PATRIAS

look. In the first week of September, however, this danger was suddenly lifted. Stabbed by a mentally ill man at a provincial rally and rushed to hospital for an emergency operation, he spent the rest of the election safely in bedridden recovery, protected not only from debates or interviews, but from the demolition that Alckmin’s managers had been readying on their TV slots – sympathy for a victim who had nearly lost his life now precluded anything so tasteless.

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The PT, meanwhile, had been wasting months in futile protestations that Lula was still its candidate, without even a symbolic presence in the first debates. It was not until five days after Bolsonaro’s stabbing that the party came to terms with reality and produced a candidate able to run. Its choice was dictated by Lula. Fernando Haddad had for six years been education minister and was widely regarded as a success, responsible for one of the major achievements of PT rule, expansion of the university system, and of access to it for the poor. Young and personable, he could have made a much better, more logical successor in 2010 than Dilma. But he had three strikes against him: he was from São Paulo, where older and more powerful heavyweights of the PT, protective of their precedence, held sway; he came from the left of the party; and by background he was an academic – trained in philosophy and economics, teaching political science – among trade unionists who distrusted professors.

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In 2012 Haddad was instead elected mayor of São Paulo. He soon fell foul of Dilma, who refused to listen to his plea to raise petrol prices rather than inflict higher bus fares on the city, setting off the protests of 2013 that began her undoing and ended his prospects of re-election. He continued to lack any significant base of his own within the PT, whose functionaries distrusted him. As early as 2003, in a prophetic article written as the PT took power, he had warned of the danger that, rather than uprooting the deeply engrained patrimonialism of the Brazilian state, the party could be captured by it. Brazil was not, contrary to the views of Cardoso and others, a setting in which modern capitalism made use of the archaisms of a former slave society but the other way round: an archaic oligarchic system appropriating a modern capitalism to preserve the traditional pattern of power by saturating public authority with its private interests. By 2018, amid the patrimonial shipwreck that had overtaken the PT, Haddad’s foresight and honesty stood out and, knowing he was clean and imaginative, Lula imposed him on the party.

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The ensuing campaign was strangely asymmetric. Starting late, Haddad was cramped by the circumstances of his appointment. With less than a month to go before the first round of the election, he had to establish a national profile of his own, against charges that he was a mere dummy for Lula, while at the same time drawing as effectively as possible on Lula’s continuing popularity and prestige. It rapidly became clear that he and Bolsonaro would face off in the second round, but there was no confrontation between the two. Haddad toured the country, addressing crowds, while Bolsonaro lay at home tweeting. With a fortnight to go till the first round, they were level-pegging in predictions for the second. Then, in the last few days, Bolsonaro suddenly soared ahead, to a closing lead of 46 to 29 per cent. With a gap as large as this, the second round was a foregone conclusion. The Brazilian establishment closed ranks behind the future victor. Haddad fought valiantly on, eventually halving the gap. But the final result left no doubt of the scale of Bolsonaro’s triumph. Winning 55 to 45 per cent, he took every state outside the north-eastern redoubt of the PT; every major city in the country; every social class with the exception of the very worst off, living on incomes of less than two minimum wages; every age group; and both sexes – only among the cohort between 18 and 24 did he fail to win a majority of women’s votes. Across the country, the right jubilated in the streets. But there had been no great rush to the polls. Voting is compulsory in Brazil, but close to a third of the electorate – 42 million voters – opted out, the highest proportion in twenty years. The number of spoiled ballots was 60 per cent higher than in 2014. A few days earlier, an opinion poll asked voters their state of mind: 72 per cent replied ‘despondent’, 74 per cent ‘sad’, 81 per cent ‘insecure’.

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In that last response lay, in all probability, the key to Bolsonaro’s sweep. The recession had certainly been critical in the melting away of support for the PT since 2014, and corruption, which had not mattered to the poor when their living standards were rising, did when they were falling. The two could be directly connected in nightly representations on television of huge sewers swilling with banknotes – in the discourse of Lava Jato, money stolen from hospitals, schools and playgrounds. But underlying popular reactions was insecurity, physical and existential. Notoriously, daily violence – traditional in the feudatory north-east, modern since the arrival of the drug trade in the south-east – takes sixty thousand lives a year, a homicide rate exceeding that of Mexico. Police account for 20 to 25 per cent of these deaths. Fewer than 10 per cent of murders are investigated. Yet prisons are teeming: 720,000 people in jail. Two-fifths of inmates, under provisional arrest, await trials that can take two, three or more years to be heard. Nearly half the country’s population is white; 70 per cent of those murdered, and 70 per cent of those imprisoned, are not. With drugs have come gangs, among the most powerful in the world. In 2006 the largest of these, Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), shut down parts of São Paulo in an uprising, directed from the prison cells of its leaders, against the police. But with the spread of drugs, street crime that is artisanal rather than organisational has proliferated too. Few middle-class households have never had a brush with some form of it. But they are better protected: where mugging at gun or knifepoint are most common, the poor rob the poor.

