Name: Brazil Is About To Show The World How A Modern Democracy Collapses
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Brazil Is About To Show The World How A Modern Democracy Collapses

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×U.S. EditionPart of HuffPost World News. ©2022 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved.×AdvertisementMilitares brasileros desfilan por las calles de Río festejando el triunfo de Bolsonaro y la gente los vitorea. Qué pesadilla. — Diego Iglesias (@IglesiasDiego)AdvertisementAdvertisementIt was still too early for an afternoon beer when I passed the first vendor doling out ice-cold cervejas along São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista on a Brazilian summer day in late November.AdvertisementPaulista, which splits one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, was closed thanks to a mid-week holiday, storefronts advertised Black Friday sales, and a giant Christmas tree outside one of the shopping malls gave away the approaching holiday season. Locals and tourists alike perused pop-up tents selling handcrafted wooden bowls and art, and loudspeakers blared a pop soundtrack for the people who’d come to do yoga in the street.Aside from the occasional bit of political graffiti sprayed onto a lamp post or the sidewalk, there were barely any signs that throughout 2018, Brazilians had repeatedly swarmed Avenida Paulista to demonstrate in favor of and against Bolsonaro.It was here, in July, that people in São Paulo joined the largest women-led protest in Brazilian history, as women and LGBTQ people who feared Bolsonaro’s history of racist, sexist and homophobic statements urged Brazilians to vote for anyone else. “Ele Nāo,” they yelled ― “Not Him.”It was also here that Bolsonaro’s supporters gathered in mid-October for a rally meant to push him over the majority threshold he had fallen just short of in the first round of voting. At that demonstration, Bolsonaro, who had been stabbed on the campaign trail in September, told the crowd via a cell phone that, as president, he would target funding for the media and human rights groups. He vowed to give his opponent ― former São Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad, of the leftist Workers’ Party ― and prominent leftist activists two options: “Leave, or go to jail.”But by the end of November? “Everything feels normal,” a friend told me, “until you watch the news.”AdvertisementLike Trump, Bolsonaro is a creature of the rot in his country’s democratic institutions that had set in years before he’d entered the picture, or that had been there all along.Power in Brazil has always remained concentrated largely among a white and wealthy elite; literacy and education rates are still low, especially among the poor; an over-militarized and under-trained police force has continued to kill large numbers of poor (and mostly black) citizens; and the return to democracy was marked by more than a decade of economic instability and hyperinflation that perpetuated vast social, racial and income inequality. Still, Brazil has spent much of the last several decades fashioning itself into a shining example of what a democratic Latin America could one day look like. Former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso stabilized the economy in the early 2000s, then leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a working-class firebrand, presided over a period of rapid growth that had Brazil’s economy on pace to surpass those of France and the United Kingdom.On da Silva’s watch, expanded social welfare programs helped some 30 million Brazilians rise out of poverty, and broader affirmative action policies increased educational, health and employment access for black Brazilians, women, the poor and the indigenous. Violent crime fell to its lowest levels in decades. When da Silva left office in 2010, his approval ratings neared 90 percent. Brazil, it seemed, was finally working.Or was it? In 2010, Tiririca, a Brazilian clown, announced a run for a congressional seat in São Paulo and launched a campaign meant to parody the Brazilian political system. “Pior do que está não fica, vote no Tiririca,” he said: “It can’t get any worse, vote Tiririca.” He playfully satirized the corruption endemic in Brazilian politics, promising that he would “enrich every Brazilian family ― especially mine.”AdvertisementThen he won, and that victory, in retrospect, might have been a sign of a lurking discontent that Bolsonaro would soon exploit.Brazil was already one of the world’s most unequal countries in terms of income distribution, and while the poor unquestionably benefited from the Workers’ Party’s policies ― including a hike in the minimum wage ― achieved under da Silva went to the richest 1 percent of Brazil’s population. So even as a new lower-middle class earned more than it ever