Jair Bolsonaro is destroying Brazilian democracy

One day in April, as Brazilian hospitals were running low on oxygen and 3,000 people a day were dying of covid-19, Jair Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, Luiz Eduardo Ramos, 64, received the vaccine. It was his turn but he did it secretly, because his boss is against vaccines. When asked why Brazil was blocking Pfizer’s approval of the drug, Bolsonaro replied, with a joke, that injections turn people into crocodiles.

The fact that Ramos, a highly decorated general who commanded the peacekeeping forces in Haiti, had to do things in secret reveals the depth of the abyss into which Brazil has fallen into the hands of Bolsonaro, whose career as a captain. of the army was distinguished only by his arrest for insubordination. Ramos admitted that he was vaccinated during a meeting he did not know to be registered at. “Like any human being, I want to live,” he said.

Before the pandemic, Brazil had been suffering from various political and economic diseases for about a decade. Now that his doctor is Bolsonaro, the country is in a coma. In April, more than 87,000 Brazilians died of covid-19, the highest number of monthly deaths in the world at that time. Vaccines are so rare that people under sixty won’t get them until September. And 14.4 percent of workers are unemployed, a record figure.

Source of inspiration
Yet on 1 May i bolsonaristas, supporters of Bolsonaro, wrapped in Brazilian flags, took to the streets. Regardless of the parliamentary commission set up to investigate how the president handled the health crisis, they applauded his refusal to wear a face mask, his support for hydroxychloroquine, and his desire to send the army to obstruct the orders to stay. at home. His supporters in São Paulo have called for “military intervention”. A woman told a tourist that Brazil has never had a civil war. “The time has come,” he added.

Just replace the Portuguese with the English and the yellow-green flag with the red, white and blue one, and the rally could have been one of 2020 in the United States. In 2018, to win the election, Bolsonaro was heavily inspired by the tactics used by Donald Trump: populism, nationalism, machismo and fake news. Brazil was traumatized by corruption, recession, worsening public services and violent crime. The Brazilians were tired of politicians unable to solve these problems, and Bolsonaro channeled their frustration.

He presented himself as an outsider despite having spent 27 years in parliament in a secondary role, making headlines only when he said something offensive about women, indigenous peoples or homosexuals. A supporter of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985, he often had himself portrayed while, with his thumb and forefinger, he mimicked the gesture of shooting with a machine gun. Once he came to power, he clearly targeted Brazilian democratic institutions.

Ten years ago, the election of Bolsonaro would have been unthinkable. After the dictatorship, Brazil reformed. A constitution passed in 1988 created independent institutions. In 1994 a new currency tamed inflation. In the 2000s, a commodity boom created many jobs. With more money available, the lives of Brazilians have improved. During the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil joined Russia, India and China in the so-called BRIC, the group of rapidly growing emerging economies. He led the climate negotiations and was awarded the organization of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.

A trail of trauma
Then the commodity boom ended. In 2013, the protests over the increase in the price of bus tickets turned into mobilizations to bring down the government of the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT). An anti-corruption investigation launched in 2014, known as Car wash (car wash), found that dozens of companies had paid bribes to politicians in exchange for contracts with Petrobras, the national oil company. The economy collapsed after the irresponsible spending of Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff. More participatory and rabid demonstrations led to Rousseff’s indictment in 2016. His replacement, Michel Temer, was accused of embezzlement and narrowly escaped dismissal in 2017.

Bolsonaro was elected in the wake of all these traumas. He had little funds and little media exposure, but his candidacy strengthened after he was stabbed while campaigning. Posing as the savior of Brazil, he got 55 percent of the vote. Support for him has been strong especially in the south and southeast, the richest and whiter regions of the country, and among conservatives such as ranchers, farmers and evangelicals. Millions of people supported him out of anger at Pt. Bolsonaro appeared to many voters as the lesser of two evils.

Many observers were convinced that Brazilian institutions would resist his authoritarian instincts. So far they have been right. While Bolsonaro argues that it would be easy to organize a coup, he has not yet done so. But in a broader sense, they were wrong. His first 29 months in power showed that Brazilian institutions are not as strong as previously thought, and have weakened under his blows. Cláudio Couto, who teaches political science at the Getulio Vargas University Foundation in São Paulo, compares them to the brakes of a car going downhill. “If pressed for too long, they can break,” he says.

Let’s take the case of justice. The operation Car wash it seemed like the triumph of the decade. The Brazilians hoped that anti-corruption reforms would bring out cleaner politicians who would act for the people and not for themselves. But some prosecutors and investigating judges had a political plan. And this allowed Bolsonaro, in the face of accusations against his children, to stop the investigation, favoring not only corrupt politicians, but also organized crime groups.

The economy is in great need of reforms that halt the growth of public spending, increase competitiveness and tackle the problem of inequality. As a candidate, Bolsonaro had hastily professed his faith in the free market. As minister of the economy he hired Paulo Guedes, a liberal who trained at the University of Chicago. Then he abandoned the minister and liberalism, refusing to support reforms that could cost him votes. After a revamp of the pension system in 2019, Guedes’ reform program came to a halt. Six of the ten members of his dream team economically they resigned or were fired.

The pandemic has wiped out all the jobs created since the recession between 2014 and 2016, plunging millions of people back into poverty. None of Bolsonaro’s four education ministers created a functioning remote school system. One of them remained in office for only five days, before it was discovered that he had enriched his resume with false degrees in Argentina and Germany. About 35 million children were excluded from the school system for 15 months, and this will act as a brake on social mobility in the years to come.

Pig and cronyism
In politics, “the promise of renewal was a big lie,” says Couto. In 2018, voters kicked out much of the traditional political class. For the first time in the congress there are more first-time deputies than re-elected. A small group committed to fiscal responsibility and other reforms represents hope for the future. But most politicians remain fond of pork and patronage. After denouncing the system, Bolsonaro integrated himself to save himself from more than one hundred requests for dismissal concerning him.

It has severely damaged the Amazon rainforest, which in Brazil today emits more carbon dioxide than it can store, due to climate change and deforestation. The president does not believe in the first and sympathizes with those responsible for the second: woodcutters, miners and ranchers. He presented himself to the Ministry of the Environment with a chainsaw, cutting the budget and driving out the competent staff. Reducing deforestation requires stricter controls and investment in economic alternatives. Neither seems likely.

At first, covid-19 helped Bolsonaro. The large spending on business and the poor has distracted attention from its inability to implement tax reforms. His consensus rates have climbed rapidly since he took office. He fell ill with covid-19 last July and recovered quickly, as he promised. It seemed the economy could do the same, paving the way for his re-election in 2022.

Then, in early 2021, Brazil was hit by a second wave, with a more infectious variant coming from the Amazonian city of Manaus. As social networks filled with images of people lining up for vaccines in neighboring Chile, in Brazil, sadly, it was the funeral home that worked non-stop. Bolsonaro continued to lash out lockdown and vaccines. During a government reshuffle he fired the defense minister, who allegedly refused to swear allegiance to him. The leaders of the three armed forces resigned in protest, briefly fueling rumors of a coup.

It didn’t happen that way. But Brazil is facing its biggest crisis since its return to democracy in 1985. The challenges that await it are frightening: economic stagnation, political polarization, environmental disaster, social setback and a pandemic nightmare. He also has to deal with a president who is undermining his own government. His associates have replaced career officials, while his decrees have severely tested the entire system of democratic counterpowers. Just scroll through the Diário Oficial da União, the official gazette of Brazil, where every legal change approved in the country is published, says historian Lilia Schwarcz. “There is a coup every day”.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)