Editorial

Censorship Backfires and the PSDB Braces for Mutiny

An attempt to restrain public demonstrations against President Jair Bolsonaro backfired spectacularly this week. Several Brazilian and foreign performers at the Lollapalooza music festival denounced Bolsonaro from the stage, attacking his political agenda and his authoritarian inclinations. The popular festival was broadcast on television and widely followed on social media around the world. The consistently negative remarks about the president led his party to seek a legal injunction against political declarations at Lollapalooza. They argued that the festival constituted “premature campaigning,” a violation of Brazilian electoral law that tightly regulates when and where political campaigning can occur. A friendly judge agreed, calling the statements from performers “political-electoral propaganda” and placed a fine of BR$50,000 reais on further infractions. The censorship only served to fuel more critiques as performers escalated their attacks on the president. In this way, the president and his allies showed themselves to be hyper sensitive to public criticism and, at the same time, incapable of doing anything to stop it.

Part of the problem for Bolsonaro is that most of those in attendance at the festival were young people, among whom former president Lula enjoys an overwhelming advantage in the polls. Indeed, according to the most recent polling from Datafolha, Lula leads Bolsonaro in every age group, but the greatest discrepancy between them pertains to young voters. The former president has 51% support among those between 16-24 versus 22% for Bolsonaro among the same cohort. Bolsonaro fares much better among older voters, hitting 29% with those over the age of 45. Lula, for his part, is weakest among those over 60, notching 39% support among that segment of the electorate.

Mired in single-digits in most polls, the center-right PSDB experienced a tumultuous Thursday. When the dust settled, São Paulo governor João Doria remained the party’s nominee despite rampant speculation that the youthful governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Eduardo Leite, might make inroads among young voters in favor of a third-way candidacy. Leite made news this week after announcing that he had decided to remain in the PSDB after hinting at a possible departure to seek the presidential nomination elsewhere. Leite lost his party’s primaries to São Paulo governor João Doria last November. Since Doria has not taken off in the polls, however, there has been incessant chatter that he could or should quit the race in favor of a more viable alternative. On Thursday morning, it was reported that Doria had decided to suspend his presidential campaign and remain in the governor’s office until the end of his term. This turned out to be a strategic maneuver by Doria, as he later explained, to force the party to publicly ratify his nomination. The dramatic maneuver helped Doria shore up his position in the short term, but it reportedly annoyed even those close to him in the party.

Doria, who defeated Workers’ Party candidate Fernando Haddad to become mayor of São Paulo in 2016 and promised to complete his four-year term, has made lots of political enemies in his own party and beyond since breaking his promise not to run for governor in 2018. He supported Bolsonaro that year, to the detriment, many felt, of his own party’s presidential nominee, Geraldo Alckmin. For his part, Leite framed his decision to stay in the PSDB as fundamentally about his commitment to the party and its history, but personal ambition is obviously always a factor in such maneuvering. He clearly sees an opening within the PSDB to disrupt the landscape of the election that has remained relatively stable for months. Despite public proclamations that Doria will be the PSDB candidate in the 2022 election, there will almost certainly be trouble ahead for his campaign.

Highlights

• YOUTH VOTE: During the Youth Voter Week, promoted by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) of Brazil, 96,425 people under the age of 18 registered to vote throughout Brazil and abroad. In total, 52,561 women registered, while 43,864 men did the same. Several civil society organizations have spearheaded campaigns to mobilize young people to vote in the upcoming elections.

• GENDER VIOLENCE IN POLITICS: The Superior Electoral Court has established a Women's Ombudsman, a permanent channel for registering complaints and combating cases of harassment, discrimination, and abuse against female candidates.

• CHANGES IN THE CABINET: The composition of Bolsonaro’s cabinet will change on April 2. Brazilian electoral law requires that candidates occupying government posts resign to run for office in the October elections. Bolsonaro took the opportunity to further increase his influence over the Armed Forces, appointing current Army Commander Paulo Sérgio Nogueira as his new Minister of Defense, since the incumbent, Walter Braga Netto, will resign to join Bolsonaro's ticket as vice president.

• FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION: In a ruling based on a complaint filed by the Liberal Party (PL) of President Jair Bolsonaro, a member of the Superior Electoral Court prohibited political demonstrations by artists who performed at the Lollapalooza festival. The decision was widely criticized by the legal community and proved to be politically disastrous. The president of the court was against the decision. Faced with the negative repercussions, Bolsonaro retreated, and his party withdrew the complaint. This case is an example of the political tensions that will likely increase this year because of the elections.

