Supporters of president-elect Jair Bolsonaro celebrate his triumph in the early hours of Oct. 29, in front of the former captain's residence on the west side of Rio de Janeiro. The far-right candidate garnered 55.13 percent of the vote and will begin his four-year presidency on Jan. 1, 2019. Credit: Fernando Frazão/Agencia Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 29 2018 (IPS)

Voters in Brazil ignored threats to democracy and opted for radical political change, with a shift to the extreme right, with ties to the military, as is always the case in this South American country.

Jair Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old former army captain, was elected as Brazil’s 42nd president with 55.13 percent of the vote in Sunday’s runoff election, heading up a group of retired generals, such as his vice president, Hamilton Mourão, and others earmarked as future cabinet ministers. He takes office on Jan. 1.

His triumph caused an unexpected political earthquake, decimating traditional parties and leaders.

The Bolsonaro effect prompted a broad renovation of parliament, with the election of many new legislators with military, police, and religious ties, and right-wing activists.

His formerly minuscule Social Liberal Party (PSL) is now the second largest force in the Chamber of Deputies, with 52 representatives. The country’s most populous and wealthiest states, São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, elected PSL allies as governors, two of whom had no political experience.

Brazil thus forms part of a global rise of the right, which in some countries has led to the election of authoritarian governments, such as in the Philippines, Turkey, Hungary and Poland, or even the United States under Donald Trump.

Bolsonaro’s chances of taking his place in the right-wing wave only became clear on the eve of the first round of elections, on Oct. 7.

Little was expected of the candidate of such a tiny party, which did not even have a share of the national air time that the electoral system awards to the main parties. His political career consists of 27 years as an obscure congressman, known only for his diatribes and outspoken prejudices against women, blacks, indigenous people, sexual minorities and the poor.

But since the previous presidential elections in 2014, Bolsonaro had traveled this vast country and used the Internet to prepare his candidacy.

Early this year, polls awarded him about 10 percent of the voting intention, which almost doubled in August, when the election campaign officially began.

That growth did not worry his possible opponents, who preferred him as the easiest adversary to defeat in a second round, if no candidate obtained an absolute majority in the first. The idea was that he would come up against heavy resistance to an extreme right-wing candidate who has shown anti-democratic tendencies.

Fernando Haddad, the candidate of the leftist Workers Party, promised his supporters, after his defeat in the Oct. 28 elections, that as an opposition leader he would fight for civil, political and social rights in the face of Brazil’s future extreme right-wing government. Credit: Paulo Pinto/Public Photos

But this was no ordinary election. The poll favorite was former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), whom the leftist Workers’ Party (PT) insisted on running, even though he had been in prison on corruption charges since April, and was only replaced on Sept. 11 by Fernando Haddad, a former minister of education and former mayor of São Paulo.

Five days earlier, Bolsonaro had been stabbed in the stomach by a lone assailant during a campaign rally in Juiz de Fora, 180 km from Rio de Janeiro.

The attack may have been decisive to his triumph, by giving him a great deal of publicity and turning him into a victim, observers say. It also allowed him to avoid debates with other candidates, which could have revealed his weaknesses and contradictions.

But two surgeries, 23 days in a hospital and then being confined to his home, due to a temporary colostomy, prevented him from participating in election rallies. So the social media-savvy candidate focused on the Internet and social networks, which turned out to be his strongest weapon.

The massive use of WhatsApp to attack Haddad aroused suspicions that businessmen were financing “fake news” websites, thus violating electoral laws, as reported by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo on Oct. 18. The electoral justice system has launched an investigation.

The recently concluded campaign in Brazil triggered a debate about the role of this free instant messaging network and “fake news” in influencing the elections.

The social networks were decisive for Bolsonaro, who started from scratch, with practically no party, no financial resources, and no support from the traditional media. The mobilisation of followers was “spontaneous,” according to the candidate.

Brazil, the largest and most populous country in Latin America, with 208 million people, is one of the five countries in the world with the most social media users, with 120 million people using WhatsApp and 125 million using Facebook.

But these tools were only successful because the former army captain managed to personify the demands of the population, despite – or because of – his right-wing radicalism.

He presented himself as the most determined enemy of corruption and of the PT, whose governments from 2003 to 2016 are blamed for the systemic corruption in politics and the errors that caused the country’s worst economic recession, between 2014 and 2016.

