January 2019
The teratology of the contemporary political imagination—plentiful enough: Trump, Le Pen, Salvini, Orbán, Kaczynski, ogres galore—has acquired a new monster. Rising above the ruck, the president-elect of Brazil has extolled his country’s most notorious torturer; declared that its military dictatorship should have shot 30,000 opponents; told a congresswoman she was too ugly to merit raping; announced he would rather a son of his were killed in a car accident than gay; declared open season on the Amazon rainforest; and, not least, on the day after his election, promised followers to rid the land of red riff-raff. For his incoming minister of justice, Sergio Moro—no ordinary magistrate: saluted worldwide as an epitome of judicial independence and integrity—Jair Bolsonaro is a ‘moderate’.
To all appearances, the verdict of the polls last October was unambiguous: after governing the country for fourteen years, the Worker’s Party led by Lula and Dilma has been comprehensively repudiated, and its very survival may now be in doubt. Incarcerated by Moro, the most popular ruler in Brazilian history awaits further sentences of imprisonment. His successor, evicted from office midway through her second term, is a virtual outcast, reduced to a humiliating fourth place in a local contest for a seat in the Senate. How has this reversal come about? To what extent was it contingent, or at some point a foregone conclusion? What explains the radicalism of the upshot? By comparison with the scale of the upheaval through which Brazil has lived in the last five years, and the gravity of its possible outcome, the histrionics over Brexit in this country and the conniptions over Trump in America are close to much ado about nothing.
Brazilian politics are Italianate in character: intricate and serpentine. But there is little grasping what has happened to the country without some understanding of them. When Lula left office in 2010—presidents in Brazil are limited to two successive terms, though not barred from subsequent re-election—the economy posted 7.5 per cent growth, poverty had been cut in half, new universities had multiplied, inflation was low, the budget and current account were in surplus, and his approval ratings over 80 per cent. To succeed him, he picked his chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, in the sixties a fighter in the underground against the military dictatorship of the period, who had never held or run for electoral office before. With Lula at her side, she coasted to victory with a 56 per cent majority, becoming the first woman to win the country’s presidency. Initially better received by a middle class that detested Lula, for two years she enjoyed quite widespread esteem, for a show of calm and competence. But her inheritance was less rosy than it seemed. Economically, high commodity prices had underlain the boom under Lula, without altering Brazil’s historically low rates of investment and productivity growth. Virtually as soon as Dilma took office in 2011, they started to fall, bringing growth abruptly down to 1.9 per cent by 2012. In 2013 the Federal Reserve announced it would stop buying bonds, setting off the so-called taper tantrum in capital markets and drawing foreign finance out of the country. The balance of payments deteriorated. Inflation picked up. The years of buoyant prosperity were over.
Politically, moreover, a mortgage lay on PT government from the start. After the re-democratization of the country in the late eighties, three parties loomed largest: on the centre-right, the fig-leaf ‘social-democratic’ PSDB, home of big business and the middle class; in the middle, the theoretically ‘democratic’ PMDB, a sprawling network of clientelism in rural and small-town backwaters, feathering local nests with federal or provincial largesse; on the left, the PT, the only party that was more than a collection of regional notables and their underlings. Alongside this trio, however, in Brazil’s open-list proportional representation in very large constituencies, a plethora of smaller parties of no ideological orientation, contraptions for extracting public funds and favours for their leaders, proliferated. In these conditions, no president has ever led a party with more than a quarter of the seats in a Congress through which all significant legislation must pass, making coalitions a condition of government, and distribution of lucrative prebends a condition of coalitions.
For twenty years, the presidency was held by only two parties, the PSDB and the PT. The former, committed to delivering what it called a salutary ‘shock of capitalism’ to the country, had little difficulty finding allies in the traditional oligarchies of the North-East, and the eternal predators of the PMDB. These were natural allies for a liberal-conservative regime. When Lula came to power, the PT did not want to depend on them. Instead it set out to build a majority in Congress from the morass of smaller parties, each more venal than the next. To avoid them taking too many Ministries, the customary prize for support, it doled out monthly cash payments to them under the counter. When this system, the so-called mensalão, was exposed in 2005, it looked for a time as if it might bring down the government. But Lula remained popular among the poor, and by shedding key aides and switching to a more conventional reliance on the PMDB to secure majorities Congress, survived the uproar and in due course was triumphantly re-elected. By his second term the PMDB was a stable brace of his administration, enjoying in exchange a swathe of satisfactory nominations in the machinery of government, central and local, from Ministries on downwards. When the term came to an end, its Speaker in the Lower Chamber, Michel Temer, a personification of the procedures and outlook of the party, was chosen by Lula to be vice-president under Dilma, yoking a veteran of back-room carve-up and corridor intrigue to a political tyro.
The economic bequests detonated first. By 2013, the middle classes had soured on the government, and rising prices were causing popular tension in the big cities. Lula had pumped money—increased minimum wages, cheaper credits, cash transfers—for the poor into private consumption, rather public services, most of which remained dire. In the winter, higher fares for public transport ignited protests led by young left-wing activists in São Paulo. Police crack-downs amplified them into massive street demonstrations throughout Brazil. With increasing right-wing participation and backing from the country’s powerful establishment media, these swiftly became a free-for-all against politicians in general and the PT in particular. In a fortnight Dilma’s approval ratings dropped from 57 to 30 per cent. Combining spending cuts and further, inexpensive welfare measures, she recovered ground over the next months. But in the summer of 2014, buried political mines from the past began to explode. Federal police taps on money-laundering operations in a Brasilia car-wash—lava jato—revealed widespread corruption in the giant state oil company Petrobras, which at the time boasted one of the largest stock valuations in the world. A stream of leaks from the investigation into it, blared crescendo by the media, indicated connexions to the PT going back to Lula’s time. These resonated in an already highly charged atmosphere, formed by the public trial in late 2012—seven years after they were accused—of the party’s leading actors in the mensalão affair.
So when Dilma ran for re-election in 2014, she faced a far more aggressive opposition than in 2010. As then, it was the PSDB candidate who reached the second round of the presidential contest against her. This time it was a sprig of the traditional political class of Minas Gerais, Aécio Neves, playboy grandson of the politician who would have been the first post-military president in 1985, had he not died before his inauguration. Confident of victory, attacking Dilma ferociously for incompetence, profligacy and suspected delinquency, he came close to beating her. After a combative but clumsy campaign, in which she performed poorly in debate, Dilma achieved a narrow majority on a pledge never to accept the austerity she accused her opponent of planning to inflict on the population. Before even taking office, she was in difficulties. Perhaps thinking to repeat Lula’s opening gambit on first becoming president, when he began with strict economic orthodoxy to reassure the markets, expanding social expenditure only after he had consolidated public finances, she picked a Chicago-trained bank executive for minister of finance to signal a new frugality, and betrayed her campaign promises with a conventional retrenchment hitting popular incomes. Having alienated her left, she then antagonized her right by attempting to prevent the PMDB from claiming the powerful position, once occupied by Temer, of Speaker of the House, on whose cooperation passage of legislation generally depended—only to be roundly defeated by the party’s victorious candidate Eduardo Cunha, a byword for ruthless cunning and lack of scruple. The PT, which had won just 13 per cent of the vote for Congress, was now extremely vulnerable in the legislature.
The PSDB, meanwhile, had not taken its defeat for the presidency lying down. Furious at being baulked of a triumph on which he had counted, Aécio lodged charges of illegal expenditure against the winning ticket with the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, hoping to get the result annulled and a new poll instituted, in which—given popular disillusion with Dilma’s economic course—he could this time be sure of success. But the PSDB, a conglomerate of well-heeled notables in which others had their own ambitions, was not of one mind behind him. The party’s unsuccessful candidate for the presidency in 2002 and 2010, José Serra, now a Senator for São Paulo, saw a different path to the eviction of Dilma, one that could broaden support for her ouster and play into his own hands. The drawback of Aécio’s route was that it threatened Temer as well as Dilma. It therefore had small appeal for the PMDB. Serra was close to Temer; in São Paulo politics, they had long been associates. Better then to launch impeachment proceedings against Dilma in Congress, where Cunha could be expected to give them a favourable hearing. Success would automatically make Temer president and give Serra—become his quasi-prime minister—the ideal launching pad to succeed him, pipping Aécio for the presidency.
Temer understandably warmed to this scheme, and surreptitiously the two coordinated moves to realize it. Behind them lay, yet more discreetly, the PSDB’s elder statesman Cardoso, an intimate friend and counsellor of Serra, who had never liked Aécio. It only remained to work out a pretext for impeachment. Consensus was reached on a technicality: Dilma had broken the law by deferring payments on public accounts to make them look better for electoral purposes. That this had been a long-standing practice, common to previous governments, scarcely mattered. For by mid 2015, the political landscape had been transformed by an earthquake engulfing the manoeuvres in Brasília.
