Fev 03 2023 | Nº. 52

Editorial

The end of the Jair Bolsonaro administration presented an opportunity for the United States, governed by a Democratic president that Bolsonaro was loathe to recognize, to rekindle its traditionally friendly relationship with the largest country in Latin America. During the campaign, prominent members of the Biden administration insisted that Bolsonaro adhere to democratic norms. Biden himself was quick to recognize Lula’s victory. Both leaders face similar problems. Like Lula, Biden is contending with a violently anti-democratic strain in the opposition to his government. Both men have made a defense of democracy central to their political appeal. 

This was an especially important week for U.S.-Brazil relations. On Tuesday, January 31, the Biden administration confirmed that Lula will be visiting the White House on Friday, February 10. “During their meeting at the White House,” read the official statement by White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, “the two Presidents will discuss the United States’ unwavering support of Brazil’s democracy and how the two countries can continue to work together to promote inclusion and democratic values in the region and around the world, particularly in the lead-up to the March 2023 Summit for Democracy.” Other issues of mutual concern are also on the agenda: “The Presidents will also discuss how the United States and Brazil can continue to work together to address common challenges, including combatting climate change, safeguarding food security, encouraging economic development, strengthening peace and security, and managing regional migration.”

While Lula and Biden look to deepen collaborative ties, Bolsonaro has extended his stay in Florida. The former president has reportedly sought a tourist visa to remain in the United States. It is not entirely clear why Bolsonaro is delaying his return to Brazil. His wife, for example, is already back in Brasilia. There is potential legal jeopardy on the horizon for the president, with new allegations that he sought means to annul last year’s election emerging from a right-wing senator on Thursday, February, but so far the Brazilian government has not requested his extradition. If nothing else, the former president seems unconcerned with the trials facing Brazilian democracy as so many of his supporters and allies continue to deny the legitimacy of the Lula government. 

Highlights

• SWEARING IN AND RESIGNING. The 513 congressional representatives and 81 senators elected or re-elected in the October 2022 elections took office on Wednesday, February 1. One of them, Senator Marcos do Val, from the right-wing party Podemos, presented his resignation the following day. He said he was “coerced” by former president Jair Bolsonaro to “carry out a coup d’état together with him.” The Federal Police will summon the senator to clarify his statement. His testimony has the potential of linking Bolsonaro more clearly to the failed January 8 coup attempt.

• TIGHT VOTE. The seating of the new Congress was followed by the election of the presidents of the lower house (Chamber of Deputies) and the Senate. Rodrigo Pacheco, with the backing of the Workers’ Party and other left and centrist parties, was re-elected to preside over the Senate, defeating his opponent by only 17 votes. He received the support of 49 of 81 senators. His rival, Rogério Marinho, favored by Bolsonaro, garnered 32 votes. Seen as an important victory in order for President Lula to carry out his legislative agenda, Pacheco will lead the Senate for the next two years.

• HUGE TALLY. In the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira was re-elected with record support, receiving the votes of 464 congressional representatives from twenty different political parties. It was the largest vote obtained by a candidate for the presidency of the lower body in the last fifty years. Like Pacheco, Lira will also command the chamber for a two-year term.

• IMPORTANT ROLE. The speakers of the House and Senate largely decide which issues will be voted on in the Brazilian congress. They dictate the pace of voting and the priority of each matter of interest to the government and the opposition. The two also play an important role in receiving and forwarding impeachment requests – an extreme resource that has been used twice in the last thirty years in Brazil, against Fernando Collor in 1992 and against Dilma Rousseff in 2016.

• RELATIONSHIP WITH LULA. Pacheco belongs to the PSD (Social Democratic Party), which claims to be center-right. Lira is a member of the PP (Progressive Party) that has roots in Arena, the former political party of defenders of the dictatorship (1964-1985). The two were, until last year, the basis of congressional support for President Jair Bolsonaro. With Lula’s election, they switched sides. The PSD and the PP make up what is called in Brazil the “Centrão” (the Big Center), a conglomerate of political parties that hold few clear-cut ideological positions or principles but rather are interested in obtaining key positions in Congress and bargaining for access to power in order to distribute public funds for projects in their electoral strongholds.

• DEFENDING DEMOCRACY. Upon taking office, Pacheco and Lira made speeches in defense of democracy. Reactions to the failed coup attempt on January 8 became a factor that brought Pacheco, Lira and Lula together. Since then, the three have acted in a coordinated manner to repel the most radical sectors of the extreme right. Lula knows that his government has little in common with these two circumstantial allies, in terms of ideological positions. But, he backed both to minimize the chances that Bolsonaro’s supporters might control one or both of the houses in the Brazilian Congress.

• BOLSONARO IN THE US. On Tuesday, January 31, Bolsonaro held his first public event since leaving Brazil on December 30. In a lecture organized by a group of supporters known as Yes Brazil USA, that took place in Orlando, Florida, he said that Lula "will not last long" in government. Although his lawyers have asked for a tourist visa so that the former president can stay longer in the United States, a B-2 visa would not allow him to carry out any renumerated activities.