As a military and religious man, recently converted to an evangelical church, he swore to wage an all-out fight against crime, a pressing concern for Brazilians, and said he would come to the rescue of the conventional family, which, according to his fiery, and often intemperate, speeches, has been under attack by feminism and other movements.

He seduced business with his neoliberal positions, represented by economist Paulo Guedes, presented as a future minister.

The promise to reduce the size of the state and cut environmental taxes, among other measures, brought him the support of the agro-export sector, especially cattle ranchers and soybean producers.

The economic crisis combined with high crimes rates, added to a wave of conservatism in the habits and customs of this plural and open society, galvanised support for Bolsonaro, while offsetting worries about his authoritarian stances or his inexperience in government administration.

Bolsonaro said he would govern for all, defending “the constitution, democracy and freedom…It is not the promise of a party, but an oath of a man to God,” he said while celebrating his victory, announced three hours after the close of the polls.

His speech did little to reassures the opposition, which will be led by the PT, still the largest party, with 56 deputies and four state governors.

A week earlier he said that in his government “the red criminals will be swept from our homeland,” referring to PT leaders. He threatened to jail his rival, Haddad.

In the past he defended the torturers of the military dictatorship and denied that the 1964-1985 military regime was a dictatorship.

His brutal statements are downplayed by his followers as “boastfulness” and even praise his declarations as frank and forthright.

The problem is not the statements themselves, but the fact that they reveal his continued fidelity to the training he received at the Military Academy in the 1970s, in the middle of the dictatorship

He considers the period when generals were presidents “democratic”, since they maintained parliament and the courts, although with restrictions and subject to controls and purges..

Bolsonaro’s victory, with 57.8 million votes, also has the symbolic effect of the absolution of the military dictatorship via elections, to the detriment of democratic convictions.

By Fernando J. Cardim de Carvalho
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 30 2015 (IPS)

As 2015 approaches its end, Brazilians live a period of extraordinary uncertainty. The recession seems to get worse by the day. Inflation is high and shows unexpected resistance to tight monetary policies applied by the Central Bank. The sluggish international economy has largely neutralized incentive and the strong devaluation of the domestic currency could represent a reality to exporters and to producers who compete with now more expensive imports. After an initial resistance, employment levels began to fall.

Fernando J. Cardim de Carvalho

Any subset of that list of events would be enough to generate widespread instability. All of them put together created a hitherto unheard of situation of political and economic crisis of which one has to make extraordinary efforts to see any way out.

Impeachment procedures against the president did not come out of the blue. The revelation of the Petrobras scandal has brewed rumors and suspicions, if not against the president herself, certainly against many of those who surround, or have surrounded, her (she is a former minister of energy in Lula’s government and a former chairman of the administration council of Petrobras.) So far, however, no accusations or evidence emerged against Rousseff. In fact, she does not even seem to be a major target of investigators, who seem to be zeroing in on Lula (and his immediate family.) The piece of accusation justifying the opening of impeachment proceedings relies on the use of accounting artifices to violate the constraints on public expenditure imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which a majority of opinion makers seem to consider too weak a case to sustain an impeachment. What makes the whole process more menacing is in fact her acute political fragility. Rousseff is universally seen as Lula’s creation, but never really relinquished his power over the party and the coalition it led.

Soon after Rousseff was reelected in November 2014, she announced a radical change of orientation in her administration’s economic policies. Austerity policies, cutting expenditures and raising taxes, seemed to be unavoidable in the face of the increased federal expenditure made to ensure her victory in the presidential elections.

The incumbent president repeatedly stated during the campaign that she rejected those policies, only to announce their implementation a few days after the result of the popular vote became known. Despite the apparent support of Lula, the change in orientation was badly received by the official Workers Party (PT), which grudgingly announced support for her, but conditioning it to a change in macroeconomic policies.

The party seemed to ignore the fact that during 2014, the increase in fiscal deficits failed to have any expansionary impact on the economy, which did not grow at all. The perception that the president had no political support of her own, however, stimulated her adversaries to aggressively advance proposals for her impeachment, based on whatever reason one could find, or the annulment of the election itself, or if nothing else worked, to force her to resign. With an aggressive opposition and unable to count on a supporting political base, the government was paralyzed for the whole year.

