By Eric Vandenbroeck
and co-workers
Investigating Why Far-Right Rioters
Invaded Brazi's Federal Representative Institutions.
Seven days after the inauguration
of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva,
thousands of far-right rioters invaded the country’s federal representative
institutions. In acts reminiscent of the attack on the U.S. Capitol two years
prior, the assailants claimed that Brazil’s 2022 elections were “stolen” and
“rigged.” Entering empty buildings—it was a Sunday—assailants tore through the
halls of Brazil’s Congress, rampaged inside the presidential palace, and
ransacked the country’s Supreme Court. They fought with police officers
guarding the buildings and attacked journalists covering the event. They
vandalized millions of dollars worth of art, some
dating back centuries. It is still unclear who organized the attack or how it
was planned. But they were inspired by the man Lula defeated: former president
Jair Bolsonaro.
The riot should not
have come as a surprise. Bolsonaro, who had smeared the 2022 election as
fraudulent, has a long track record of denigrating Brazilian democracy. As a
candidate in 2018, he threatened to arrest and execute leftists. As president,
he pledged not to follow Supreme Court decisions from a disliked justice. And
yet, throughout his presidency, many commentators insisted that Bolsonaro did
not pose a serious risk because the country’s political institutions—the same
ones his supporters physically trashed on Sunday—were strong enough to
withstand his attacks. When Bolsonaro was first elected, U.S. political
commentator Ian Bremmer wrote in Time that the president posed
little threat to democracy, arguing that Brazil “is a country with strong
political institutions.” In 2019, Brazilian political scientist Fernando Schüler said in an interview that “no institution was
threatened and there was no risk to fundamental rights” under Bolsonaro. After
all, Bolsonaro was elected as a self-styled political outsider who aimed to
clean up what many Brazilians saw as the rotten corruption produced by 13 years
of rule under the center-left Worker’s Party, known by its Portuguese initials,
PT. Whatever the excesses of the Bolsonaro administration, the institutions of
Brazil’s young democracy would hold firm.
Brazilian democracy,
of course, did survive Bolsonaro (and the January 8 ex post facto insurrection,
eventually stopped by government forces). But Brazil’s institutions were not
the primary reason its democracy persevered. Bolsonaro found many ways to work
around the formal administrative apparatus of the state, including by using the
public budget to pay off members of Congress to get their votes. He helped
promote paramilitary governance in Rio de Janeiro, his family’s home base, by
asking the lower ranks of security forces to act outside their institutional
limits. And he made it difficult for the health ministry to procure stocks of
COVID-19 vaccines. State governments then had to work around Bolsonaro to
combat the pandemic, ratcheting up intergovernmental tensions.
Instead, Brazilian
democracy survived Bolsonaro thanks to something else: the country’s vibrant
civil society. It has a long history of promoting liberal and social rights.
Civic organizations and movements were critical to the country’s transition
from autocracy in the mid-1980s. They have been central to keeping the country
free in the decades since, including in 2022. Lula would have been impossible
to defeat Bolsonaro were it not for health, human rights, and housing advocacy
groups. Indeed, such organizations are critical to democratic transitions and
the endurance of popular governance in Brazil and worldwide. And as Lula fights
to prevent his country from sliding back into autocratic rule, he will have to
rely on this broad, organized social base of support to strengthen the
institutional basis of Brazilian democracy again.
People Power
It is impossible to
talk about Brazil’s democratization, from the 1980s onward, without mentioning
the country’s dense network of trade unions, urban movements, peasant
movements, church groups, cultural organizations, and intellectuals. Despite
repeated and often violent repression, each flourished and grew throughout the
military dictatorship of the 1970s and early 1980s. This wide array of
movements was critical in creating a unified fight to end the tyranny,
culminating in a series of massive street protests that helped prompt the end
of military rule. And as the country eventually opened up in the middle of the
1980s, these movements gave birth to the organizations and leaders that
consolidated democratic gains. They were responsible, for example, for the
broad range of socioeconomic rights featured in the country’s 1988 federal
constitution. That constitution, in turn, prompted Brazil’s 1989 presidential
election—the country’s first direct election with a universal franchise.
Lula performed well
in that contest, advancing to the runoff and losing by six percentage points.