had, Brazil’s obscene levels of income inequality . Violent crime had been reduced, but not to levels befitting a developed democracy: Even before the economic collapse, Brazil was home to of the planet’s 50 most violent cities. Things got worse: The economy collapsed in 2013, plunging millions out of work and millions more back into poverty. In 2014, a money-laundering investigation turned into the world’s broadest political corruption investigation. Known as Operation Car Wash, or “Lava Jato” in Portuguese, it has implicated hundreds of Brazilian politicians, including da Silva and outgoing President Michel Temer, of the centrist Democratic Movement Party. Violent crime has surged ― there were more than 60,000 homicides in each of the last two years. President Dilma Rousseff, da Silva’s hand-picked successor, was impeached in 2016. Da Silva was in 2017 and imprisoned this year; Temer has on bribery charges.Compared with their counterparts across Latin America, Brazilians have always shown a low level of support for democracy. That support has eroded even further amid the crises: In 2017, agreed when Latinobarómetro, which conducts polls across the region, asked if they agreed that “democracy may have problems but is the best system of government.” No other Latin American nation showed less support for democracy, while other surveys found that nearly two-thirds of Brazilians had lost faith in political parties, the presidency and Congress. said they would support a more authoritarian style of government if it “solved problems.”Advertisement“If you ask people on the street if they’re worried about what Bolsonaro may mean for democracy, it’s not like people are particularly concerned,” said Oliver Stuenkel, a political scientist at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo.“Democracy,” he said, “hasn’t delivered what many of us have expected.”“Even if he were a racist, I would still vote for him.”- Marcelo Amador Pereira, São Paulo residentThe PT, as the Workers’ Party is known by its initials in Portuguese, has received much of the blame for the backlash that fueled Bolsonaro’s rise. A great deal of this criticism is legitimate: Da Silva and the Workers’ Party had risen to power on something resembling revolutionary hope ― a belief “that it could use the established order in Brazil to benefit the poor, without harm – indeed with help – to the rich,” as the British essayist Perry Anderson .By the time Rousseff was impeached in 2016, to the delight of millions of mostly middle-class and wealthy Brazilians who had marched in the streets demanding her ouster, the party had embraced a brand of economic austerity and engaged in the sort of corruption that .In addition to its usual base of elites, the counter-revolution in Brazil could now count on winning at least some support from the PT’s natural constituency. Bolsonaro drew support from across the political and social spectrum, even from poor and black voters whom some of his most repressive policy goals will surely target. Polls ahead of the election showed that Bolsonaro led Haddad and women ― and that he also earned a share of the vote from LGBTQ Brazilians ― despite his racism, sexism and homophobia.Advertisement“Even if he were a racist, I would still vote for him,” Marcelo Amador Pereira, a black man who lives in São Paulo and lost his job during the Rousseff administration, told HuffPost Brazil before the election. “Because he is running against the PT, and I will not accept any part in what the PT did to Brazil.”Healthy democracy relies on mutual support for a basic set of rules, but in the aftermath of the 2014 presidential election, Brazil’s center-right establishment began to disregard the old consensus. The center-right Social Democratic Party, or PSDB, of Rousseff’s narrow re-election that fall, giving oxygen to fringe social media conspiracy theories that the Workers’ Party president had benefited from election fraud. Two years later, the centrist parties launched an effort to impeach her that looked less like an effort to hold Rousseff accountable than a chance for Brazil’s establishment the sort of power it couldn’t win at the ballot box — and protect itself from judicial and public scrutiny in the process. For others on the right, including Bolsonaro, it was merely an opportunity to rid Brazil of a leftist government that they claimed had on “God, family and the Brazilian people.” AdvertisementAdvertisement“Throughout the last two years, Brazilian political observers and journalists assured me not just that Bolsonaro wouldn’t win, but that he couldn’t. When they didn’t ignore him outright, they treated him as a sideshow.”Cynicism, corruption and the pursuit of unpopular economic policies under Temer had left a vacuum on the right, and along came Bolsonaro to fill the void.AdvertisementThat Bolsonaro had adopted an anti-corruption posture merely as a campaign tactic ― much like Trump’s promise to “Drain the Swamp” ― was evident even before he took office. Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, is already facing questions about potential corruption, and despite pledging that his government ministries would not include anyone convicted of corruption, Bolsonaro has appointed at least seven people who have been or currently are involved in such scandals, . They include his chief of staff and his finance minister, Paulo Guedes ― the University of Chicago–educated economist and free marketeer whose close ties to Bolsonaro during the campaign gave Brazil’s business elite to cozy up to the supposed “populist.”As with Trump, Bolsonaro’s attack on corruption went beyond hypocrisy. It was a Herrenvolk appeal — spoils for the dominant class, banishment or marginalization for everyone else — and the tubthumping about corruption fit into larger themes about the contamination of Brazilian identity by the country’s underclasses. AdvertisementAdvertisement“Bolsonaro has modeled his ascent to power on the rise of Trump, whose own victory was built on years of democratic erosion.”Advertisement“Even in the best-case scenario, Bolsonaro’s Brazil will become even less democratic for the people who already suffer the vast majority of violence and oppression.”Advertisement“It sounds like McCarthyism,” Alexandre Padilha, a high-ranking member of the Workers’ Party who served in da Silva’s government, told me. “He hates everything that is left in Brazil, and thinks they should be eliminated, basically.”To the right, these fears and the rhetoric that has inspired them are a source of humor. The day before the inauguration, Carlos Bolsonaro ― a Rio councilman and another of the new president’s sons ― posted a video on Twitter of his father celebrating police killings and calling his opponents “pussies.”“The left is crying,” he said, mockingly.A esquerdalha chora! 😂😂😂 — Carlos Bolsonaro (@CarlosBolsonaro)In the U.S., Trump’s continued attacks have had negative effects on how Americans view their elections, the press and other democratic institutions, and his rhetoric has emboldened racists and white nationalists and potentially contributed to rises in violent crime against racial, ethnic and religious minorities. AdvertisementLGBTQ Brazilians, who are already subject to high rates of violence, are also fearful that Bolsonaro’s aggressive opposition to their rights will give his supporters license to level even more attacks against them. And Bolsonaro’s rhetoric on policing and public security has only emboldened some of the hard-line officers within Brazil’s police forces, according to locals.In São Paulo, a young black writer who lives in a favela on the city’s outskirts told me that he had been stopped by police five times in the first three weeks after the election, usually as he was returning to the neighborhood on the way home from work. In Rio, videos circulated last month of two men lying in the street, shot to death, before the police officers who killed them threw their bodies into the back of a pickup truck. Brazil’s police already ― in Rio, they were responsible for 1 in every 5 homicides across the state. Bolsonaro will likely make police forces even more deadly.On this, he will have allies both in and out of politics. Brazilians overwhelmingly support aggressive stances on policing, and amid the violent crime epidemic, more politicians have adopted hard-line stances. Wilson Witzel, the incoming governor of Rio de Janeiro, has said the state will “” for the bodies of alleged criminals police kill. Newly elected São Paulo Gov. João Doria, a politician who aligned himself with Bolsonaro during the campaign, has adopted similar rhetoric when it comes to protecting police accused of killing.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementHuffPost Brazil’s Diego Iraheta contributed reporting.This piece has been updated to include the military’s assertion that members of the armed forces were not “parading” through the streets of Rio after Bolsonaro’s election.Suggest a correction

×U.S. EditionPart of HuffPost World News. ©2022 BuzzFeed, Inc. All rights reserved.×AdvertisementMilitares brasileros desfilan por las calles de Río festejando el triunfo de Bolsonaro y la gente los vitorea. Qué pesadilla. — Diego Iglesias (@IglesiasDiego)AdvertisementAdvertisementIt was still too early for an afternoon beer when I passed the first vendor doling out ice-cold cervejas along São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista on a Brazilian summer day in late November.AdvertisementPaulista, which splits one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, was closed thanks to a mid-week holiday, storefronts...

Brazil Is About To Show The World How A Modern Democracy Collapses

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