From the start, the Lava Jato investigations had fallen under the jurisdiction of the home state of the first mid-level culprit to be caught, the doleiro (black market money-changer) Alberto Youssef: the atypically middle-class provincial society of Paraná, in the south of Brazil. There Moro, a native son who had cut his teeth as an assistant in the mensalão trial, was the presiding judge in its capital Curitiba. His operational model, as he made clear in an article published a decade before Lava Jato was launched, would be the Mani Pulite prosecutions of corruption in Italy by a pool of magistrates in Milan, which had destroyed the governing parties in the early nineties, bringing the First Republic to an end. Moro singled out two features of their campaign for praise: the use of preventive detention to secure delations, and calibrated leaks to the press about ongoing investigations, to goad public opinion into putting pressure on targets and courts. Dramatization in the media mattered more than the presumption of innocence, which Moro explained was subject to pragmatic considerations.1 In charge of Lava-Jato, he proved an exceptional impresario. Successive operations—raids, round-ups, hand-cuffs, confessions—were given maximum publicity, with tip-offs to press and television, each carefully assigned a number (to date there have been fifty-seven, resulting in over a thousand years of jail sentences), and typically a code name calculated for operatic effect from the cinematic, classical or biblical imaginary: Bidone, Dolce Vita, Casablanca, Nessun Dorma, Erga Omnes, Aletheia, Last Judgment, Déjà Vu, Omertà, Abyss, etcetera. Italians pride themselves on a national flair for the spectacle: Moro’s management left his Milanese mentors looking flat-footed.
For a year, the Lava Jato operations focussed above all on former directors of Petrobras, charged with receiving and dispensing huge bribes. Then in the spring of 2015, they brought down the first prominent cadre of the PT, its treasurer João Vaccari Neto, arrested in April. A few weeks later the heads of the two largest construction firms in the country, Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez, each a continental conglomerate operating across Latin America, were hauled away. By now, demonstrations in support of Moro, clamouring for punishment of the PT and removal of Dilma were building up and putting Congress under siege, where Cunha—still formally part of the ruling coalition—edged towards clearing the docket for impeachment. Isolated and weakened, Dilma accepted her PT ministers’ advice that Lula must be called in, as the only person skilled enough in the ways of a Congress she had been unable to master, to try and save the situation. He swiftly set about mending fences with the PMDB. As he did so, it suddenly and spectacularly came out that Cunha had millions of dollars in secret bank accounts in Switzerland. Whereupon, himself now threatened with destruction by Lava Jato, Cunha offered a pact of mutual protection: he would block proceedings against Dilma if the government blocked proceedings against him. Lula urged acceptance of the deal, and at summit level in Brasília an understanding was reached. But the national leadership of the PT, based in São Paulo, fearing news of this arrangement could only confirm public perception of the party as utterly corrupt, instructed its deputies to vote for action against Cunha. In retaliation, he immediately cleared the PSDB-crafted charges against Dilma for deliberation in Congress.
Moro, meanwhile, was preparing his coup de grâce. In the first week of March 2016, Operation Aletheia seized Lula in the early hours of the morning, taking him in for interrogation, as camera-crews of press and television, tipped off in advance, blazed around him in the darkness. He was now under formal Lava Jato investigation. Further sensation followed. A phone call from Dilma to Lula to discuss the modalities of appointing him as her chief of staff in Brasília was wire-tapped by Moro, and instantly released to the press. Since politicians of ministerial rank, as well as members of Congress, enjoy immunity from prosecution unless authorized by the Supreme Court, there was uproar. This was simply a way of shielding Lula from arrest. The appointment was struck down by two judges in Brasília, the first a public vociferator against the PT on Facebook, the second the well-known placeman of the PSDB on the Supreme Court.
Street pressure for impeachment was by now enormous: across Brazil, 3.6 million demonstrators clamouring for Dilma’s eviction in mid-March. Yet it was still far from clear that the necessary two-thirds majority for impeachment could be reached in Congress. Within short order, however, a Lava Jato raid uncovered the notebooks Odebrecht had kept, logging ciphered payments to what was widely rumoured to be some two hundred Brazilian politicians, of virtually all parties. At this, the sirens went off in the political class. Within days Romero Jucá, former leader of government in the Senate, another top power-broker in the PMDB, was taped telling a colleague that ‘this bleeding has got to be stopped’. Since ‘the guys in the Supreme Court’ had told him this was impossible so long as Dilma was in place and the media in full cry after her, he went on, she had to be replaced by Temer right away, and a national government formed, backed by the Supreme Court and the army—he had been talking with generals. Only in this way could Lava Jato be halted before it got to themselves.2 Within a fortnight the House voted for Dilma’s impeachment, Cunha presiding. Having served his purpose, Moro could then pick off Cunha. The Supreme Court ordered Congress to dismiss him as Speaker, in due course he was expelled from the House, and ended in prison. After a required interval, the Senate condemned Dilma on the indictment passed by the House, and Temer took over the presidency. In April 2018, Lula was arrested on a charge of corruption in the prospective acquisition of a sea-front apartment, of which he had never become owner. Tried in Curitiba that summer, he was sentenced to nine years in jail; when he appealed, they were increased to twelve. Its first president behind bars, its second driven ignominiously from office, its popular standing at an all-time low, the wreckage of the PT looked all but complete.
That this was not effectually so, reaction to Lula’s incarceration began to show. Enemies in the PSDB had counted on him going into exile rather than prison, flight to safety sealing his fall from grace. Taken aback by his stoical acceptance of jail, they failed to reckon with the sympathy his imprisonment might arouse. Within a few months, polls showed he was once again the most popular leader in the country, and ahead, even disqualified as a felon, of all others in the 2018 contest for the presidency in 2018. Lula’s personal appeal, however, was one thing, the future of the PT another. The party had suffered a debacle without precedent in Brazilian history. What kind of reckoning was required to redress it? In its years of power, it had done little to foster a culture of self-critical analysis or reflection on where it, or the country, was going: no newspaper, no journals, no radio or TV stations. Intellectuals had been useful as a bridge to public visibility in the early days. Once in office, though many—perhaps most—continued to support it, the party essentially ignored them, in a myopic philistinism for which all that mattered was electoral calculation.
Undeserved and unappreciated though he was, the party possessed one political thinker of the first rank. Son of an Austrian Jewish immigrant who became a leading Left economist in Brazil, André Singer was a founder member of the PT in São Paulo in 1980. He began as journalist, rising to a senior position in the less conservative of the city’s two newspapers, the Folha, before becoming press secretary and presidential spokesman for Lula during his first term in Brasília, at the end of which he resigned to take up an academic career as a political scientist. In 2012, he produced the first serious study of the trajectory of its rule and of its social support under Lula, Os sentidos do Lulismo. Though written with respectful admiration for what had been achieved, it was too calmly clear-eyed about the nature and causes of the ‘weak reformism’ it represented to find favour with the party, and had little echo within it. Last summer he published a sequel, O Lulismo em crise. Um quebra-cabeça do período Dilma (2011–2016) [Lulism in Crisis: A Conundrum of the Dilma Period], which—even if there is little sign of it yet—may be hoped will meet less silence. From time to time, in different countries, books are compared to Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, but as a dazzling synthesis of class analysis, political narrative and historical imagination, none has ever really approached it till this tour de force from Brazil. Singer’s tone, cool and sober, passion contained rather than expressed, is quite different from the blaze of Marx’s caustic irony and metaphoric intensity, and the events at issue have been, so far at any rate, less blood-soaked and precipitous. But the kind of intelligence at work, and its scope, are kin.
The puzzle Singer sets out to resolve is why, from the peak of its success under Lula, the formula of power he constructed disintegrated into such wholesale disaster. His opening argument is that it was no familiar case of entropy in office. Dilma was not just a maladroit imitation of her predecessor, bungling in pursuit of the same policies. She had objectives of her own that differed from his. These Singer characterizes as a combination of ‘developmentalism’ and ‘republicanism’. The first, he argues, was a bid to accelerate growth by way of a more ambitious use of the tools available to the national state: control of interest rates, public lending, fiscal incentives, import duties, social expenditures—in sum a significantly more interventionist set of economic policies than the PT had attempted hitherto. By the second, he means republicanism in the classic sense, as reconstructed by Pocock: that is, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century belief that corruption was a perpetual danger to the integrity of the state and the safety of citizens, vigilance against which was a condition of liberty. Where Lula’s had been a weak reformism, Dilma’s project aimed at a stronger version.
Its effect, however, was—Singer’s second argument—to knock away two critical struts of Lula’s system, his entente with financial capital and his pact with clientelism. With the aim of stimulating investment, Dilma’s ‘new economic matrix’ sought to favour domestic industry—which had long complained of Brazil’s sky-high interest rates, over-valued currency, weak protection of local manufactures, and costly energy inputs—in the belief that its underlying interests divided it from banks, securities firms and pension funds that benefited from these. But in Brazil the different sectors of capital were too closely intertwined for such a strategy of separation to work. Denounced in the media as a meddling, anti-liberal statism, business soon closed ranks against it. More investment was not forthcoming, growth declined, profits dropped, strikes multiplied. The employers’ federation turned extremely hostile.