 

 

***

 

In this jungle, the police are the most ruthless of all predators: no major crime without their take. Divided into separate ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ branches, in a ratio of about three to one, they are state, not federal forces. Alongside them fester informal ‘militias’ composed of former policemen acting as security guards or battening on the drug traffic. The small corps of federal police – a tenth the size of the military police at the disposal of the governors of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro – is reserved largely for border control and white-collar crime. Promotion depends on arrest rates, which are assisted by laws that no longer distinguish between the sale and the consumption of drugs, nor require witnesses for apprehension on the spot, offering a quick route to the criminalisation of poverty, as the young and black – pardo (‘mixed race’) and preto (‘black’) scarcely distinguished – are picked off for dispatch to jails where there are twice as many prisoners as places. Since miscegenation was historically so widespread, making a ‘one-drop’ colour line impossible, racism in Brazil differs from the US pattern, but is no less brutal. Combined with very rapid urbanisation, driven as much by the push of peasants from the land as by the pull of city lights, creating settings of huge inequality with few or no structures of reception, its effect is to displace social conflict into anomic violence. For black youth, crime can be a desperate bid for recognition, a weapon, a passport to dignity: guns, rented for a few hours and pointed at the head of a driver or passer-by becoming too a means of forcing people to look at, rather than away from, those otherwise treated as invisible. Successive presidents, relieved of responsibility for public security, since this remains the province of governors, have had little incentive to change what amounts to a convenient brief for inaction. At most, they can declare an emergency and send in troops to occupy slums, as a temporary exercise in public relations, leaving scant trace.

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For the popular classes, intersecting with and compounding an ambience of everyday violence has been the disintegration of norms of customary, family and sexual life, fanned not just by the diffusion of drugs, but by the media – television, keeping up with North American models, throwing earlier restraints to the winds. Women are the principal victims. Rape is as common as murder in Brazil: more than sixty thousand a year, around 175 a day – the number reported has doubled in the last five years. Amid all this, economic anxieties are the most permanent and intense – insecurity at its most fundamental level, of food and shelter. In such conditions, a desperate desire for order has increasingly been met by Pentecostal religion, its churches offering an ontological framework for making sense of lives on the edge of existence. Their trademark is a theology not of liberation but of ‘prosperity’ as the means of earthly salvation. By hard work, self-discipline, correct behaviour and communal support, believers can better themselves – and pay tithes to the pastoral organisation helping them. Typically, the neo-Protestant churches are also shady financial corporations, which make millionaires of their chief ministers. By 2014 the evangelical flocks in Brazil numbered some eighty million. The Pentecostal enterprises were a power in the land; a fifth of the deputies in Congress thought it to their advantage to declare an affiliation with them. Four years later, however, the conditions of their following had altered. The success of the theology of prosperity had coincided with the boom years of Lula’s presidency, giving credibility to its optimism of material uplift. By 2018, the promise of steady improvement was gone. For many, everything now seemed to be falling apart.

 

Nowhere were these stresses more acute than in Brazil’s second city. Rio, with half the population of São Paulo, has a murder rate more than twice as high. In large part this is due to the unrivalled degree of control across São Paulo – a city built on a plateau – exercised by the dominant paulista gang, the PCC. There it is in a position to discourage petty assaults – which complicate the orderly management of high-value drug traffic – with the heavy weapons at its disposal. Rio’s topography – a narrow, winding strip of coastland segmented by forest-clad mountains jutting through to beaches, favelas crammed in their interstices, often cheek by jowl with wealthy neighbourhoods – hinders such centralised power. There rival gangs wage fierce territorial warfare heedless of bystander casualties, and amid greater levels of poverty a denser arms trade multiplies the random mayhem of individual hold-ups. In early 2018, to stopper the violence, Temer sent in the army – and there it has remained, as in the past, to no lasting effect. In this environment, the PT was never able to take root, still less the PSDB, or any stable partisan configuration. All three of the last governors of the state are in jail or custody for corruption. What did take political hold, with a grip more extensive than in any other big city, were the evangelical churches. Cunha, for long Rio’s dominant politician, was a lay preacher linked to the Assembly of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination. Its current mayor is a bishop of the rival Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and nephew of its capo, Edir Macedo, Brazil’s (much more powerful) answer to the Reverend Moon.