• REMOVAL OF THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION: A corruption scandal erupted this week due to the leaking of speeches by the former Minister of Education Milton Ribeiro, revealing he distributed resources primarily to municipalities appointed by two evangelical pastors at the behest of President Jair Bolsonaro. Mayors and municipal administrators also claimed that they were asked to pay bribes in gold bullion to get resources for educational programs. Several political parties, civil society organizations, and the press demanded that the Attorney General's Office (PGR) and other powers open an investigation. As a result, Bolsonaro asked Ribeiro to resign from his office as a way of making it more difficult for any investigation to reach the president.

• WITHDRAWAL: Sérgio Moro quit the presidential race on Thursday. The former Lava Jato judge who also served as Bolsonaro's Justice Minister announced he was leaving his party Podemos to join the much larger União Brasil for a congressional seat in São Paulo state instead.

Feature Article

The Military and the Threat to Democracy in Brazil

by Sidney Chalhoub

There are deep historical reasons not to underestimate the threat that the administration of Jair Bolsonaro poses to Brazilian democracy. The Bolsonarista coup-mongering agenda, with the support of the armed forces, is coherent from a historical perspective. Perhaps the only novelty lies in the fact that the concept of “armed forces” now also includes broad sectors of the states’ military police and the urban militias.

Brazilian politics has not always operated under the barrel of a gun. Independence-era politicians, marked by the memory of the Napoleonic wars and distrustful of the authoritarian tendencies of Dom Pedro I, thought that powerful professional armies were a dangerous resource in the hands of absolutist monarchs and potential tyrants. During much of the nineteenth century, Brazil faced international conflicts and internal rebellions with an army made up of recruits captured by lasso, “free” men barred from the right to citizenship due to poverty itself (the 1824 Constitution established a minimum income for exercising political rights). The situation changed after the Paraguayan War (1864-70) when the army showed itself to be utterly unprepared for prolonged combat in an immense area in the interior of the country. In 1868, Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, the head of the war effort best remembered as the Duke of Caxias, felt that the cabinet of progressive liberals was not supportive enough of the troops. He pushed for the cabinet’s dismissal and the rise of the conservatives, a harbinger of more than a century of military interventionism in Brazilian politics. In the years that followed, the army became professionalized and politicized, inspired by pseudo-scientific ideas and increasingly convinced of the need of its own political action in a country racked by monarchic crisis and divided by enduring elite resistance to the abolition of slavery.

From then on, the military, courted by civilian sectors, became a constant source of political instability through a succession of coups, coup attempts, dictatorships, and threats. The armed forces sometimes served as an armed support to those who sought power undemocratically. A military coup overthrew the monarchy in November 1889, followed by years of dictatorship and civil wars. In these days of pandemic and government irresponsibility regarding the vaccination of the population, we sometimes remember that there was a revolt against smallpox vaccination in Rio de Janeiro in 1904, but we forget that amid the political turmoil of those days there was an attempted military coup against President Rodrigues Alves. An incomplete account of this period reveals several instances of military interventionism, including the tenente (lieutenants') uprisings of the 1920s, the rise of Getúlio Vargas to power in 1930 (despite having been defeated in the presidential election), the military support for the Estado Novo (1937-45). The “manifesto of the colonels” against Vargas, who had been democratically elected in 1950, was an important event leading to his suicide in August, 1954. In 1955, there was an attempted coup to prevent the inauguration of Juscelino Kubitchek. Six years later, having been essentially vetoed by the military, João Goulart only managed to assume the presidency after the resignation of Jânio Quadros when he agreed to accept a parliamentary system intended to limit his powers. On April 1, 1964, João Goulart was deposed, the country plunged into more than two decades of civil-military dictatorship.

History is heavy, and we carry it on our shoulders, whether we like it or not. Democracy does not have a deep hold among Brazilian elites. We have experienced one sole authentically democratic period in our republican history, lasting from the 1988 Constitution to the 2016 parliamentary coup against President Dilma Rousseff. The military were in their barracks and did not seem interested in political life—as the Constitution dictates and as the generation of Independence-era politicians wanted—, nor did there seem to be any relevant political groups willing to compromise democracy. The 2016 impeachment crisis disorganized the country's institutions, revealing their fragility when there is no solid tradition of respect for democratic rules. Bolsonaro's bet on an armed coup is a real danger. Failing to take this threat seriously, failing to strengthen institutions to face it, failing to alert the international community to the gravity of the situation, could well be fatal.

Sidney Chalhoub is David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also affiliated with the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

Feature articles express the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or WBO.