Both he and his party, the PT, were a direct outgrowth of Brazil’s flourishing
civil society. The party was founded in 1980 by trade union leaders, including
Lula, who came from the auto factories in the suburbs of São Paulo. And even
though they lost Brazil’s first post-dictatorship nationwide elections, the PT
and its allies in civil society spent the decade after liberalization advancing
various progressive, democratic policies in the places where they did win
office. They created participatory budgeting systems at the municipal and state
levels; participatory councils in sectors such as health, water, and housing;
programs for upgrading slums; and programs to improve health and education.
These policies laid the foundation for significant improvements in life
expectancy and drops in poverty and hunger.
Eventually, in 2002,
Lula won the presidency, and he made nurturing these gains one of his primary
goals. Upon taking office in January 2003, Lula established a new Ministry of
Cities to roll out investments in infrastructure in the poor peripheries of the
country’s urban areas. He brought environmental activists into the Ministry of
Environment to reduce deforestation. He got health activists to join the
Ministry of Health, where they worked to improve the country’s national
healthcare system and fought against the HIV epidemic (in which they largely
succeeded). Lula’s government established a federal cash-transfer program known
as the “Family Wallet,” or Bolsa Familia in Portuguese. This brought Brazil
closer to having a universal basic income system, a dream of many policy
intellectuals affiliated with the PT.
Lula served for eight
years until he was term-limited, and his administration was prevalent. But his
chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, did not have as much luck. In 2016, halfway
through her second term, Rousseff was removed from office by Congress as Brazil
was rocked by corruption scandals and suffering from economic malaise. Her vice
president completed her time, but continued discontent helped pave the way for
Bolsonaro to win office two years later comfortably.
Once in power,
Bolsonaro quickly began attacking programs and institutions that Brazil’s civil
society had worked so hard for. He closed, for instance, many of the country’s
participatory councils. He attacked civil society activists working in key
bureaucratic agencies, such as in the health and environment ministries. He
ended Bolsa Familia. He spoke wistfully of Brazil’s brutal
dictatorship, sometimes calling on the military to intervene again in domestic
politics. By the end of the 2010s, three decades of democracy and social
progress—hard fought and hard won—were at significant risk.
The Good Fight
Brazil’s formal
institutions struggled to contain Bolsonaro. Sergio Moro, the judge who led the
corruption investigations that paved the way for Bolsonaro’s victory and that
imprisoned Lula (making it impossible for him to run for president in 2018)
became Bolsonaro’s justice minister. Moro’s successor, Anderson Torres, was in
charge of public security in Brasilia on the day of the riots. The Supreme
Court has ordered his arrest under suspicion that he had security forces assist
in invading the federal government’s buildings.
But while the
country’s formal institutions struggled, Brazil’s civil society organized to
protect the country’s social programs and democratic system. Consider, for
example, how Brazilian activists handled COVID-19. As president, Bolsonaro made
it as hard as possible for the country to mount an effective response to the
pandemic, denying that COVID-19 posed a severe public health
and economic threat and refusing to entertain any measures that would make it
easier for states to lock down, require masks, and for people to work remotely.
In response, a coalition of health organizations, grassroots movements, and
academics lobbied Congress to pass an emergency social grant to protect the
millions of Brazilians at risk of economic ruin if they could not work because
of illness or lockdowns. Bolsonaro vigorously opposed the grant program, but
when it became clear that it had a majority in Congress, he agreed to sign it
into law and tried to pass it off as his idea. The program proved to be a
success, effectively replacing Bolsa Familia. Thanks to this
infusion of cash to the poorest Brazilians, poverty rates in Brazil decreased
in the first year of the pandemic.
Activists also helped
surmount Bolsonaro’s effort to prevent Brazil from acquiring COVID-19 shots.
Even as Bolsonaro ignored offers by vaccine makers to deliver the injections to
the country, bureaucrats in the Ministry of Health who came out of the famous
1970s and 1980s sanitarista movement—which
successfully agitated to get the government to provide public access to health
care—saw to it that Brazil procured and administered shots. By the middle of
2021, even with a delayed start, Brazil's vaccination rate surpassed that
of the United States.
Civil society found
other ways to help Brazil survive the pandemic. Urban housing movements, for
example, protested against evictions, successfully getting the Supreme Court to
institute a long-term freeze on them for poor families. Community groups
organized to provide emergency aid for residents in poor, favela neighborhoods
in the country’s large cities. These wins, which took place amid
the circus-like atmosphere of Bolsonaro’s presidency, helped expose the
president’s incompetence. In doing so, they dragged down his approval rating.