 

Bolsonaro is a product of this petri dish. He was born in 1955 in the small-town interior of São Paulo state, but his career has unfolded entirely in Rio, where at the age of 18, in the time of the dictatorship, he entered a military academy close to the city, training as a parachutist. Rising within ten years to the rank of captain, in 1986 he published an article complaining of low salaries in the army and was arrested for indiscipline. On release he plotted a series of minor explosions at various barracks to press home material discontent in the ranks. Probably because he enjoyed some protection from higher officers in sympathy with his aims, if not his methods, an investigation found the evidence against him – which included maps drawn in his hand – inconclusive. But he was forced to retire aged just 33. Five months later he got himself elected to the city council in Rio. Within another two years, he had vaulted to Congress on the votes of the Vila Militar, an area in the west of the city built for soldiers and their families containing the largest concentration of troops in Latin America, and of the zone around the military academy to the south of the city where he had been a cadet.

 

In Brasília, Bolsonaro was soon calling for a regime of exception and the temporary closure of Congress, and the following year – this was 1994 – declared he would rather ‘survive in a military regime than die in this democracy’. Over the next two decades, his parliamentary career consisted largely of speeches extolling the military dictatorship and the armed forces; calling for the death penalty, a lower age of criminal responsibility, easier access to guns; and attacking leftists, homosexuals and other enemies of society. He was returned six times, his electoral base in the barracks and their precincts holding steady at much the same level – around 100,000 votes – until 2014, when it suddenly quadrupled. The jump, little noticed at the time, was more than a general effect of the economic crisis, though clearly lifted by it. Dislike of the PT – antipetismo – had long been a powerful strain in Brazilian political culture as a middle-class counterpoint to PT ascendancy, intensified as the media (above all Veja, the country’s leading news magazine) whipped up outrage at corruption to boost the PSDB’s campaigns to capture the presidency. But no one could compete with Bolsonaro for virulence on this front. He had, moreover, learned something from the urban uprising of 2013 that the PSDB had not. Then, young activists of a new right in São Paulo – far ahead of their elders or the political class generally – had pioneered the use of social media to mobilise what became vast anti-government demonstrations. They were radical neoliberals, which Bolsonaro was not, and there was little contact between the two. But he could see what they had achieved and set up his own personal operation in Rio in advance of any competitor. By late 2017 he was far ahead of the pack, with seven million followers on Facebook, double the number of the country’s leading newspaper.

 

The success of the image he projected in this medium was a reflection not just of the violence of his pronouncements. The impression of Bolsonaro given by press coverage abroad, of an unremitting feral fanaticism, is misleading. The public personality is more ambiguous than that: crude and violent certainly, but with a boyish, playful side, capable of a popular, on occasion even self-deprecating, good humour, far from the glowering bearing of Trump, with whom he is now often compared. His background was less grindingly poor than Lula’s – his father an unlicensed dentist plying his trade from one small town to another – but plebeian enough by the standards of the Brazilian elite. Though he is now well-off (the owner of five properties), a common touch comes naturally. His charisma travels especially among the young, both popular and more educated.

 

Married three times, Bolsonaro has four sons by his first two wives and one daughter (‘a moment of weakness’, he likes to joke) by his third, Michelle, a volunteer for a spin-off branch of the Assembly of God, whose televangelist leader, the third richest pastor in Brazil (worth reputedly $150 million), married the couple. After he was investigated by the federal police, she left for a ‘Baptist Attitude’ church near their apartment. Though a Catholic by origin, Bolsonaro has made sure of the best evangelical credentials, travelling with a pastor to be baptised in Israel. The family is his political fortress. Unlike the Trump household, the three eldest Bolsonaro sons have all made successful electoral careers: one is now a deputy for the Rio Assembly; another, in São Paulo, the most voted-for deputy in Brazilian history; the third a councillor in Rio. They are often seen as a mixture of brains trust and bodyguard around him, while Michelle is the gatekeeper to the outside world.

 

Though long a somewhat friendless loner in Congress, Bolsonaro understood the need for allies to reach the presidency, and showed he had the skills to acquire them. For his running mate, he chose a five-star general, Hamilton Mourão, who had just retired after becoming too outspoken: he had openly attacked Dilma’s government; declared that if the judiciary failed to restore order in Brazil, the military should intervene to do so; and floated the idea of an ‘auto-coup’ by an acting president, should that be necessary. (In other asides he remarked that the country needed to improve its stock, since Indians were lazy, blacks deceitful and Portuguese spoiled.) Given that Bolsonaro’s primary political base had always been military, the choice of Mourão was logical and well received in the army. But he also needed to reassure business, wary of him not just as a wild card, but as a congressman with a consistently ‘statist’ voting record, an opponent of privatisations and grudging of foreign investment. So, with a smile of engaging candour, he confessed himself ignorant of economics, though capable of learning from those who knew better, and found his mentor in an economist down the road.