Meanwhile, by refusing to engage in the traditional do ut des of Brazil’s pork-barrel politics and purging the government of its most blatantly compromised ministers, Dilma was antagonizing forces in Congress on which her majority in the legislature depended, for whom corruption was a condition of existence. After close-grained analysis of the fractions of capital, Singer situates these tensions in a striking overview of the longue durée of the party structure in Brazil, from the post-war period to the present. Throughout, three components persisted. From 1945 to 1964, when the military seized power, there was a party on the liberal right of the spectrum, representing bankers, urban middle classes and a section of the rural oligarchy, the UDN; a popular party on the left of the spectrum, the PTB, appealing to the working-class and urban poor; and an intermediate party, the PSD, based on the larger part of the traditional landowning class and its dependents in the countryside and smaller provincial towns. Singer dubs this last ‘the party of the interior’, an amoeba-like force with no distinct ideological identity, neither right nor left nor centre, slithering in whichever direction temporary power and emoluments, democratic or undemocratic, lay. Twenty years later, after the military stepped down, this trio essentially reappeared in the shape of the PSDB, PT and PMDB. Neither of the first two could govern without the parasitic assistance of the third, with its wide-flung capillary network of local office-holders, and nearly continuous control of the powerful presidency of the Senate. Any hint of republicanism was anathema to it.
What of the PT’s own constituency? Although, ever since 1945, a pole of capital and a pole of labour were clearly discernible within the political system, conflict between them was always overdetermined by a vast sub-proletariat, urban and rural, living in pre-modern conditions whose existence skewed the system away from a class confrontation to a populist opposition between the rich and poor, in which the poor were as available for demagogic or clientelist capture by politicians of conservative as they were of radical stamp. By 2006 Lula’s social policies, dramatically reducing poverty, had for the first time made this mass, much of it subsisting in the informal economy, an electoral bastion of the PT, which Dilma inherited. Millions had been lifted from acute hardship and knew to whom they owed it. But, egged on by interested journalists and the ideology of the time, the regime took to boasting of its achievement as the creation of a ‘new middle class’ in Brazil, when in fact the social promotion of most of those affected was not only more modest—formal jobs and higher minimum wages raising them to something like the position of a new working class—but also more precarious. Politically, Singer argues, the official propaganda boomeranged: its effect was to invite identification with the consumerist individualism of the actual middle class, rather than with the existing working class.
Once growth went negative, downward mobility struck many of those just risen. Frustration at this reversal of expectations was particularly sharp among youth who had gained from the popular expansion of higher education, however indifferent in quality, that had been another of the benefits extended by the PT to the poor, and who now found they had no access to the kind of jobs for which they had been led to hope. Here was the combustible mass that became critical in the great street uprising of June 2013—some 1.5 million in the protests at their height—that would be the watershed in the fortunes of Dilma and her party. Singer’s meticulous breakdown of its participants—statistics beyond the dreams of Marx’s time—shows that 80 per cent of those who marched in the demonstrations were youths or young adults, below the age of forty. Eighty per cent had been or were involved in some form of higher education, as against 13 per cent of the population as a whole; yet half had incomes of no more than between two and five minimum wages, where under two wages is the poverty line. Those below it, the sub-proletariat proper—comprising half the population—were marginal in the events, making up less than a sixth of the explosion. Decisive in the evolution and outcome of the protests, however, was the ability of the other third of the marchers, the true middle class, to secure the support of the half that believed itself or aspired to be middle class too, in a generalized indignation against the government, and beyond it the political class as a whole—dynamic activists of a youthful new right mobilizing social media to bond the two together as a force. Structurally, though not sociologically, it might be said that in Singer’s vivid account the uprising of 2013 occupies a position not unlike la pègre in Marx’s account of 1848.
The victors who captured the movement, and made it into a springboard for what would become much larger and more deadly assaults on the government two years later, were the newest cohorts of the urban middle class in the big cities in the south of the country. Big business, the working class and the poor had all benefited from PT rule. Professionals, middle management, service personnel and small employers had not. Their incomes had increased proportionately less than that of the poor, and their status had been eroded by new forms of popular consumption and social mobility, undermining deference. Taking for granted a traditional hierarchy, with its colour connotations, and the availability of the largest number of domestic servants per capita in the world (over seven million of them) this stratum had always been a breeding-ground of reaction. Formally comprising the ‘modern’ sector of Brazilian society, it was of sufficient size to have long exercised a veto on changes that would make the rest of the country less backward. But if it was large enough to frustrate social inclusion of the poor in national development, it was too small to have much hope of dominating presidential elections, once the suffrage was extended after the war. It was therefore always tempted to short-circuit these in a coup. In 1964 much of the urban middle class had conspired with officers to launch a military coup. In 2016 it mounted a parliamentary coup, overthrowing the president within the framework of the constitution, rather than suspending it.
This time it was not the military, but the judiciary that acted as the lever for an overturn which this stratum, organized simply in electoral terms, as a party or set of parties, could not achieve. Magistrates, closer in their career and culture to the civilian mass of the middle class than officers, were more organic allies in a common cause. Dissenting from both of the opposite characterizations current in Brazil of the role of the judges in Lava Jato—either fearless scourges of corruption, impartially upholding the rule of law, or ruthless manipulators of it for partisan political ends—Singer views their operations as at once genuinely republican in effect, yet unmistakeably factious in direction. Republican: how else could the imprisonment of the richest and most powerful tycoons in the land be described? Not without reason, another of the operations of Lava Jato was named, after the indignant response of a Petrobras boss on being put under arrest, Que pais é esse?—‘What kind of country is this?’ Factious: how else could the systematic targeting of the PT, and sparing of other parties till Dilma was brought down, be described? Not to speak of the blurting of political sympathies and antipathies on Facebook, the smirking photo-ops of Moro with ornaments of the PSDB and the rest. The contradiction was a inextricable knot, entangled with that of the PT itself: the judges ‘factious and republican’, the party ‘created to change institutions and swallowed by them’.3
Having laid out the course on which Dilma embarked on taking office, the economic and legislative obstacles into which it ran, the party system in which it was encased, the array of class forces confronting it, and the judicial siege that eventually encircled it, Singer ends with a graphic narrative of the sequence of moves and counter-moves by the individual political actors in the hurly-burly towards impeachment that finished her off. Here personalities are given full weight. Dilma’s intentions were more than honourable. She wanted to advance, not just preserve, the social gains achieved by the PT under Lula, and to free them from the connivances with which they had been bought. But politically ill at ease, she compensated with rigidity, and though in private she could be relaxed and charming enough, in office she brooked neither criticism nor advice. For Singer, she must be held responsible for two fatal and avoidable errors, in each case refusing to heed her mentor. The first was her decision to stand for president a second time in 2014, rather than stepping down to allow Lula to return, as he had expected and wished to do. Out of a culpable vanity, or a natural pride in the autonomy of her project? At one point, Lula publicly allowed that he would be a candidate if there was a danger of the PSDB making a comeback, as there soon was. But personal bluntness was not his style: he never raised the matter directly with her. The political convention in Brazil, as in the US, is that an incumbent president runs for a second term, and he respected it.
The second charge against Dilma was her rejection of any deal with Cunha to save herself from impeachment, which Lula believed a necessity and sought to reach. For Singer, there lay the critical difference of character. Politically, he observes, Lula would bend, but not break; Dilma would break rather than bend. Blackmailers are never satisfied, she said: yield, and they will always come back for more. Without putting it in so many words, Singer sides with Lula. Politics as a vocation, wrote Weber, requires acceptance of ‘ethical paradoxes’. Citing him, Singer suggests that this was an obligation—his word—that Dilma declined. It was such because the consequences of not bending were so grave. In stubbornly resisting a deal, she opened the door to a ‘retrogression of the nation of unpredictable proportions’.4
In an otherwise magisterial reconstruction of Dilma’s downfall, these concluding judgments seem questionable. Singer, it might be said, is both a touch too uncritical, and too critical, of Dilma. What tells against the attribution of a clear-cut republicanism to her, at any rate at the start, are the two key advisers she chose when she ran for president the first time, and installed next to her when she won. Head of her campaign, and then chief of staff in Brasília, was the most notoriously corrupt single politician in the ranks of the PT, Antonio Palocci, toast of big business when he was Lula’s minister of finance, before being forced to resign after a particularly ugly scandal in 2006.5 His reappearance in 2010 was greeted with delight by the Economist, but it soon emerged that in the interim he had acquired a massive unexplained fortune in consultancies and real estate operations, and Dilma had to get rid of him. Predictably, this abject figure would then be the only PT leader to turn delator in Lava Jato. After he was gone, João Santana remained by her side: her most intimate counselor, and by many accounts a critical influence on her decisions. Once a songwriter in a back-up group for Caetano Veloso, then a star investigative reporter, before becoming the top-paid marqueteiro—all-purpose commercial campaign manager and brand-fabricator—in the country, Santana was put into marketing orbit by Palocci in his home town and plied his services on an international scale; among his clients was the billionaire presidential looter of Angola, José Eduardo dos Santos. He lasted six years with Dilma, before Lava Jato caught up with him for a $10 million bribe he had salted away in Panama. Naturally, being a mercenary, he too bought leniency with delation. In both cases, Dilma’s judgment was less than republican. Not herself a product of the PT, which she had joined only in 2001, she could not so easily escape its habitus.