No relevant austerity measure has obtained Congress’ approval. Despite the effort of leftist parties to blame the pro-austerity Finance Minister Joaquim Levy for the contraction of the economy, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the failed attempts to get the proposed policies approved by Congress just made explicit the lack of political power that characterized Rousseff’s position. The impasse created by the inexistence of an effective government in the face of an aggressive opposition led decision-makers to postpone any but the most immediate decisions. Investment has fallen, workers have been fired in increasing numbers, consumption has been negatively impacted, etc.

The political crisis has transformed an expected recession into something that threatens to become a major depression, both in depth and duration. The situation is made more difficult by the difficulty to visualize any sustainable solution for the crises in the mediate horizon, let alone the coming months. If the impeachment process prospers, one could expect for sure increased political instability as a result, on the one hand, of attempts by PT and the social movements that are close to it to react somehow, and, on the other, by the fact that there is no organized opposition ready to take the place of the current administration. If the impeachment initiative is defeated, the problem remains that the president does not have any vision or power and it is overwhelmingly difficult to imagine how she could recover enough initiative to last the three remaining years of her term in office.

Paraphrasing the late historian Eric Hobsbawn, who observed that the Twentieth Century had been very short (beginning in 1914 and ending in 1991), 2015 may be a long year for Brazilians. The incompressible minimal duration of an impeachment process will take it to 2016, when the social situation may be more tense than it is now, with high inflation and increasing unemployment. If a national agreement of some sort, be it in terms of allowing Rousseff’s government to work or by removing it altogether, is not reached to avoid the worse, 2015 can last even longer. The country may dive into an unknown abyss of a combination of economic, political and social crises of which it is hard to see how, when and in what conditions it will recover.

(End)

Excerpt:

By Fernando J. Cardim de Carvalho
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 22 2015 (IPS)

As the political situation in Brazil appears to be reaching a state of unstable equilibrium, or more bluntly, as it is transformed from instability to impasse, the economy continues to deteriorate.

The sharpening of political conflicts that could lead to an outright collapse of the economy seems to have been attenuated by the shift on Apr. 7 of effective political power from President Dilma Rousseff to Vice-President Michel Temer.

Fernando Cardim de Carvalho

Temer was successful in bringing Renan Calheiros, the chairman of the Federal Senate, back to the government camp, in a power-sharing agreement meant to isolate the chairman of the House, Eduardo Cunha, who has assumed a much more radical stance. The arrangement has worked so far.

The pressure on the President to resign or on the appropriate bodies to give cause to initiate impeachment processes seems to have reached its limit. Popular opposition to the federal administration, which has its stronghold in Sao Paulo – as shown in mass demonstrations in March and April and most recently on Aug. 16 – has not seen the snowball growth its leaders expected.

In sum, positions seem to have been hardened as a measure of political accommodation has been reached, with the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) taking the lead on the side of government, and the formal opposition to government, including the nominally leading opposition party, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), rallying to the side of Eduardo Cunha, still their best hope on the way to an impeachment procedure.

Street demonstrations at this point seem to be unable to change this picture. Still, it should be noted that only the opposition has been able to organise large demonstrations. Attempts by pro-government groups to do the same in favour of the government have been few and largely unsuccessful.

In this context, as expected, the Brazilian economy continues to deteriorate. The contractionary impact of fiscal retrenchment has been greater than anticipated because not many people can foresee what will come next. In fact, no one can, even if announced measures will in fact be implemented while current difficulties, including fiscal difficulties, grow further.

The federal government was not able to pass the contractionary measures it argued to be essential, thus creating a ‘Catch 22’ situation in which one expects the success of the government to be very bad for the country but its failure to be even worse. Many economists are predicting a fall in 2015 GDP close to two percent, postponing chances of recovery until at least 2017.

“[Brazil] finds itself at an impasse. No political force seems to be strong enough, or even interested in finding a better and more promising alternative policy strategy”
If this contraction actually happens, it will be one the most serious recessions in recent history, much worse than what happened in 2008 and 2009.

The reasons for this are complex and the government is partly correct to point to the worsening of the external scenario. China can no longer carry Brazil forward. The recovery of the U.S. economy is weak and volatile. Europe is unable to overcome its own fossilised views on the virtues of austerity, causing the whole area to limp around.