 

Paulo Guedes had been trained in Chicago, taught in Chile under Pinochet, and returned to Rio a successful financier. He was not highly regarded by his fellow economists, and never got much of an academic job in Brazil, but he had co-founded the country’s largest private investment bank, BTG Pactual, and made a fortune from it, departing for other ventures well before it was caught up in Lava Jato investigations. A neoliberal pur sang, his chief remedies for Brazil’s economic ills are the privatisation of all state enterprises and assets to pay off the national debt, and deregulation of every transaction in sight. With promises like these – even if some were sceptical they could so easily be kept – capital had little to complain of. Financial markets were squared; security and economy taken care of: that left corruption. On course for victory after the first round of the election, Bolsonaro dispatched Guedes to get Moro on board. He needed little persuasion: within a few days of the second round, Bolsonaro announced that Moro had accepted his invitation to become justice minister in the incoming government. The magistrates of Mani Pulite, intending to clean up the Italian political system, put paid to the ruling parties of the First Republic and were appalled to find they had ushered in Berlusconi. In Brazil the star judge of Lava Jato, after achieving much the same, was happy to join an analogue fouler by any measure.

 

 

***

 

Installed in January, the new regime marks a more radical break with the era of the PT than the managers of Dilma’s ouster, their own parties severely depleted at the polls, ever imagined. Central to its composition is the return of the armed forces to the front of the political stage, thirty years after the end of the military dictatorship. No institutional adjustment was required. In the 1980s, Brazilian democracy was not wrested by popular revolt from the generals, but passed back to parliament by the generals once they considered their mission – eradication of any threat to the social order – accomplished. There was no settlement of accounts with the conspirators and torturers of 1964-85. Not only were they ensured immunity from prosecution or absolved by law from anything they had done, but their overthrow of the Second Republic was given constitutional sanction with the legalisation of their rulers as regular presidents of Brazil and the acceptance of legislation introduced by them as normal juridical continuity with the past. In all cases, the South American tyrannies of the 1960s and 1970s made an amnesty for their crimes a condition of withdrawing to the barracks. In every other country these were partially or completely annulled once democracy was consolidated. Uniquely, not in Brazil. In every other country, within one to five years a Truth Commission was set up to examine the past. In Brazil it took 23 years for one to be approved by the Chamber of Deputies and no action was taken against the perpetrators it named. Indeed, in 2010 the Supreme Court declared the amnesty law nothing less than a ‘foundation of Brazilian democracy’. Eight years later, in a speech commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the constitution enacted after the generals had left, the president of the Supreme Court, Dias Toffoli – former legal errand boy of the PT and arguably the most despicable single figure in today’s political landscape – formally blessed their seizure of power, telling his audience: ‘Today I no longer refer to a coup or a revolution. I refer to the movement of 1964.’

 

The army had its electoral say early on in 2018. In April, the commander-in-chief, Eduardo Villas Bôas, warned against any grant of habeas corpus to Lula, in the name, as he later explained, of the highest value cherished by the armed forces, the stability of the country. With Bolsonaro safely elected, Villas Bôas hailed the new president’s victory as a welcome release of national energy, and in January thanked him for ‘liberation from the ideological shackles sequestering free thought’ in Brazil. To discuss 1964 today was ridiculous, he said, and the Truth Commission a disservice to the country. Questions of public security were also matters of national security. Villas Bôas had taken part in one of the periodic military interventions to restore order in the slums of Rio, and seen how futile civilian incompetence had made them. In that they resembled Brazilian military intervention in Haiti in 2004, which had been much too short, according to Villas Bôas, chaos returning as soon as its troops departed. Not a lesson lost on Bolsonaro, whose key first appointment was General Augusto Heleno, the commander of the Brazilian forces dispatched to Haiti – to his shame, under Lula, to please Washington – to lock down the eviction of Aristide. Heleno was installed as head of ‘institutional security’– a kind of super chief of staff – in the Presidential Palace, where another general, Santos Cruz, also a veteran of Haiti, is in charge of relations with Congress, flanked by two more officers in the ministries of defence, and science and technology. Heleno, the most powerful of the group, has made no secret of his convictions, expressed in the dictum ‘direitos humanos são para humanos direitos’ (‘human rights are for the righteous’) – not for anyone else. His first pronouncement in government was to compare guns with cars as something every citizen has the right to possess.