On the other hand, the criticisms that she damaged the party by not passing the baton to Lula in 2014, and endangered the country by refusing the pact with Cunha he urged in 2016, imply two counterfactuals against which the logic of the historical situation speaks. Had Lula rather than Dilma run against Aécio in 2014, he would certainly have won by a wider margin, and would have been unlikely to make such a clumsily abrupt turn towards austerity, alienating the poor, as she did. But the economic conjuncture did not permit a repetition of the stimulus that allowed him to ride out the global financial crisis of 2008 as a mere ‘ripple’ in Brazil. The commodities super-cycle was over, all economic signals were pointing down: the poison pills left by his own rule were being consumed. Furthermore, the storm of Lava Jato would have hit his presidency with yet greater force than it did Dilma’s. Personally, he was much more exposed to its attack. There would have been no need to resort to budgetary technicalities for an impeachment: inevitably it would have been much more broadside, with even more deafening clamour on the streets and screens of the country. His traditional political skills in handling Congress might still have averted a fate that he had escaped once before, at the time of the mensalão, in the best of cases perhaps allowing him to limp to the end of his term. But the price would have been three years of being manacled with Cunha in such common moral-political odium that, in all likelihood, retribution at the polls in 2018 would have been even more devastating. There were good reasons why not just Dilma, but the PT itself, rejected collusion with Cunha. The price in credibility, which was already so damaged, was too high, the pay-off too fleeting.
The judges themselves, of course, had scarcely more scruple in tolerating Cunha, so long as he held the keys to impeachment, than the politician they had in their sights. Singer’s account of the outlook and impact of the magistrates of Lava Jato is a model of level-headed analysis. Still, it leaves two questions open. Republican yet factious, yes: but what would be the ultimate balance between the two—merely of equal effect? Were these, moreover, the only two elements in the make-up of the Brazilian judiciary? Singer’s focus is on the pool in Curitiba. But it was operating within a legal system that predated and overtopped it. There, of decisive importance was the relationship between police, prosecutors and judges. Formally speaking, each is a body independent of the other. Police gather evidence, prosecutors bring charges, judges pronounce verdicts (in Brazil juries exist only for cases of homicide). In practice, however, Lava Jato fused these three functions into one, prosecutors and police working under the supervision of the judge, who controlled investigations, determined indictments and delivered sentences. The negation of ordinary principles of justice in such a system, even without Moro’s dismissal of presumption of innocence, is plain: powers of accusation and condemnation are no longer distinguished.
To these, moreover, were added in the course of these years three further powers. Delacão premiada—informing for a reward—introduced the practice, extended from judges to prosecutors, of threatening persons under arrest with crushing sentences unless they implicated others in whom the investigation was interested: in effect, judicial blackmail. The scale of abuse to which this power gives rise can be read off from the treatment accorded the wealthiest magnate netted by Lava Jato. Marcelo Odebrecht was sentenced to nineteen years in prison for corruption to the tune of $35 million. Once he turned informer, these were reduced to two and a half, and he was released from jail without further ado. The incentive to supply whatever claims might be useful for other cases the magistrate is seeking to prosecute is obvious. Judges can even bestow pardons for them. A further facility afforded them was abolition of the rule that appeal procedures had to be exhausted before an accused could be imprisoned.
Last but not least was the adoption, dating essentially from the mensalão trial, of the concept of domínio de fato—condemnation in the absence of any direct evidence of participation in a crime, on the grounds that the accused must have been in charge of it. This was the basis on which Lula’s chief of staff Dirceu was sentenced, for his hierarchical position as the head of political administration in Brasília. The notion was borrowed from the principle of Tatherrschaft, developed by the German jurist Claus Roxin for Nazi war crimes. Roxin, however, has protested against Brazilian abuse of it: organizational position did not suffice for the crime as he defined it, there had to be some proof of giving a command.6 Moro, however, dispensed even with organizational hierarchy, in deploying domínio de fato to convict Lula of the intention of receiving an apartment from Odebrecht which he never used or owned. The value of the property was $600,000 dollars, for which he was jailed for twelve years: over two-thirds of Odebrecht’s punishment, for less than 2 per cent of the sum for which Odebrecht was charged. The ratios speak for themselves.
In such cases, as processed in Curitiba, the combination of republican zeal and factious bias applies. Moving up the judicial ladder to Brasília, where the Supreme Court (STF) presides at the top of it, the same cannot be said. There, neither ethical rigour nor ideological fervour are anywhere in sight: motivations are of an altogether different, more squalid order. Unlike its counterparts anywhere else in the world, the STF combines three functions: it interprets the constitution, acts as the last court of appeal in civil and criminal cases and, crucially, is alone empowered to try public officials—members of Congress and ministers—who otherwise enjoy immunity from prosecution, popularly known as foro privilegiado, in all other courts of the land. Its eleven members are appointed by the executive; their confirmation by the legislature, quite unlike in the US, is no more than pro forma. Previous experience on the bench is not required—only three of the current justices have any; mere practice as a lawyer or a prosecutor, with a smattering of academic credentials, is the usual background.
Though chosen by the government of the day, serving till mandatory retirement, selection has traditionally been based not so much on ideological affinity as personal connexion: of the current batch, one is a former lawyer for Lula, another a crony of Cardoso, a third a cousin of his disgraced predecessor Collor. The case load of the court is grotesque, with over 100,000 cases before it in 2017, allocated for preliminary consideration by lottery to individual judges, each vested—no other Supreme Court in the world features this—with arbitrary power to stall or to speed a case as they please, delaying some for years, expediting others post-haste. In practice, there are no deadlines. When a case is cleared for decision by the plenum, hearings are not only public, but—another unique feature—televised live, if the incumbent president of the court, who rotates, sees fit. In such sessions, decorum is at a minimum, grand-standing at a premium.
By the time pressure for impeachment began to build up, eight of the eleven members of the court had been picked by Lula or Dilma. But since appointments had seldom been highly political in a partisan sense, only one member of the court had a clear-cut ideological profile, as a hawk for the PSDB: Cardoso’s intimate Gilmar Mendes. The rest were not of any particular colour, egoism and opportunism generally counting for more than any other –ism. But once the third function of the court, trial of politicians, acquired a salience it had never known before, from the mensalão onwards, those who owed their appointment to Lula and Dilma were on their mettle to show their independence of the PT. It was the first black member of the court, Joaquim Barbosa, put there by Lula, who handed down sentences of unprecedented harshness on PT cadres in the mensalão trial. But as events were to show, this was not so much independence in the sense of an impartial justice, as substitution of a rather nominal dependence on patrons by a more telling submission to the media.
From the start, the pool in Curitiba used leaks and planted stories in the press to short-circuit due process, convicting targets before trial in public opinion, in accord with the Brazilian wisdom—valid, of course, across the world—that ‘public opinion is what gets published’. Such leaks are juridically forbidden. Moro employed them scot-free, systematically. He could do so, because the media which he used as his megaphone intimidated the judges of the STF, who feared denunciation of themselves if they demurred. When Moro was instructed by one justice on the court that on habeas corpus grounds he must release a Petrobras director he was holding in prison, he simply went to the media, explaining that if so he must release drug traffickers too. His superior immediately backed down. When he broke no less than three regulations in tapping and publishing the phone-call between Lula and Dilma, and received a feeble reprimand from the same judge, he retorted that he had acted in the public interest, and—since he was now fêted in the press as a national hero—suffered not even a slap on the wrist.
Craven in covering illegalities below, the STF was no better—servility and self-interest competing—in performance of its tasks above. If the attorney-general brings charges against a member of Congress or the government, the Court determines whether to hold a trial, its decision requiring ratification by Congress to be acted on. Charges were brought against Cunha as soon as his Swiss accounts were revealed. The Court did not stir for six months, until he had set impeachment in motion. Then it not only accepted the indictment overnight, but eager to obfuscate its inaction, peremptorily ordered his dismissal as Speaker, which it had no constitutional authority to do. As Cunha remarked with cynical accuracy: ‘If it was urgent, why it did take them six months?’7 When a PT—former PSDB—Senator was caught on tape discussing ways of spiriting a Petrobras boss out of prison, the Court acted with lightning speed, arresting him within twenty-four hours. Why? To cover its own embarrassment: he had let drop he was on terms with the judges, and sounding them out on the case. His fate? Once he offered due delation, charges were quietly dropped, and he was restored to the Senate. In its lack of any principled compass, a critic has observed, a Supreme Court which was supposed to be a power moderating tensions in the Constitution, had become—a stronger word is in order than his—an abscess generating them.8
Holding out for less than eighteen months before she was evicted from the Presidential Palace, Dilma’s second mandate was barren of achievement. Temer’s annexation of it, lasting twice as long, was altogether more consequential. Acting with a speed and resolve that made clear the depth of the planning behind impeachment, the new regime passed three classical pieces of neo-liberal statecraft in short order, altering the economic constitution of the country at a stroke. Within a month of Dilma’s suspension, legislation freezing social expenditures for twenty years—no increase beyond the rate of inflation—was in front of Congress. No sooner was it passed with a two-thirds majority than the country’s labour code was comprehensively scrapped: the legal limit of a working day was extended from ten to twelve hours, permissible lunch break cut from an hour to thirty minutes, protection of employees, full or part-time, reduced; check-off of union dues abolished; plus sundry other deregulations of the labour market. The new rules gave a generalized green light to outsourcing of employment and zero-hour contracts. Next up was radical pension reform, increasing contributions and raising retirement ages, to bring down the costs of constitutionally mandated social security in the name of reducing the national debt. Since beneficiaries of the most lavish payments under the existing system come from the top ranks of the bureaucracy and political class, this was a trickier proposition.