Feature Article

Does the Brazilian Far-right Have a Future without Bolsonaro?

Political scientists have given us sage advice: electoral defeats do not necessarily mean political defeats. Bolsonaro lost at the polls, which does not mean that the Brazilian ultra-right has been defeated politically. After four years of the Bolsonaro government, the far-right is actually stronger than it was in 2018.

Something not very different was said by US analysts when a mob of fanatics tried to take the Capitol by storm on January 6, 2021. It was clear that Trump had been defeated in the elections, but Trumpism remained the main organized political force in the United States.

The emergence of Bolsonarism as a social movement undoubtedly represented a watershed in Brazilian political life. Unlike what has happened with other important solid democracies around the world, there is no party in Brazil that ideologically represents conservative sectors of Brazilian society, which different opinion polls reveal are not small in numbers. Rather, what exists in Brazil are parties that survive on clientelistic practices, that is, the exchange of goods and services for political support.

Until the emergence of Bolsonarism, the Brazilian right was fragmented. Bolsonaro has become a unifying force for numerous trends on the Brazilian right: religious conservatives, military nationalists, reactionaries nostalgic for the dictatorship and even the monarchy, and pro-market liberals. The large demonstrations on the streets of Brazil in June 2013, the attacks on traditional political elites launched by the Car Wash Operation (Lava Jato), and a broad anti-PT sentiment all produced an anti-establishment energy that Bolsonaro’s populist rhetoric captured. In the absence of a party to shape and represent the Brazilian right, there emerged a movement leader who managed to articulate a major demand of Brazilian society. The fact that Bolsonaro arbitrarily chose a party to contest the elections, which he subsequently left during his government, proves that Bolsonarism is a political force that escapes the institutional structures of the Brazilian party system.

It turns out that Bolsonaro is not just a charismatic leader with conservative views, as Ronald Reagan was in the United States. His ideas have always defied liberal democracy. Bolsonaro became known nationally for defending torture and the maxim of penal populism, namely, that “a good bandit is a dead bandit.” He became a phenomenon on social networks with his homophobic, misogynistic, and racist positions. On several occasions, he attacked the rule of law, arguing that minorities should submit to the majority.

Cas Mudde, one of the great scholars of the ultra-right, argues that we must analytically separate the populist radical right from the extreme right. The radical right accepts the essence of democracy based on popular sovereignty, but opposes the elements of liberal democracy, that is: minority rights, the separation of powers, and the rule of law. The extreme right, on the other hand, is at the same time illiberal and anti-democratic, in addition to being animated by a revolutionary impetus and desiring a violent rupture with the prevailing social order in order to recreate an idealized past. Thus, as much as Bolsonaro can be classified as an extreme right-wing leader, his government had characteristics typical of the populist radical right, such as that of Viktor Orban in Hungary and Donald Trump in the USA. Bolsonaro's far-right agenda was not taken to the extreme only because of a series of institutional, political, and social constraints, which revealed the surprising resilience of Brazilian democracy.

However, governments of the populist radical right encourage far-right groups to come out of anonymity by legitimizing their actions. In the United States, the Trump administration created a favorable environment for strengthening the alt-right, expanding the influence of neo-fascist groups, such as the Proud Boys, and leveraging white supremacist terrorism. In Brazil, the radical right in government also honored various organizations and actors of the extreme right. The paramilitary group called “300 from Brazil” even performed an act with torches in the image and likeness of Nazi ceremonies and the alt-right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia. A report produced by the Brazilian transitional government revealed that a process of radicalization based on far-right doctrines (i.e., Nazism, Italian fascism and Integralism) is underway within Brazilian schools. No less extremist are the militants who were camped in front of barracks begging for a coup d’état to prevent Lula's inauguration.

In addition to these groups that are embedded in Brazilian society, the Lula government will face a vociferous conservative opposition in the National Congress. Even though the far-right was defeated in the presidential election, it has expanded its base in Congress, and it will create obstacles for Lula's third term. But it is important to emphasize that the strength and cohesion of the ultra-right in Brazil depends on Bolsonaro's role as leader of the opposition. This means that he will have to overcome his depression and withdrawal from politics that took place after his electoral defeat. Since the Brazilian right does not have a historic party that defends a conservative agenda, it is dependent on a strong and charismatic leadership in order to avoid returning to the state of fragmentation in which it found itself before Bolsonaro's presidency. Without this powerful unifying force, the Brazilian ultra-right could have the same outcome as Trumpism, which was being roundly defeated in the midterms of 2022.

David Magalhães, professor of International Relations at PUC-SP and coordinator of the Extreme Right Observatory. This text was originally written for issue 52 of the WBO Newsletter, published on February 3, 2023. Fill in the form at the bottom of the text to access and subscribe to the WBO weekly newsletter in English.

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