 

The economic wing of the government, of far greater concern to financial markets, is more friable. Guedes has assembled around him a team mostly of like-minded radical neoliberals, greeted with enthusiasm by business, and able to build on the deregulation Temer had already delivered. Top of the agenda is the dismantling of the existing pension system. Indefensible on any measure of social justice, absorbing a third of tax revenues, over a half of its total payouts – which start at an average age of 55 for men – are taken by the wealthiest fifth of the population (judges, officers and bureaucrats prominent in their ranks), less than 3 per cent by those who are worst-off. Naturally, however, inequity isn’t the driver of standard schemes of pension reform, whose priority in Brazil, as elsewhere, is not to redress it but to slash the cost of pensions in the budget, while other cuts in public spending wait in the pipeline. Privatisations are advertised as the way to pay off the debt. A hundred state holdings of one kind or another – the plums are in infrastructure: motorways, ports, airfields – are scheduled for disposal or closure, naturally also in the name of efficiency and better service, under the direction of a military engineer, another veteran of Haiti. As under Cardoso, many of the richest pickings will no doubt go to foreign investors. The elated reaction of the Financial Times to the economic package in prospect is understandable. Why worry about a few political gaffes? ‘López Obrador Is Bigger Threat to Liberal Democracy than Bolsonaro,’ its Latin American editor decided.

 

The cutting-edge austeritarian overhaul of the economy in view requires, of course, passage through Congress. There, much Brazilian commentary expects resistance, given the dependence of so many members of Congress on the provision of federal funding to their localities, which austerity would undercut. Privatisation, too, is often thought to be so at variance with the statist nationalism of the Brazilian military – as a deputy, Bolsonaro himself vehemently opposed it – that it is likely to be watered down in practice. On both counts, some scepticism is warranted. Under the PT presidencies, the legislature was a fundamental barrier to the will of the executive, limiting what it could do and compromising it in what it did, with notorious results. But this was the predictable product of tensions between a radical party in control of one branch of the constitution and a salmagundi of conservative parties in control of another. Where no comparable tension existed between president and Congress, as under the centre-right administration of Cardoso, the executive was rarely frustrated – privatisations, for example, sailing through. Bolsonaro’s brand of neoliberalism promises to be significantly more drastic but his popular mandate for change is much greater and opposition to it in Congress notably weaker.

 

There his fly-by-night Social Liberal Party (PSL), cobbled together within a few weeks of the elections, will be the largest force in the lower chamber, once it is topped up, as it will be, with desertions from the huge marsh of venal lesser groupings. The once mighty PSDB and PMDB have been reduced to shadows of their former selves, their representation in Congress halved. The debacle of the PSDB and its patriarch has been especially striking. After failing to persuade one vacuous TV presenter to run for the presidency, seeing his party’s candidate get less than 5 per cent of the national vote, and refusing to support Haddad against Bolsonaro in the second round, Cardoso ended up with the PSDB in São Paulo – and no doubt soon nationally – in the hands of João Doria, another TV presenter-cum-entrepreneur, host of a show modelled on Trump’s Apprentice. This reptilian figure ran on a ticket brazenly twinning himself with the presidential winner as ‘Bolsodoria’. Poetic justice. In Congress, the bandwagon is likely to roll just as fast, deputies clambering aboard in greed or fear to give the executive, at least to begin with, the majorities it needs. As for military resistance to privatisation or foreign takeovers, the first of Brazil’s generals to run the country after they seized power in 1964, Castelo Branco, was no enemy of either. His minister of planning, later ambassador in London, was the famously outspoken champion of free markets and foreign capital, Roberto Campos. Bolsonaro has just appointed Campos’s grandson head of the Central Bank. To believe the sale of public assets will drive a wedge between Bolsonaro and his praetorians could prove wishful thinking.

 

A more serious risk to the new regime lies in the unfinished business of Lava Jato. Like the old, the new Congress is packed with recipients of bribes, distributors of backhanders, begetters of ill-gotten fortunes, those who’ve passed lifetimes in assiduous corruption – indeed, it has become a sanctuary for those already in the crosshairs of the police, who got themselves elected deputies simply to gain immunity from prosecution. Prominent among them is Aécio, with multiple charges piling up against him. Nor are Bolsonaro and his family in the clear, investigators having – post-election – not only discovered suspicious transactions in the accounts of his son Flávio, but, still more explosively, links to an ex-captain of the military police in Rio, twice held on charges of militia-style killings, who could be implicated in the murder of Marielle Franco, the black legislator and activist whose death last year caused an international outcry. Can Moro as justice minister now pass a sponge over delicts to which as a magistrate he owed his reputation for mercilessness? Already, he has explained that the Ten Measures against Corruption, that for years he insisted had to be passed if the country was to be cleansed, needed ‘rethinking’: not all of them are any longer so important. Yet to unwind the dynamic of Lava Jato altogether would destroy his standing. Should Congress try to pass a general amnesty for cases of corruption, a move mooted under Temer, the stage would be set for a full-tilt conflict of powers – as it also would if, vice versa, Moro pressed the Supreme Court to lift the immunity of too many deputies. This is the front where the potential for combustion is most real.