They laid the groundwork for Lula’s campaign by reigniting the same
constellation of civil society groups that made it possible to oust the junta
in the 1980s. Trade unions, healthcare employees, and other associations made
up of workers and the poor created an essential counterbalance to the
right-wing, religious grassroots social coalition that helped propel Bolsonaro
to his 2018 victory. Bolsonaro and Lula, for example, spent significant parts
of televised debates and campaign speeches competing over who could be better
trusted to protect the cash-transfer scheme that civil society activists had
inspired.
Regarding voting, the
progressive and working-class coalition put Lula over the top. In some of the
largest cities in the country’s southeast, which had gone for Bolsonaro in his
first presidential campaign, the peripheral working-class neighborhoods swung
back to Lula. The PT also made gains in metropolitan São Paulo. The two
million–vote increase in this region alone was equal to Lula’s entire margin of
victory in the election’s second round.
Lula has continued to
marshal civil society since taking office, again in service of promoting
Brazil’s inclusive democracy. He has appointed people from indigenous
organizations, antiracist organizers, and politicians with strong links to
agricultural cooperatives to lead ministries dedicated to these causes. His
solid social base has also enabled him to broker deals with other parties to
build a governing majority in a tightly divided Congress. Although this
parliamentary horse-trading has prompted some grumbling on the left, Lula
entered the presidential “Alvorada” palace with a
governing coalition that includes many of the pork-barrel, center-right parties
that had previously allied with Bolsonaro. Critically, Lula has created such a
governing coalition while maintaining a policy platform that includes extending
cash transfers, increasing funding for the national health system, and building
more houses for the homeless and the housing insecure. And unlike after the
January 6 riots in the United States, Lula was able to get every state
governor—including right-wing Bolsonaro supporters—to meet in Brasilia and
publicly condemn the recent invasion.
Keeping The Faith
Brazil is not the
only state in which civil society has been an essential part of
democratization. In Popular
Politics and the Path to Durable D, one
of us (Kadivar) examined 112 democratic transitions in 80 countries between
1960 and 2010. The book found that durable democratization results from lengthy
episodes of unarmed political mobilization, which requires organization
building, coalition formation, and the development of democratic discourse. A
2020 research article by us and the sociologist Adaner Usmani showed that a mobilized civil society not
only helps foster democratization but also results in democracies that grow
more participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian over time.
The way that civil
society resisted Bolsonaro’s autocratic tendencies and bad policies suggests
that organization building and mobilization have another critical function:
keeping existing democracies from degenerating into authoritarianism. Civil
society is essential to pressuring incumbents who undermine democratic
institutions. Political and worker groups have also proven to be tools through
which pro-democracy forces can fight against strongmen. And critically, civil
society can help democrats make the kind of concessions necessary to build
workable coalitions once in power. Lula would not be in such a strong political
position, with a workable governing majority, had civil society organizations
long affiliated with the PT not enabled him to negotiate and make concessions.
For example, Brazil Union, a party that includes now Senator Moro, has agreed
not to oppose the Lula administration in Brazil’s Congress. He even holds three
ministries in his cabinet.
That does not mean
Brazilian democracy is secure. Significant financial resources back the
country's far-right, and small entrepreneurs and people with connections to the
military's lower ranks give it meaningful social roots. But it is smaller than
Brazil’s civic grassroots; there is a reason Bolsonaro’s base could not marshal
the strength to attack until a weekend after Lula’s inauguration. And civic
groups have made it clear that another effort to undermine the country’s
electoral institutions will face fierce resistance. Since the attack on
Brasilia, tens of thousands of people have joined pro-democracy protests in
cities across the country. Sure enough, the protests were organized by civil
society coalitions.
As long as Lula is in
office, civic groups will have a leader who can marshal a broad front against
attacks on Brazilian democracy. Their challenge will be to construct a basis
for strength that can thrive without Lula’s extraordinary leadership and
charisma. The president is 77, and when he again steps down, Brazil’s civil
society needs to be better prepared to fight for democracy than they were under
Rousseff and her successor. Brazil’s social organizations have done tremendous
work, but they must find more ways to buttress the country’s still young
representative institutions.
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