But before it could come to a vote, Temer looked within an ace of following Dilma out of office. In the spring of 2017 he was taped in a secret meeting with Joesley Batista, head of the giant corporation JBS, in the garage of the Presidential Palace discussing hush money to Cunha—who had just been sentenced and could implicate him in any number of corrupt schemes—unaware that his interlocutor was collaborating with the police. The tape was immediately broadcast on national television by Globo, to an uproar without precedent. In the same week, one of his aides could be seen on screen receiving a suitcase containing 500,000 reais from an emissary of Batista. For the Supreme Court to act on the charges immediately laid against him by the attorney-general, the House had to authorize proceedings by a two-thirds vote. Beyond shame, a majority rejected any investigation.
Two months later, the attorney-general sent the STF a much wider indictment of Temer along with six other PMDB leaders, three of them already behind bars—one caught with a cash hoard of R$51 million in banknotes in his home. Once again, the House blocked any action. A year later, yet another major scandal exploded, federal police bringing charges of long-standing corruption in the docks at Santos against Temer. By then, paralyzed politically by over a year of protecting himself, though he had survived every revelation he had no agenda left. The conventional stabilization plan accompanying his initial neo-liberal measures had ended the Dilma recession, but the pick-up was weak—growth asthmatic, living standards depressed, 13 million unemployed. Temer’s own credibility sub-zero, his party ran the finance minister who had presided over this recovery as its candidate for the presidency in 2018. He got 1 per cent of the vote. Yet this muted interim had, all the same, cleared the way for a high-pitched obbligato to come.
II
By mid 2016, the rule of the Workers’ Party had sunk under the dual mill-stones of economic deterioration and political corruption. But by the end of 2017, the (no longer P) MDB had fallen even lower in the polls, for the same two reasons. Since the PSDB was part of Temer’s support system along with the PMDB, with prominent members of the party in the government, it too could not escape the stench—Aécio, its chairman, had been taped demanding a large bribe from Joesley’s corporation, and like Temer had only avoided trial by the STF through the protection of a Congress packed with confederates. In this devastated landscape, Lula—for all the sentence pronounced on him, still on appeal—remained far the most popular politician in the country, and if nothing were done about it, the most likely victor in the oncoming presidential election. With unprecedented speed—the average time for judging an appeal was cut by three-quarters to eliminate the danger—the verdict not just confirming but increasing his sentence was handed down in January 2018. For two months his lawyers were able to delay his imprisonment, and in the respite he gave a set of three extended interviews published as a book, A verdade vencerá [The Truth Will Triumph] in March. The title is misleading, suggesting a rebuttal of charges against him which are scarcely mentioned in what becomes a memorable, often moving, self-portrait of a politician of exceptional intuition and realist intelligence, that explains why his return to power was so resisted by the Brazilian elites.
As a ruler, Lula’s operating style and political creed were one. He was a trade-unionist who had learnt back in the early eighties not ‘to make demands of the type “80 per cent or nothing”. That way you end up with nothing’. On becoming president in a huge, complex society in 2002, he was always aware that ‘I could never treat the country wishing it were as I am’. It followed that ‘to govern is to negotiate’.9 In opposition, you could be principled. But once you win elections, if you don’t have a majority in parliament, which no president had enjoyed for many years, ‘you have to put your principles on the table to make them practicable’. That meant dealing with adversaries as well as allies, who wanted quid pro quos—offices, above all. Every predecessor had had to do the same. The PMBD was not even the worst such partner; twenty smaller intermediate parties could add up to a majority in Congress, needing to be cozened. ‘You make an agreement with who is there, in Congress. If they are robbers, but have votes, you either have the courage to ask for them, or you lose’.10 Dilma should have made a deal with Cunha. There was no feasible alternative.
But negotiation was one thing, conciliation was another. Asked whether he had not been too conciliatory as president, Lula’s reply was emphatic. ‘A government of conciliation is one where you can do more and don’t want to do it. When you can only do less and end up doing more, it’s almost the beginning of a revolution—and that’s what we did in this country’.11 He had made only such concessions as the situation required. The PT had less than one-fifth of Congress. Had he ever controlled the governorships of twenty-three states and a majority in the Constituent Assembly, like the PMDB in 1988, he would have conceded less and accomplished much more. Even so, ‘we gave the people a standard of living that many armed revolutions never achieved—and in a mere eight years’. He had ended with opinion polls in the skies. But his pride was not to have been a popular president. ‘What I am proudest of is to have changed the relation of the State with society, and of government with society. What I wanted to achieve as president was that the poorest in the country could imagine themselves in my place. That I did.’12
It is an impressive claim. Lula’s largeness—and quickness—of mind and feeling come across vividly throughout the exchanges. Self-critical they are not. Did he pick the wrong successor? He chose Dilma because she was a tough, efficient chief of staff who gave him some peace and quiet in the Presidential Palace. He knew she was politically inexperienced, but aware that she was better educated than he was, he believed she would learn; only later did he realize that she didn’t actually enjoy politics, but he wasn’t wrong to have selected her. Unacknowledged is his probable assumption that just because she was a novice, she would be easier to control than any seasoned cadre of the PT. Nor, more significantly, is there any sense that the dark arts of acquiring mercenary support in Congress imposed not just limits on what he could do—which he admits—but costs to his own party, as it became itself infected by them, which he doesn’t. Projected onto the plane of national politics, the model of economic negotiation he brought from his trade-union background lost its innocence, and bred illusion. Wage agreements don’t involve back-handers to employers. Still less, where power is at stake, can adversaries be trusted not to go va banque.
In a final poignant exchange, after Lula declares that if he returns to power, he will do more—go further—than he did earlier, and his opponents know it, he is asked whether he reckons a return is even possible at this point—he was within a month of serving nine years. This is his wistful reply: ‘Oh, I want to come back. That depends on whether God gives me health, keeps me alive; and it depends on the understanding of members of the Judicial Power who are going to vote, whether they take care to read the records of the case and see the dirty tricks being played there.’13 To the last, Lula believed a deal could be reached that would allow him to run again: that was how negotiations ended. He had fatally underestimated his enemies. They were determined to eliminate him. In April 2018 an ultimate plea for habeas corpus, which would have enabled him to run for the presidency, went to the Supreme Court. The Brazilian Constitution states that no criminal conviction can be executed until it is definitive—that is, all instances of appeal have been exhausted, of which in Lula’s case there were two further levels. The head of the army warned that granting him habeas corpus would threaten the stability of the country, which it was the duty of the Armed Forces to defend. Whereupon the judges did their own duty with alacrity, overturning the constitutional principle by a vote of by 6:5 to bar Lula’s candidacy.14
In the arena thus cleared, the presumptive front-runner for the presidency became the PSDB candidate Geraldo Alckmin, long-time Governor of São Paulo. A wooden figure devoid of charisma, he had lost against Lula in 2006, but was less compromised by support for Temer than his rivals in the party, and enjoyed solid backing from business. The PT was paralyzed, incapable of entering the ring since it still insisted, despite its patent impossibility, that Lula remained its candidate. At the starting gate in the opinion polls, an outsider led the field with a modest 15 per cent support: Jair Bolsonaro, a lone-wolf deputy so isolated he had received just four votes out of 513 when he ran for Speaker in 2017. Marginality in Congress was not, however, necessarily a disadvantage in running for president. Never having belonged to any of the major parties in Congress—roaming between seven smaller ones—nor held any government office, he was untainted by blame for economic hardship or ongoing exposure for corruption, and free to attribute the ills of the former to the latter, castigating the whole political class for both. But his praise of the dictatorship and its torturers, and vituperations at large, appeared such conspicuous handicaps that it was generally assumed that once campaigning got under way, he would be relegated to the also-rans.
Alckmin, by contrast, had not just the PSDB behind him, but promptly the entire so-called Centrão, the swamp of intermediate-sized parties of which Lula complained, giving him half of all TV time assigned to party commercials—in the past a priceless asset. With this, he was widely expected to overwhelm Bolsonaro and other potential rivals. Seven television debates, featuring all the candidates with a minimum representation in Congress, were scheduled once campaigning started. Starting in August, they exposed Bolsonaro’s disadvantage in the medium: poorly prepared and ill at ease, he was ineffectual. The more he was exposed to it, the flakier he was likely to look. In the first week of September, however, this danger was suddenly lifted. Stabbed by a mental case at a provincial rally and rushed to hospital for an emergency operation, he spent the rest of the campaign safely in bed-ridden recovery, shielded not only from debates and interviews, but the demolition that Alckmin’s managers had been readying on their TV slots—official sympathy for a victim who had nearly lost his life now precluded anything so tasteless.