 

 

***

 

Holding these diverse segments of the regime together is the circle composed of Bolsonaro himself, his offspring and immediate entourage. Their arrival at the apex of the state marks a significant alteration in the geography of power in Brazil. After President Getúlio Vargas shot himself in the Catete Palace in 1954, Rio – capital of the country for some two hundred years – lost its position as the centre of national politics. The construction of Brasília started in 1956 and was completed by 1960. Thereafter, presidents came from São Paulo (Janio, Cardoso, Lula), Rio Grande do Sul (Jango), Minas (Itamar, Dilma) or the north-east (Sarney, Collor). Demoted politically, Rio declined – at points, some would say, rotted – economically, socially and physically. Neither the PT nor the PSDB ever secured much of a foothold in the city, for long stretches an ideological no man’s land, with little purchase on national politics. This started to change with the rise of Cunha to the helm of Congress, an archetypal Rio – carioca –figure with a pack of monetised deputies at his beck and call. The new regime has consummated the shift. After six decades in which Rio was marginal, power has moved back. All three of the most important positions in the administration are occupied by its products – Bolsonaro in the presidency, Guedes in the Finance Ministry and the rotund fixer Rodrigo Maia in Cunha’s former seat as Speaker of the House. In the cabinet, which for the first time in the history of the republic contains not a single minister from the north or the north-east, all coming from just six out of Brazil’s 26 states, the largest contingent – a quarter – are natives of Rio. It is a signal shift.

 

How then is Bolsonaro to be classified? Often heard on the left in Brazil, and in the liberal press in Europe, is the opinion that his rise represents a contemporary version of fascism. The same, of course, is a standard depiction of Trump in liberal and left circles in America and the North Atlantic at large, if typically assorted with escape clauses – ‘much like’, ‘reminiscent of’, ‘resembling’ – making clear it is little more than lazy invective.[5] The label is no more plausible in Brazil. Fascism was a reaction to the danger of social revolution in a time of economic dislocation or depression. It commanded dedicated cadres, organised mass movements and possessed an articulated ideology. Brazil had its version in the 1930s, the green-shirt Integralistas, who at their height numbered over a million members, with an articulate leader, Plínio Salgado, an extensive press, publishing programme and set of cultural organisations, and who came close to seizing power in 1938, after the failure of a communist insurrection in 1935. Nothing remotely comparable either in terms of a danger to the established order from the left, or of a disciplined mass force on the right, exists in Brazil today. In 1964, there was still a major communist party, with influence inside the armed forces, a militant trade-union movement, and growing unrest in the countryside, under a weak president calling for radical reforms. That was enough to provoke not fascism but a conventional military dictatorship. In 2018, the communist party of old was long gone, combative trade unions were a back number, the poor passive and dispersed, the PT a mildly reforming party, for years on good terms with big business. Breathing fire, Bolsonaro could win an election. But there is scarcely any organisational infrastructure beneath him and no need for any mass repression since there is no mass opposition to crush.

 

Is Bolsonaro better pigeonholed as a populist? The term now suffers such inflation as the all-purpose bugbear of the bien pensant media that its utility has declined. Undoubtedly, his posture as a valiant foe of the establishment, and style as a rough-hewn man of the people, belong to the repertoire of what is generally viewed as populism. Modelling himself on the president of the US, he outdoes Trump in wrapping himself in the national flag, and spewing a Twitter stream – 70 per cent more tweets than the latter in his first week in office. But in the gallery of right-wing populists today, Bolsonaro does not fit the standard bill in at least two respects. Immigration is not an issue in Brazil, where just 600,000 of a population of 204 million are foreign-born – 0.3 per cent, compared with some 14 per cent in the US and UK, or 15 per cent in Germany. Racism, of course, is an issue, to which Bolsonaro like Trump has made covert appeals, and whose violence in the practices of the police he will encourage. But unlike Trump, he won a large black and pardo constituency in the polls, and is not likely to risk this by anything approaching an equivalent of the xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric in the North Atlantic. A third of his party in parliament, indeed, is not white – a higher percentage than in the much vaunted progressive Democratic contingent in the 116th US Congress.

 

A second significant difference lies in the character of Bolsonaro’s nationalism. Brazil is not a country either afflicted or threatened by loss of sovereignty as in the EU or by imperial decline as in the US or UK, the two drivers of right-wing populism in the North. His patriotic chest-beating is more factitious. Today he is no enemy of foreign capital. His nationalism, in expression hyperbolic enough, essentially takes the form of virulent tropes of anti-socialism, anti-feminism and homophobia, excrescences alien to the Brazilian soul. But it has no quarrel with free markets. In local parlance, it offers the paradox of a populismo entreguista, a ‘supine’ populism – one in principle at least, perfectly willing to hand over national assets to global banks and corporations.

