legislative Assembly. A considerably more momentous step came shortly after with the filing of the Escola Livre bill on June 16, which established him as a champion of parents’ rights and would later become the centerpiece of his campaign.

During that period, opposition to anyone or anything that could possibly be PT-related offered the clearest path to power. After more than 10 excruciating years of continuous corruption-related revelations, the PT image had gradually become extremely toxic in most of the country. For an idea of how intense the sentiment had become, consider that, by April 2016, 72 PT mayors in 16 states had broken with the party to run for reelection under other parties’ banners (Roxo, 2016). ¹¹

However, the effects of Rousseff’s impeachment go far beyond reputational damage to the PT, its leaders, and its candidates. Even though Brazil’s infamous electoral system features more than 30 political parties, the PT is, in effect, the primary representative of liberal and progressive thought in the country. Having secured a minimum of 30 percent of the valid vote in every single presidential election since 1998, the party had established itself as the hegemonic force on the left. Because its agenda had become synonymous with the left’s agenda, as rejection rates for PT candidates increased so did the repudiation of liberal and progressive ideals. In this context, opposition to ESP-inspired bills was construed not as an attempt to preserve dialogue, openness, and tolerance in the classroom but as support for a criminal organization that had driven the country to financial ruin.

By the time the Escola Livre law was proposed, Rousseff’s approval rating had sunk to a dismal 10 percent and her impeachment was a foregone conclusion. Nezinho, who understood that, at that juncture of Brazilian history, just as important as the ideas one stood for were the ideas one stood against, pounced on it. The Escola Livre law had made clear that he was against pedagogical approaches premised on critical inquiry and, by extension, the PT, Rousseff, and Freirean thought. The inference is no exaggeration.

Ever since the birth of the storied friendship between Lula and Freire, which regrettably must be bypassed here, petistas (as PT members and supporters are called) have seen themselves as upholders of Freirean thought, both in symbol and in substance. In 2012, for example, Rousseff signed into law the declaration of Freire as “Patron of Brazilian Education” (Law 12,612 of April 13, 2012). In the following year, her administration launched the so-called National Policy of Popular Education in Health (Ordinance 2,761 of November 19, 2013). Expressly governed by the principles of “dialogue,” “kindness,” “problematization,” “shared construction of knowledge,” “emancipation,” and “commitment to the construction of the popular democratic project,” the policy was arguably one of the purest applications of Freirean theory in the real world of policy. Significantly, kindness (amorosidade) is there defined as “the expansion of dialogue in care relationships and educational action through the incorporation of emotional exchanges and sensitivity, allowing for dialogue that goes beyond knowledge and logically organized arguments.”

The Escola Livre law was therefore ipso facto the opposite of the PT’s educational platform—in a context in which a big enough chunk of the electorate wanted to extirpate the party root and branch. Surely and not slowly, protests turned into political action and the drama reached a climax on October 21, when the opposition filed impeachment proceedings against Rousseff. If ever there was a perfect moment for change, this was surely it. Within less than a month the bill would be put up for a vote and unanimously passed (on November 17).

Remarkably, the research has not identified any major pronouncements (let alone signs of organized action) against the bill during the June-to-November window; those would be made only in the wake of the vote. Still, they were few and far between and came from stakeholders as involved with and affected by the new policy as Alagoas’s Teachers’ Union, which in January 2016 characterized it as a “disservice to the state” and urged Governor Renan Filho to veto it (Sindicato dos Professores de Alagoas, 2016). These were, naturally, expected developments but ones that would not hinder Nezinho’s strategy. Time was on his side, and, if anything, the bill’s chances would improve, and substantially. On January 25 Renan Filho, who is also affiliated with the MDB, heeded the Union’s calls and vetoed the bill. By then, however, the Chamber of Deputies had already initiated impeachment proceedings, and the impeachment evolved from a broad public discussion to a formal process before the two congressional houses.

The governor’s veto would not be reviewed immediately. The PT’s downfall, which has already been explained by argument and events, continued into the next three months until the now historic session of April 16, 2016, when the Chamber of Deputies voted to approve the impeachment of Rousseff. ¹² Two days later, with the PT at its lowest ebb of legitimacy, Nezinho finally announced his candidacy for mayor of Arapiraca, at the center of which lay his commitment to political neutrality. ¹³ In the following week the veto was put to a vote and overridden, clearing the path for the bill’s passage on May 9.