The PT, meanwhile, had been wasting months in futile protestations that Lula remained its candidate, and so lacked even a symbolic presence in the first debates. It was not until five days after Bolsonaro was removed from these that it came to terms with reality and produced a candidate able to run. Its choice was dictated by Lula. Fernando Haddad had for six years been minister of education, where he was widely regarded as a success, responsible for one of the major achievements of PT rule, expansion of the university system and of access to it for the poor. Young and personable, he could have made a much better, more logical successor than Dilma. But he had three handicaps: he was from São Paulo, where older and more powerful heavy-weights of the PT, jealous of their precedence, held sway; he came from an area of the party to the left of Lula’s centre of it; and by background he was an academic—trained in philosophy and economics, teaching political science—set among trade-unionists who distrusted professors.
In 2012 he was instead elected mayor of São Paulo. There he soon fell foul of Dilma, who refused to listen to his plea to raise petrol prices rather than inflict higher bus fares on the city, setting off the protests of 2013 that began her undoing and ended his prospects of re-election (in Paris on a mayoral junket when they started, his own first reactions to them were coercive and dismissive).15 He continued to lack any significant base of his own within the PT, whose functionaries had reason to distrust him. As early as 2003, in a prophetic article written as the PT took power, he had warned of the danger that rather than uprooting the old, deeply engrained patrimonialism of the Brazilian state, it could be captured by it—not, contrary to the views of Cardoso and others, by modern capitalism exploiting the archaisms of a former slave society, but the other way around: an archaic oligarchic system appropriating a modern capitalism for what was of instrumental use to it, preserving the traditional pattern of its power by saturating public authority with its private interests.16 By 2018, amidst the patrimonial shipwreck that had overtaken the PT, his foresight and honesty stood out, and Lula, knowing he was clean and imaginative, imposed him on the party.
The ensuing campaign was a strangely asymmetric one. Starting late, Haddad was cramped by the circumstances of his appointment. With less than a month to go before the first round of the election, he had to establish a national profile of his own, against charges that he was a mere dummy for Lula, while at the same time drawing as effectively as possible on Lula’s continuing popularity and prestige. It rapidly became clear that it was he and Bolsonaro who would face off in the second round, but there was no confrontation between the two. Haddad toured the country, addressing crowds, while Bolsonaro lay at home tweeting. With a fortnight to go to the first round, they were level-pegging in predictions for the second. Then, in the last few days, Bolsonaro suddenly shot ahead, to a closing lead of 46 to 29 per cent. With a gap as large as this, the second round was a foregone conclusion. The Brazilian establishment closed ranks behind the future victor. Haddad fought valiantly on, eventually halving the gap. But the final result left no doubt of the scale of Bolsonaro’s triumph. Winning 55 to 45 per cent, he took every state and every major city in the country outside the north-eastern redoubt of the PT; every social class with the exception of the poorest, living on incomes of less than two minimum wages a month; every age group save the cohort between eighteen and twenty-four; and close to half of all women. Across the country, the Right jubilated in the streets. Yet there had been no great rush to the polls. Voting is compulsory in Brazil, but close to a third of the electorate—42 million voters—opted out, the highest proportion in twenty years.17 The number of spoilt ballots was 60 per cent higher than in 2014. A few days earlier, an opinion poll asked voters their state of mind: 72 per cent replied ‘despondent’, 74 per cent ‘sad’, 81 per cent ‘insecure’.18
In that last response lay, in all probability, the key to Bolsonaro’s sweep. The recession had certainly been critical in the melting away of support for the PT since 2014. Corruption, which had not mattered to the poor when their living standards were rising, did when they were falling and the two could be directly connected, in nightly representations on television of huge sewers swilling with torrents of bank-notes—money stolen from hospitals, schools and playgrounds, in the discourse of Lava Jato. But the substratum of popular reactions to these images was insecurity, physical and existential. Notoriously, daily violence—traditional in the feudatory North-East, modern since the arrival of the drug trade in the South-East—takes 60,000 lives a year, a homicide rate exceeding the killings in Mexico. Police killings account for 10 per cent of these deaths. Less than 10 per cent of murders are elucidated, over 90 per cent committed with impunity. Yet the prisons are teeming: 720,000 people in jail. Two-fifths of inmates, under provisional arrest, await trials that can take two, three or more years to be held. Nearly half the Brazilian population is white; 70 per cent of those murdered, and 70 per cent of those imprisoned, are not. With drugs have come gangs, among the most powerful in the world. In 2006, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) shut down large parts of the city of São Paulo in an uprising against the police, mounted from the prison cells of its leaders. But with the spread of drugs, street crime that is artisanal rather than organizational has proliferated too. Few middle-class households have never had a brush with some form of it. But they are better protected: where mugging at gun- or knife-point are commonest occurrences, the poor rob the poor.
In this jungle, the police are the most ruthless of all predators: no major crime without their take. Divided into separate ‘military’ and ‘civilian’ branches, in a ratio of about three to one, these are statewide, not federal forces. Alongside them fester informal ‘militias’ composed of former policemen acting as security guards or battening on the drug traffic. The small corps of federal police—a tenth the size of the military police at the disposal of the governors of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro—is reserved largely for border control and white-collar crime. Promotion depends on arrest rates, assisted by police practices that scarcely distinguish between sale and consumption of drugs, or require witness for apprehension on the spot, offering a quick route to the criminalization of poverty, as the young and black—for these purposes, pardo and preto scarcely distinguished—are picked off for dispatch to jails where there are twice as many prisoners as places. Since miscegenation was historically so widespread, making a one-drop colour line impossible, racism in Brazil differs from the US pattern, but is no less brutal. Combined with very rapid urbanization, driven as much by the push of peasants expelled from their land as by the pull of city lights, creating pockets of huge inequality with few or no structures of reception, its effect is to displace social conflict into anomic violence. For black youth, crime can become a desperate bid for recognition, a weapon a passport to dignity—guns, rented for a few hours and pointed at the head of a driver or passer-by, becoming a means, too, of forcing them to look at, rather than away, from those otherwise treated as invisible. Successive presidents, relieved of responsibility for public security, since this remains the province of governors, have had little incentive to change what amounts to a convenient brief for inaction. At most, they can declare an emergency and send in troops to occupy slums, as a temporary exercise in public relations, typically leaving hundreds of people killed, otherwise scant trace.
For the popular classes, compounding and intersecting with the ambience of everyday violence has been disintegration of traditional norms of customary, family and sexual life, fanned not just by the diffusion of drugs, but by the media—television, vying with North American models, throwing earlier moral restraints to the winds. Women are the principal victims. Rape is as common as murder in Brazil: over 60,000 a year, 164 a day.19 Amidst all this, economic anxieties are naturally the most permanent and intense of all—insecurity at its most fundamental level, of food and shelter. In such conditions, a desperate desire for order has increasingly been met by Pentecostal religion whose churches offer an ontological framework for making sense of lives on the edge of existence. Their trademark is a theology, not of liberation, but of ‘prosperity’, as the means of earthly salvation. By hard work, self-discipline, correct behavior, and communal support, believers can better themselves—and pay tithes to the pastoral organization helping them. These neo-Protestant churches typically combine shady financial corporations, making millionaires of their chief ministers, with the one organizational form that has effective implantation in poor neighbourhoods reached by no secular party. Today the Evangelical flocks number perhaps some 50 million Brazilians. The Pentecostal enterprises are a power in the land; in 2014 a fifth of the deputies in Congress thought it advantageous to declare an affiliation with them. Four years later, however, the conditions of their following had altered. The success of the theology of prosperity had coincided with the boom years of Lula’s presidency, giving credibility to its optimism of material uplift. By 2018, the promise of steady improvement was gone. For many, everything now seemed to be falling apart.
Nowhere were these stresses more acute and concentrated than in Brazil’s second city. Rio, with half the population of São Paulo, has twice the murder rate. In large part, the lesser violence in Sāo Paulo is due to the unrivalled degree of control exercised across a city built on a plateau by the dominant paulista gang, the PCC, which is in a position to discourage petty assaults—complicating the orderly management of high-value drug traffic—with the heavy weapons at its disposal.20 Rio’s topography—a narrow, winding strip of coastland segmented by forest-clad mountains jutting through to the beaches, favelas crammed in their interstices, often cheek by jowl with wealthy neighbourhoods—hinders such centralized power. There rival gangs—Comando Vermelho, TCP (Terceiro Comando Puro) and others—wage fierce territorial warfare heedless of bystander casualties, and amid greater levels of poverty, a denser arms trade multiplies the random mayhem of individual hold-ups. In early 2018 Temer sent in the army to stopper the violence, where it has remained, as in the past to no lasting effect. In this environment, the PT was never able to take root, still less the PSDB, nor any stable partisan configuration. All three of the last governors of the state are in jail or custody for corruption. What did take political hold, with a grip more extensive than in any other big city, are the Evangelical churches. Cunha, for long Rio’s dominant politician, was a lay preacher linked to the Assembly of God. Its current mayor is a pastor of the rival Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and nephew of its capo Edir Macedo, Brazil’s (much more powerful) answer to the Reverend Moon.