 

Comparison with Trump, Bolsonaro’s closest analogue as a politician, indicates a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Though he comes from a much humbler background, Bolsonaro is less illiterate. Education in a military academy saw to that: books are not a complete mystery to him. Aware of certain of his limitations, he lacks Trump’s degree of egomania. Trump’s overweening confidence in himself comes not just from a millionaire family background, but a long career of success in real estate speculation and showbusiness. Bolsonaro, who has never run anything in his life, has no such existential build-up. He is much less secure. Given, like Trump, to every kind of intemperate outburst, unlike Trump, he will quickly back off if reactions become too negative. The first weeks of his administration have been a cacophony of conflicting statements and retractions or denials of them.

 

It is not just in character, but by circumstance, that Bolsonaro is a more brittle figure. Both he and Trump were catapulted to power virtually overnight, against all expectation. Trump took the presidency with a much lower percentage of the vote – 46 per cent – than Bolsonaro’s 55 per cent majority. But his supporters are ideologically fervent and solidly behind him, whereas Bolsonaro’s support may be wider, but is shallower, as post-electoral polls indicating rejection of many of his proposed policies show. Trump, moreover, came to power by taking over one of the two great parties of the country, where Bolsonaro won power effectively on his own, without any institutional support at the polls. Once elected, on the other hand, he will not, because he cannot, rule without taking account of the institutions around him, as Trump has tried to do. This doesn’t mean he will be less brutal, since in Brazil many of these institutions are more authoritarian than in the US. The indigenous peoples of the Amazon are sure victims: unlike blacks a negligible quantity at the polls, as cattle ranchers sweep across their habitat (with long-term consequences that will not be appeased by the dismal gestures of the Global north towards arresting climate change), they will be the first to suffer. So too, it is easy to imagine – especially if the economy fails to pick up and he needs to distract attention from it – Bolsonaro cracking down viciously on student protests; rounding up activists of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) or its urban equivalent, the MTST, and banning their organisations; breaking strikes, where necessary. But jungle apart, such repression is likely to be retail, not wholesale. More, for the minute, would be surplus to requirements.

 

 

***

 

Where will that leave the PT? Far from flourishing, but so far surviving. With 10 per cent of the vote and 11 per cent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, it avoided the rout of the PSDB and PMDB. With Lula in jail, what is likely to become of it? Here qualified opinion divides. For Singer, the central reality of the PT years was, as the titles of his two books make plain, lulismo – the person overshadowing the party. For the best American scholar on contemporary Brazil, David Samuels, it is the other way round: the deeper, more durable phenomenon was petismo – the party rather than the person. Lula, in his view, was not a charismatic leader like Vargas, or his heirs from Rio Grande do Sul, João Goulart or Leonel Brizola, politicians without real roots in a party. Nor, for that matter, unlike these figures, was he a populist. Financially orthodox, respectful of democratic institutions, he neither created a political system around himself, nor gave way to inflammatory Manichaean rhetoric of ‘them’ and ‘us’. In Samuels’s reading, lulismo itself never amounted to more than a ‘thin psychological attachment’, compared to the PT’s organisational strength and solid racination in civil society. Singer was wrong both to exaggerate the importance of Lula and to attribute a generally conservative outlook to the poor, offset by a special investment in him. In 2014, Samuels and his Brazilian colleague Cesar Zucco could write: ‘Peering into our crystal ball, we see the PT as the fulcrum of Brazil’s party system. Without it, governance will be difficult’.[6]

 

Singer’s predictions have worn better. Events have shown that his sense of the mentality of the dispossessed, their fear of disorder and anxious desire for stability, was accurate. In their clairvoyance, many pages from his Os Sentidos do lulismo (2012), noting the precedents of Collor and Jânio Quadros, read like a scenario for Bolsonaro’s triumph in popular zones of Brazil six years later. What has this meant for the relations between the PT and its leader since? On the eve of his imprisonment, an interviewer remarked to Lula: ‘There are those who say that the problem in Brazil is that it never knew a war, a rupture.’ His answer was: ‘I agree. It’s funny the way each time Brazil was on the verge of a rupture, there was an agreement. An agreement reached from above. Those who are above never want to leave.’ The reply is revealing: what it excludes is the possibility that those above might want a rupture – a break from the right, not the left. Yet this is effectively what hit the PT in 2016-18, something with which it has yet to come to terms. In power, so long as the going was good, the PT benefited the poor; but it neither educated nor mobilised them. Its enemies, meanwhile, not only mobilised but educated themselves, up to the latest postmodern standards. The result was a one-sided class war. The huge demonstrations that ended by toppling Dilma were the outcome of a galvanisation of the middle class such as Brazil had never witnessed; enabled by a mastery of social media, transmitted from its youth to Bolsonaro, reflecting a transformation of the country little short of a social revolution. Between 2014 and 2018, despite the recession, the number of smartphones surpassed the number of inhabitants, and their use would put any other political deployment of them, in Europe or America, in the shade.