Of course, this excuse only goes so far. Many analysts had called the attention of government authorities to the fact that growth during President Lula da Silva’s two terms in office (2003-2011) would vanish in the event that China lost its breath, as has actually happened.

The country lost the opportunity to make the investments, particularly in infrastructure, which could have increased its productive capacity. Efficient industrial policies should have been consistently implemented to that end, public investment should have been expanded, and consistent exchange rate policies should have been sought to change the picture of overvaluation that has been killing local manufacturing, on and off, since the Real Plan was implemented in 1994.

Practically nothing of this was effectively done. Investment plans were announced that had no consequence, local manufacturers became importers on an increasing scale, and roads, ports and energy production fell behind needs, while the government presented policies to increase household indebtedness to expand consumption as a successful combination of economic and social policies.

In the last two years of Rousseff’s first term (2011-2014), these policies were not even successful in increasing growth rates and GDP stalled as the government appealed more and more to tricks, particularly accounting tricks, and the distribution of favours to politically-connected sectors to try to revive the economy.

To a large extent, the turn to austerity was motivated by the failure to revive the economy, which doubled the bet on mistaken policies. Austerity measures in a shrinking economy can only accelerate the fall. But the dissolution of the political power of the president tripled the bet.

No one can believe that the president has the power to effectively pursue an alternative policy path. In fact, if the alternative to austerity is going back to what she did in her first term, the president will not find any supporters, except, perhaps, in her fast-shrinking number of hard-core believers.

So the country finds itself at an impasse. No political force seems to be strong enough, or even interested in finding a better and more promising alternative policy strategy. The more radical opponents – the Workers’ Party (PT) and the PSDB – got lost in a ‘blame game’, trying to pin down which of two presidents, Fernando Henrique Cardoso or Lula, had been worse.

None of them seems to have anything to offer. PMDB does not deal in wholesale strategies, it is more interested in retailing. Given the steep loss of trust in the PT or its leaders, including Lula, the party seems to be excluded from any power arrangement to be designed in the near future (its perspectives for the long-term future are at a minimum very uncertain).

The situation of the PSDB is not much better, because all it has in its favour is the receding memory of the Cardoso period, in which much the same problems were as serious as they are now and the party was as incompetent in pointing to solutions as the PT is now.

In this situation, the PMDB stepped in. It reached some measure of political stability but it has no vision of where to take the economy. Given its structure as a federation of state leaderships, the PMDB deals better with favours than with strategies.

As happened under President José Sarney in the late 1980s, this may be enough – in the best of circumstances – to put the brakes on economic deterioration but not to guide its revival.

The country will survive, of course, as it has done in the past.  The problem is that Brazil has experience of unfortunately all too frequent low-quality political leadership, so even the optimistic analysts can only see hardship ahead. (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Post-election garbage outside a voting station in a populous neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro, a day after the first round of Brazil’s presidential elections – a metaphor for the dirty campaign. Credit: Tânia Rêgo/Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 7 2014 (IPS)

The dream of electing Brazil’s first black president, an environmental activist from the Amazon jungle, lasted only 40 days and was frustrated in Sunday’s elections. In the end, it is the two parties that have dominated Brazilian politics for the last 20 years that will face off in the second round of voting on Oct. 26.

Former environment minister Marina Silva, who was briefly the frontrunner in the polls after she was named presidential candidate by the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) on Aug. 16, saw her popularity plunge in the last three weeks. She came in third, with 21 percent of the vote.

Aecio Neves of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), which governed Brazil from 1995 to 2003 under former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT), garnered 33.5 and 41.6 percent of the vote, respectively.

Improvisation, a result of her sudden designation as candidate and the diverse coalition that backed her up, headed by the party that thrust her into the race, may have contributed to her failure and makes the political future of the black former Amazon activist unclear.

If projections are borne out, the economy will be the central focus of the new campaign, which will be the sixth time since 1994 that the PSDB and the PT, both of which have a social democratic orientation, face off at the polls.Improvisation, a result of her sudden designation as candidate and the diverse coalition that backed her up, headed by the party that thrust her into the race, may have contributed to her failure and makes the political future of the black former Amazon activist unclear.

But in elections characterised by sudden shifts, such as Silva’s rise and fall, a new surprise could come from a scandal at Brazil’s state-run oil giant Petrobras, involving billions of dollars in kickbacks over the last decade.

During part of that period, Rousseff chaired the Petrobras board.