Bolsonaro is a product of this petri dish. He was born in 1955 in the small-town interior of São Paulo, but his career has unfolded entirely in the state of Rio, where at the age of eighteen he entered a military academy to the south of the city in the time of the dictatorship, training as a parachutist. Rising within ten years to the rank of captain, in 1986 he published an article complaining of low salaries in the army and was arrested for indiscipline. On release he plotted a series of minor bomb explosions at various barracks to press home material discontent in the ranks. Probably because he enjoyed some protection from higher officers sympathetic to his aims, if not his methods, an investigation found the evidence against him—though it included maps drawn in his own hand—inconclusive. But he was forced to retire; he was just thirty-three. Yet with scarcely a pause, five months later he got himself elected to the city council in Rio. Within another two years, he had vaulted to Congress on the votes of the Vila Militar, an area in the west of the city built for soldiers and their families containing the largest concentration of troops in Latin America, and of the zone around the military academy where he had been a cadet.
In Brasília, he was soon calling for a regime of exception and the temporary closure of Congress, and the following year—this was 1994—declared he would rather ‘survive in a military regime than die in this democracy’. Over the next two decades, his parliamentary career consisted largely of speeches extolling the military dictatorship and the armed forces; calling for the death penalty, lower jailing ages, easier access to guns; and attacking leftists, homosexuals and other enemies of society. He was returned six times, his electoral base in the barracks and their precincts holding steady at much the same level—around 100,000 votes—until 2014, when it suddenly quadrupled. The jump, little noticed at the time, was more than simply a general effect of the economic crisis, though clearly lifted by it. Anti-petismo had long been a powerful strain within Brazilian political culture21 as a middle-class counterpoint to PT ascendancy, intensified as the media—above all Veja, the country’s leading news magazine—whipped up outrage at corruption to boost the PSDB’s campaigns to capture the presidency. But no-one could compete with Bolsonaro for virulence on this front. He had, moreover, learnt something from the urban uprising of 2013 that the PSDB had not. Then, young activists of a new Right in São Paulo—far ahead of their elders, or the political class generally—had pioneered use of social media to mobilize what became vast anti-government demonstrations. They were radical neo-liberals, which Bolsonaro was not, and there was little contact between the two. But he could see what they had achieved, and set up his own personal operation in Rio in advance of any competitor. By late 2017 he was far ahead of the pack, with seven million followers on Facebook, double the number of the country’s leading newspaper.22
The success of the image he projected in this medium was a reflection not just of the violence of his pronouncements. The impression of Bolsonaro given by press coverage abroad, of an unremitting feral fanaticism, is misleading. The public personality is more ambiguous. Crude and violent certainly, but also with a boyish, playful side, capable of a coarse, on occasion even self-deprecating, good humour far from the glowering bearing of Trump, with whom he is now often compared.23 His background was less grindingly poor than Lula’s—father an unlicensed dentist plying his trade from one small town to another—but plebeian enough by the standards of the Brazilian elite. Though now well-off—owner of five properties (how acquired remains obscure)—a common touch comes naturally. His is a charisma that travels especially well among youth, both popular and more educated.
Married three times, he has four sons by the first two wives and one daughter (‘a moment of weakness’, he likes to joke) by the last, a volunteer for a branch-off from the Assembly of God whose televangelist leader Silas Malafaia (the third-richest pastor in Brazil, reputedly worth $150 million) married the couple, before he was investigated by the federal police and she exited to a Baptist Attitude church near their condominium. Though a Catholic by birth, Bolsonaro has made sure of the best Evangelical credentials, travelling with a pastor to be baptized in Israel. The family is his political fortress. Unlike the Trump household, the three eldest Bolsonaro sons have all made successful electoral careers: one is now a senator for Rio, a second the most voted deputy in history in São Paulo, a third councillor in Rio. They are often seen as a mixture of brains-trust and bodyguard around him, while his wife Michelle is the gate-keeper to the outside world.
Though long a somewhat friendless loner in Congress, Bolsonaro understood the need for allies to reach to the presidency, and showed he had the skills to acquire them. For his running mate, he chose a four-star general, Hamilton Mourão, just retired after becoming too outspoken. Besides openly attacking Dilma’s government, Mourāo had declared that if the judiciary failed to restore order in Brazil, the military should intervene to do so, and floated the idea of an ‘auto-coup’ by an acting president, should that be necessary; in other asides remarked that the country needed to improve its stock, since Indians were lazy, blacks deceitful and Portuguese spoilt. Given that Bolsonaro’s primary political base had always been military, the choice of Mourão was logical and well received in the army. But he also needed to reassure business, wary of him not just as a wild card, but as a congressman with a consistently ‘statist’ voting record, opponent of privatizations and grudging of foreign investment. So, with a smile of engaging candour, he confessed himself ignorant of economics, though capable of learning from those who knew better, and found his mentor in an economist down the road. Paulo Guedes had been trained in Chicago, taught in Chile under Pinochet, and returned to Rio to become a successful financier.24 He was not highly regarded by his fellow economists, and never got much of an academic job in Brazil—but he had co-founded the country’s largest private investment bank and made a fortune from it, then departing for other ventures well before it was caught up in the Lava Jato investigations. A neo-liberal pur sang, his chief remedies for Brazil’s economic ills are privatization of all state enterprises and assets to pay off the national debt, and de-regulation of every transaction in sight. With promises like these, even if some were sceptical they could so easily be kept, capital had little to complain of. Financial markets were squared. Security and economy taken care of, that left corruption. On course for victory after winning the first round, Bolsonaro dispatched Guedes to Moro to get him on board. He needed little persuasion: a few days after the second round, Bolsonaro announced that the trophy judge had accepted his invitation to become minister of justice in the incoming government. The magistrates of Mani Pulite, intending to clean up the Italian political system, put paid to the ruling parties of the First Republic, and were appalled to find they had ushered in Berlusconi. In Brazil the star judge of Lava Jato, after accomplishing much the same, was happy to join an analogue fouler by any measure.
Installed in January, the new regime marks a more radical a break with the era of the PT than the managers of Dilma’s ouster, their own parties decimated at the polls, ever imagined. Central to its composition is the return of the Armed Forces to the front of the political stage, thirty years after the end of the military dictatorship. No institutional adjustment was required. In the eighties, Brazilian democracy was not wrested from the generals by popular revolt, it was passed back to parliament once they considered their mission—eradication of any threat to the social order—accomplished. There was no settlement of accounts with the conspirators and torturers of 1964–85. Not only were they ensured immunity from prosecution, absolved by law from anything they had done, but their overthrow of the Second Republic was given constitutional sanction with the legalization of their rulers as regular presidents of Brazil, and acceptance of legislation by them as normal juridical continuity with the past. In all cases, the South American tyrannies of the sixties and seventies made an amnesty for their crimes a condition for withdrawing to the barracks. Once democracy was consolidated, in every other country these amnesties were partially or completely revoked. Not in Brazil. In every other country, within one to five years a Truth Commission was set up to examine the past. In Brazil it took twenty-six years before such a commission reported, and no action was taken against the perpetrators it named.25 Indeed, in 2010 the Supreme Court declared the amnesty law nothing less than a ‘foundation of Brazilian democracy’. Eight years later, in a speech commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Constitution enacted when the generals had left, the president of the Supreme Court, Dias Toffoli—former legal errand boy of the PT, arguably the most despicable single figure in today’s political landscape, though there is a lot of competition—formally blessed their seizure of power, telling his audience: ‘Today I no longer refer to a coup or a revolution. I refer to the movement of 1964’.
In 2018, the Army had its electoral say early on. In April, its commander-in-chief, Villas Bôas, warned against any grant of habeas corpus to Lula, in the name, as he later explained, of the most cherished value of the armed forces, the stability of the country. Bolsonaro safely elected, he hailed the new president’s victory as a welcome release of national energy, and in retirement in January thanked him for ‘liberation from the ideological shackles sequestering free thought’ in Brazil. To discuss 1964 today was ridiculous, and the Truth Commission a disservice to the country. Questions of public security were also matters of national security. He had taken part in one of the periodic military interventions to restore order in the slums of Rio, and seen how futile civilian incompetence had made them. In that they resembled Brazilian military intervention in Haiti, which had been much too short-lived, chaos returning as soon as its troops departed.26 Not a lesson lost on Bolsonaro, whose key first appointment was General Augusto Heleno, commander of the Brazilian forces dispatched to Haiti—to his shame, under Lula, to please Washington—in 2004 to lock down the eviction of Aristide, installing him as head of ‘Institutional Security’ in the Presidential Palace. Another general, also a veteran of Haiti, Floriano Peixoto is secretary-general of the presidency, a kind of super chief of staff. A third, Santos Cruz, yet another veteran of Haiti, is in charge of relations with Congress, flanked by two more officers in the Ministries of Defence and Science and Technology, and third in charge of public relations. Heleno, the most powerful of the group, has made no secret of his convictions, expressed in the dictum: direitos humanos são para humanos direitos ‘human rights are for the righteous’—and nobody else. His first pronouncement in government was to compare guns with cars as the right of every normal citizen to possess.