 

That, of course, was not the only lethal reality the PT failed to recognise. In office, it had rejected mobilisation in favour of co-option; and co-option – of the Brazilian political and business class – meant corruption. That was in the logic of its strategic choice in office. ‘Between consent and force stands corruption,’ Gramsci wrote, ‘which is characteristic of situations when it is hard to exercise the hegemonic function and the use of force is too risky.’ Renouncing hegemony, which required a sustained effort of popular enlightenment and collective organisation, and refusing coercion, towards which it never felt any temptation, the party was left with corruption. To its leaders, anything else seemed too hard or too risky. Corruption was the price of its ‘weak reformism’, in Singer’s phrase, and the real benefits it made possible. But once it was exposed, the party could find no words to name and criticise what it had done. Instead, in an all too revealing – in its way, disastrously accurate – euphemism, the PT explained that it needed to ‘overcome its adaptation to the modus vivendi of traditional Brazilian politics’. Modus vivendi: a way of living together – just so.

 

Resort to euphemisms offers no escape from a past to which the PT remains fettered, in the most painful and paralysing way. Lava Jato is far from finished with its star victim. Lula’s sentence of 12 years for his inspection of a beachfront condominium is just the beginning. A second trial on a similar charge – employing a construction firm that had received governmental contracts while he was in office for improvements to a friend’s rural retreat – is nearing conclusion, with a similar verdict in view. These charges are still, in the sum of things, relatively trivial, though the sentences are not. Coming down the pike, however, are far more serious accusations, not of private dereliction, but malversation of huge sums of public money – hundreds of millions of dollars at the disposal of Petrobras when Lula was president – based on the rewarded testimony of the leading Judas of the party, his one-time right-hand man, the former finance minister Antonio Palocci, at present selling himself as a witness on yet further cases for prosecution. The government will ensure maximum publicity for the mega-trials to come. It needs to finish off Lula.

 

The PT, and its sympathisers, deeply and understandably angered at the lack of commutative justice with which Lula’s personal affairs have been handled, are likely to have to confront evidence, however tainted, potentially far more damaging, in what threatens to be an indefinitely extended process to discredit and confine, for life, the former president. How is the party to react? Lula, who has not been diminished in prison, remains its overwhelmingly most important political asset; yet now one in danger of becoming, for many, almost equally a liability. To do him historical justice seems beyond its powers. The party depends on him for steady leadership, but risks forfeiting credibility if it doesn’t become independent of him. Anchor or albatross? If Lula were fully abstracted from the scene, many think the PT would rapidly split. In such an impasse, militants may well be driven to hope that under Bolsonaro conditions in Brazil worsen so much that few will any longer care about the venial scandals of the past, their traces obliterated in some vaster upheaval to come.

 

For a dozen years, Brazil was the only major country in the world to defy the epoch, to refuse the deepening of the neoliberal regime of capital and relax some of its rigours in favour of the least well-off. Whether the experience had to end as it did is imponderable. The masses were not called to defend what they had gained. Did the centuries of slavery that set the country apart from the rest of Latin America make popular passivity insuperable, the PT’s modus vivendi the best that could be done? At times, Singer has implied something like this. At others, he is more stringent. Brazil, he recently wrote, has failed to achieve the social inclusion of all its citizens that was the task of the generation after the dictatorship. But in its absence, no other projects are viable. In a slightly more optimistic vein, another acute observer, a little to his right, Celso Rocha de Barros, has remarked that lulismo will not be finished in Brazil until something better replaces it. One must hope these judgments hold good. But memories can fade, and elsewhere, social exclusion has proved only too cruelly viable. The left has always been inclined to make predictions of its preferences. It would be an error to count on defeat self-correcting itself with time.

 

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Notes

 

[1] ‘Considerações sobre a operação Mani Pulite’ (Revista CEJ 26, July-September 2004).

[2] Companhia das Letras, 392 pp., £11.50, May 2018, 978 8 535 93115 0.

[3] ‘Na prática, ministros do STF agridem a democracia’ (Ilustríssima, 28 January 2018): much the best portrait of the current court.

[4] Boitempo, 216 pp., £15, March 2018, 978 8 575 59621 0.

[5] For a comprehensive demolition of the label, and the literature surrounding it, see Dylan Riley, ‘What is Trump?’, New Left Review 114, pp. 5-31.

[6] ‘Lulismo, Petismo, and the Future of Brazilian Politics’, Journal of Politics in Latin America 3, where lulismo is contrasted with peronismo. For reiterated dissent from Singer, see their Partisans, Antipartisans, Nonpartisans: Voting Behaviour in Brazil (Cambridge, 196 pp., £75, May 2018, 978 1 108 42888 0).