The investigation is in the hands of the police and the legal authorities. But the names of some politicians and companies implicated in the scandal have been leaked to the press.

The fear, especially in the government, is that other information will come to light.

The opposition criticises the current administration for what it calls errors in the management of the economy, which it says have led to the current stagnation, high inflation, fiscal deterioration and imbalances in the external accounts.

But Rousseff, for her part, can point to the low unemployment rate – just five percent in August – the result of the generation of millions of jobs during the nearly 12 years of PT government, as well as the progress made in income distribution and poverty reduction.

The results of the Oct. 5 elections also reflect a geographically and socially polarised country. In the industrialised south and the state of São Paulo in particular, the strong desire to unseat the PT gave rise to a “useful vote” cast by many who, as they saw Silva’s popularity decline, threw their support behind Neves. In the state of São Paulo, Neves took 44 percent of the vote, compared to Rousseff’s 22 percent.

The PT’s strongest backing is in the impoverished Northeast, which has only slightly more voters than São Paulo. The president took nearly 60 percent of the vote in the Northeast, Brazil’s poorest region.

The country thus remains ideologically divided, since the first victory by former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011).

The two rivals are now both hoping to win the support of Silva and the coalition that backed her, headed by the socialists, which could be decisive in the runoff.

The difference between the moderate left-wing Rousseff and the business-friendly centrist Neves in the first round was 8.37 million votes, while Silva took 22.17 million votes.

What is still unclear is the direction that will be taken by the heterogeneous coalition headed by the PSB. In 2010, when the environmentalist ran for president as the Green Party (PV) candidate, she won 19.3 percent of the vote and remained neutral during the campaign for the runoff between candidates of the same two parties as today.

But the situation was very different back then. Silva presented herself as a third alternative, criticising the polarisation between the PT and the PSDB, and setting forth her own proposals.

Dissatisfied with the PV, she abandoned the Greens to create the Sustainability Network, aimed at promoting socioenvironmental sustainability and a new way of doing politics.

But her group did not achieve the necessary 492,000 signatures to become a political party because the electoral court failed to validate 95,000 signatures. Silva then decided to join the PSB, which named her vice presidential candidate on the ticket led by socialist leader Eduardo Campos.

However, Campos died in a plane crash on Aug. 13 and Silva replaced him as presidential candidate. Seen as the leader who best represented the widespread discontent that fuelled the June 2013 nationwide protests, her popularity soared, until she was ahead of Rousseff in the opinion polls.

But the future of Silva, who took only two percentage points more of the vote than in the 2010 elections, is now cloudy. Her political and personal weaknesses were revealed by the harassment from her opponents, especially the Rousseff campaign, which mounted aggressive ad attacks against the other woman in the race.

For example, the PT charged that Silva would eliminate the Bolsa Familia programme, which provides cash transfers to nearly 14 million poor households, would reduce investments in pre-salt oil fields exploration, and would hand power over to the bankers.

Under Brazil’s election laws, Silva’s team had just two minutes of electoral programming on nightly television – hardy enough time to defend herself from the allegations, let alone set forth her environmental proposals, which brought her international renown, or other attractive points on her platform, such as a “renewal of democracy”.

Because free electoral programming time in Brazil is proportionate to the parliamentary representation of each coalition, Rousseff had 11 minutes a day of broadcasting time.

For the second round, the time allotted is the same for both candidates: 10 minutes each.

But the ambiguous policy proposals and reversals that marked Silva’s campaign also hurt her image. She started out by reversing her stance just after the socialist party officially announced its support for same-sex marriage and other rights for homosexuals. She later fell into other contradictions regarding her record in the Senate.

Nor did Silva perform well in the televised debates.

It is not yet known whether she will stay with the PSB, which was left without a strong leader to hold it together, or will go it alone with her Sustainability Network. The socialists seem to be coming apart: Some of the PSB’s leaders have already come out in favour of Neves, while others have ties to the governing PT.

On the economic front, Silva’s advisers are close to their counterparts in the PSDB, which would push her towards supporting that party’s candidate in the second round. To that is added the accusations by the PT, which include the label “neoliberal” because of Silva’s economic orientation.

Backing either of the two candidates still in the race would hurt her central stance, which is to lead a third route to overcome the polarisation between the PT and the PSDB while renovating and cleaning up Brazilian politics.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes