Luísa
Abbott Galvão / Inequality.org
In less
than a week, Brazil will vote to elect its next president in what’s
widely considered the most consequential election in Brazil’s
history.
On one
side is Fernando Haddad — a soft-spoken academic, former Minister
of Education for the Workers Party (PT), and recent mayor of São
Paulo most remembered for painting bike lanes across Brazil’s
economic capital. Haddad faces Jair Bolsonaro — a former military
man and long-time member of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies
representing Rio de Janeiro. Bolsonaro’s extreme far-right
overtures have earned him the distinction of being compared to Trump,
Duterte, and Hitler.
Brazil’s
democracy is younger than I am, and follows a brutal period of
military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. Tragically, this election
process hasn’t been a rigorous debate of ideas for the improvement
of our country. Instead, it’s testing the very fate of our
democracy.
Bolsonaro,
whose running mate is a retired army general, has built a campaign on
his disdain for democracy and glorification of authoritarianism. He’s
gained infamy worldwide for past comments praising torturers and for
asserting during a 1999 televised appearance that the Brazilian
dictatorship should have executed “at least 30,000” people. As a
presidential candidate, Bolsonaro has called for political opponents
to be shot, promised to deny the legitimacy of any election results
that don’t declare him the winner, and refused to partake in
debates ahead of the general elections.
Bolsonaro
took the lead in the first round of voting with 47 percent of valid
votes. In the ten days that followed, there were over 50 catalogued
incidents of physical attacks and threats carried out by Bolsonaro
supporters in 18 states and the federal district, including the
murder of a Bolsonaro critic by a supporter at a bar in the state of
Bahia.
Given
this backdrop of anti-democratic demagoguery, incitement of violence,
and virulent bigotry, it might feel inappropriate to give Bolsonaro’s
candidacy the benefit of a judgement of merit. However, not only does
the high possibility of a Bolsonaro presidency force us to contend
with the implications of his policy proposals, it requires us to
understand that neoliberalism isn’t only a feature of his candidacy
— it’s the means by which his candidacy has been made viable.
The 1964
dictatorship in Brazil was installed by a military coup aimed at
blocking the administration of a president who was seen at the time
being as too left-wing. The coup was supported by many well-to-do
Brazilians at the time. “And why not?” journalist Vincent Bevins
asked recently in the New York Review of Books. “If you were rich
and stayed in line politically, things were never that bad—this
kind of nostalgia [is] often reproduced in media and historical
memory.”
Recent
surveys have found that 55 percent of Brazilians wouldn’t mind a
non-democratic form of government if it “solved problems.” And
Brazilians have legitimate problems, among which healthcare, citizen
security, corruption, unemployment, and education have ranked as
highly important in recent polls.
Bolsonaro’s
campaign recipe has not only been to promote — through no shortage
of lies and misinformation — shortcuts to democratic and civic
processes. He’s also aligned himself with corporate and financial
interests, attracting support from moderates willing to overlook,
understate, and ultimately masque his fascist nature by leaning into
his recently-adopted free-market agenda.
While
support for Bolsonaro was initially highest among rich white men and
Evangelical Christians, it’s impossible to win the 49 million votes
he received in the first round without support from a larger swathe
of the population. Bolsonaro gained that support because this
election has been driven to a significant degree by what Brazilians
are against rather than by what they are for.
“The
core of Bolsonarism,” a Jacobin article says, “is hatred of the
organized working class, of trade unions, which today…is incarnated
in PT and, above all, in the image of Lula,” Brazil’s former
president, for whom Haddad is filling in as candidate. Lula, who is
in jail on flimsy bribery charges, has not been allowed to run.
But why
so much hatred for PT? The party was recently in power for over 13
years, or three and a half presidential terms, spanning the tenures
of Lula and former President Dilma Rousseff. Lula’s investment in
social programs during a time of booming economic expansion in Brazil
has been credited with lifting 30 million Brazilians out of poverty,
and for giving poor, Black and Brown, female, and otherwise
disadvantaged Brazilians unprecedented opportunity for advancement.
Tensions
grew under Dilma’s tenure over her mismanagement of the economy.
Socioeconomic indicators began to reverse course as Brazil entered
into one the worst recession of the last quarter century. Coupled
with her support for the massive anti-corruption investigation taking
place, which implicated a large proportion of the sitting members of
Congress, political opponents saw her as a problem to resolve
quickly. They conspired to successfully impeach her from office in a
process that’s been described by many as a “soft” coup d’état.
Dilma
was succeeded by a coalition-government member from a center party,
then-Vice President Michel Temer, who has spent the last two years
overseeing the implementation of severe austerity measures and other
reforms that have especially hurt the poor and the previously-growing
middle class.
This
election is marked with widespread and deep resentment for the PT’s
handling of the economy. But the PT is also unreasonably singled out
for its role in corruption. Haddad recently recognized PT’s errors
on the economy and their role in corruption in a public mea culpa,
promising reform if elected.
But the
selective scapegoating of PT when it comes to corruption is unfair
for several reasons. First of all, it was during a PT administration
that the country’s largest corruption investigation in the
country’s history was enabled. The singular focus on the PT is also
incongruent with Brazilians’ perception of corruption generally,
and fails to consider the ubiquity of corruption across political
parties in our government.
Over 83
percent of Brazilians believe that more than half of all politicians
are corrupt. And their perceptions aren’t totally off: more than
half of Brazilian senators and one third of the members of Brazil’s
lower chamber of Congress face criminal accusations. Bolsonaro has
taken advantage of this anti-PT, anti-left, anti-government,
anti-corruption sentiment by touting extra-democratic governance and
adopting a neoliberal agenda.
But
history always offers a well of insights. “It’s really strange
that so many people now believe that the military regime somehow
delivered safety to Brazilians or managed the economy well, since, by
the end of the 1970s, they were very often seen as corrupt and
incompetent, and crime statistics were worsening due to the
government’s own policies,” historian Marcos Napolitano told the
New York Review of Books.
Napolitano’s
research, Bevins writes, “has shown that by encouraging mass
migration into urban slums with no public services, and allowing a
militarized police to routinely use extra-judicial killings to
control marginalized populations, the dictatorship actually set the
country on the path toward its current widespread violence.”
Widespread
violence and public security have been a leading concern for
Brazilians for many years, and a key invocation in Bolsonaro’s
campaign. Brazil, already claiming the position of world leader in
homicides, set a new record by registering nearly 64,000 homicides
over the last year. Most victims were young Black men from poor urban
areas.
“We
have two persistent phenomena: violence against women and criminal
gangs dealing in drugs and arms,” said Renato Sérgio de Lima,
director of the Brazilian Public Security Forum. This violence is
largely linked to poverty and inequality — including the
criminalization of poverty in Brazil. Dealing with it requires a
comprehensive intervention that starts with significant investment in
and economic inclusion of marginalized communities.
Bolsonaro’s
remedy? Ease gun laws for citizens, give policemen carte blanche to
kill, build more prisons, and expand military-controlled schools.
In
contrast to the nationalistic economic tendencies gleaned from his
27-year Congressional voting record, Bolsonaro has chosen Paulo
Guedes, a “Chicago Boy” neoliberal economist, as his main
economic advisor. Guedes’s policy recommendations include
privatizing almost all state-run companies, opening up the Amazon to
foreign development, and further cutting social spending.
Guedes
is currently under investigation for possible securities fraud, but
the irony is clearly lost on Bolsonaro supporters. Bolsonaro’s
economic promises, many of them documented on Instagram, include
across-the-board deregulation, a refusal to tax the wealthy and their
inheritances, a commitment to cutting taxes overall, and a reduction
to Bolsa Família, a successful conditional cash transfer program,
under the guise of fighting fraud in the system.
Bolsonaro
has capitalized on Brazil’s deep economic and social inequality to
push for an agenda that will undoubtedly drive even bigger rifts into
the Brazilian socioeconomic fabric and further disenfranchise the
country’s most vulnerable people. We must fight to defend our
democracy and human rights. But we should not lose sight of the
importance of fighting the corporate and financial powers that are
not only extractive in their own right, but are also being used as
vehicles for authoritarianism.
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