The economic wing of the government, of greater concern to financial markets, is more friable. Guedes has assembled a team mostly of like-minded radical neo-liberals around him, greeted with enthusiasm by business, and can build on the deregulation Temer had already delivered. Top of the agenda is dismantling of the existing pension system. Indefensible on any measure of social justice, absorbing a third of tax revenues, over a half of its total pay-outs—which start at an average age of fifty-five for males—are taken by the most affluent fifth of the population (judges, officers and bureaucrats prominent in their ranks), less than 3 per cent by those who are worst-off.27 Naturally, however, inequity isn’t the driver of standard schemes of pension reform, whose priority in Brazil, as elsewhere, is not to redress it, but to slash the weight of pensions in the budget, while other cuts in public spending wait in the pipe-line. Privatizations, the other pièce de resistance of Guedes’s programme, are advertised as the way to pay off the public debt. A hundred state holdings of one kind or another—the plums are in infrastructure: motorways, ports, air-fields—are scheduled for disposal or closure, naturally also in the name of efficiency and better service, under the direction of a military engineer, another veteran of Haiti. As under Cardoso, no doubt many of the richest pickings will go to foreign investors. The elated reaction of the Financial Times to the economic package in prospect is understandable. Why worry about a few political gaffes? ‘López Obrador Is Bigger Threat to Liberal Democracy than Bolsonaro’, its Latin American editor decided.28
This cutting-edge austeritarian overhaul of the economy requires, of course, passage through Congress. There, much Brazilian commentary expects resistance, given the dependence of so many of its members on the provision of federal funding to their localities, which austerity would undercut. Privatization, too, is often thought to be so at variance with the statist nationalism of the Brazilian military—as a deputy, Bolsonaro himself vehemently opposed it—that it is likely be watered down in practice. On both counts, some scepticism is warranted. Under the PT presidencies, the legislature was a fundamental barrier to the will of the Executive, limiting what it could do and compromising it in what it did, with notorious results. But this was the predictable product of tensions between a radical party in control of one branch of the Constitution, and a salmagundi of conservative parties in control of another. Where no comparable tension existed between president and Congress, as under the centre-right administration of Cardoso, the executive was rarely frustrated—privatizations, for example, sailing through. Bolsonaro’s brand of neo-liberalism promises to be significantly more drastic, but his popular mandate for change is much greater, and opposition to it in Congress notably weaker.
There his fly-by-night Social Liberal Party, cobbled together within a few weeks of the elections, will be the largest force in the Lower Chamber, once it is topped up, as it probably will be, with desertions from the huge marsh of venal lesser groupings. The once mighty PSDB and PMDB have been reduced to shadows of their former selves, their former representation in Congress halved. The debacle of the PSDB and its patriarch have been especially striking. Cardoso, after failing to persuade one vacuous TV presenter to run for the presidency, seeing his party’s candidate get just under 5 per cent of the national vote, and refusing to support Haddad against Bolsonaro in the second round—brushing off anguished pleas for him to do so from well-meaning friends at home and abroad with a petulant ‘to hell with them all’29—ended up with the PSDB in São Paulo, and no doubt soon nationally, in the hands of João Doria, long host of a show modelled on Trump’s Apprentice and franchised by it. This reptilian figure ran on a ticket brazenly twinning himself with the presidential winner as ‘Bolsodoria’. Poetic justice. In Congress, the bandwagon is likely to roll just as fast, deputies clambering aboard in greed or fear to give the Executive, at least to begin with, the majorities it needs. As for military resistance to privatization or foreign take-overs, the first of Brazil’s generals to run the country after they seized power in 1964, Castelo Branco, was no enemy of either. His planning minister, later Brazilian ambassador in London, was the famously outspoken champion of free markets and foreign capital Roberto Campos. Bolsonaro has just appointed his grandson head of the Central Bank. To believe that sale of public assets will become much of a wedge between Bolsonaro and his praetorians could prove wishful thinking.
The more serious risk of attrition within the new regime lies elsewhere, in the unfinished business of Lava Jato. Like the old, the new Congress is packed with recipients of bribes, distributors of back-handers, ill-gotten fortunes, life-times of assiduous corruption—in not a few cases, indeed, it has become a sanctuary for those already in the cross-hairs of the police, who got themselves elected to it simply to gain immunity from prosecution. Prominent among these is Aécio, with multiple charges piling up against him. Nor are Bolsonaro and his family in the clear, investigators having—post-election—not only discovered suspicious transactions in the accounts of his son Flávio, but still more explosively, connexions linking him to an ex-captain of the military police in Rio: a thug twice charged with militia-style killings and now on the lam, who could be implicated in the murder of black legislator and activist Marielle Franco in March of last year, which caused an international outcry. Can Moro as minister of justice now pass a sponge over delicts towards which as a magistrate he owed his fame for being merciless? Already, he has explained that the Ten Measures Against Corruption, which for years he insisted must be passed if the country was to be cleansed, needed ‘rethinking’: not all of them were any longer so important. Yet to unwind the dynamic of Lava Jato altogether would destroy his standing. Should Congress try to pass a general amnesty for cases of corruption, a move mooted under Temer, the stage would be set for a full-tilt conflict of powers—as it also would if, vice-versa, Moro pressed the Supreme Court to lift the immunity of too many deputies. This is the front where the potential for combustion is most real.
Capping these diverse segments of the regime is the circle composed of Bolsonaro himself, his offspring and immediate entourage. Their arrival at the apex of the state marks a significant alteration in the geography of power in Brazil. After Getulio Vargas shot himself in the Catete Palace in 1954, Rio—capital of the country for some two hundred years—lost its position as the centre of national politics. Construction of Brasília started in 1957, and was completed by 1960. Thereafter, presidents came from São Paulo (Jânio, Cardoso, Lula), Rio Grande do Sul (Jango, Dilma), Minas (Itamar) or the North-East (Sarney, Collor).30 Demoted politically, Rio declined—some would say, rotted—economically, socially and physically. Neither the PT nor the PSDB ever secured much of a foothold in the city, for long stretches an ideological no man’s land, with little purchase on national politics. This started to change with the rise of Cunha to the helm of Congress, an archetypal carioca figure with a pack of monetized deputies at his beck and call. The new regime has consummated the shift. After six decades in which it was marginal, power has moved back to Rio. All three of the most important positions in the administration are occupied by its products—Bolsonaro in the presidency, Guedes in the Ministry of Finance, and the rotund fixer Rodrigo Maia in Cunha’s seat as Speaker of the House. In the Cabinet, which for the first time in the history of the republic contains not a single minister from the North-East or the North of the country, all coming from just six out of Brazil’s twenty-six states, the largest contingent—a quarter—are natives of Rio. It is a signal shift.
How is Bolsonaro then to be classified? Often heard on the Left in Brazil, and in the liberal press in Europe, is the opinion that his rise represents a contemporary version of fascism. The same, of course, is a standard depiction of Trump in liberal and left circles in America and the North Atlantic at large, if typically assorted with escape clauses—‘much like’, ‘reminiscent of’, ‘resembling’—making clear that it is little more than lazy invective.31 The label is no more plausible in Brazil. Fascism was a reaction to the danger of social revolution, in a time of economic dislocation or depression. It commanded dedicated cadres, organized mass movements and possessed an articulated ideology. Brazil had its version in the thirties, the green-shirt Integralistas, who at their height numbered over a million members, with a voluble leader, Plínio Salgado, an extensive press, publishing programme and set of cultural organizations. They came close to seizing power in 1938, after the failure of a communist insurrection in 1935. In Brazil today, nothing remotely comparable to either a danger to the established order from the Left, or a disciplined mass force on the Right, exists. In 1964, there was still a major communist party, with influence inside the armed forces, a militant trade-union movement and growing unrest in the countryside, under a weak president calling for radical reforms. That was enough to provoke not fascism but a conventional military dictatorship. In 2018, the Communist Party of old was long gone, combative trade-unions were a back number, the poor were passive and dispersed, the PT was a mildly reforming party, for years on good terms with big business. Breathing fire, Bolsonaro could win an election. But there is scarcely any organizational infrastructure beneath him, and no need for mass repression, since there is no mass opposition to crush.
Is Bolsonaro better pigeon-holed as a populist? The term now suffers such inflation as the all-purpose bugbear of the bien-pensant media that its utility has declined. Undoubtedly, his posture as a valiant foe of the establishment, and style as a rough-hewed man of the people, belong to the repertoire of what is generally viewed as populism. Modelling himself on the president of the US, Bolsonaro outdoes Trump in wrapping himself in the national flag, and spewing a twitter-stream—70 per cent more tweets than the latter in his first week in office. But in the gallery of right-wing populists today, Bolsonaro does not fit the standard bill in at least two respects. Immigration is not a significant issue in Brazil, where just 600,000 out of a population of 204 million are foreign-born32—0.3 per cent, compared with some 14 per cent in the US and UK, or 16 per cent in Germany. Racism, of course, is an issue, to which Bolsonaro like Trump has made covert appeals, and whose violence in the practices of the police he will encourage. But unlike Trump, he won a large black and pardo (mixed) constituency in the polls, and is not likely to risk this by anything approaching an equivalent of white supremacy or backlash rhetoric in the North Atlantic. A third of his party in parliament, indeed, is not white—a higher percentage than in the much-vaunted progressive Democratic contingent in the current 116th Congress. A second significant difference lies in the character of Bolsonaro’s nationalism. Brazil is not a country either afflicted or threatened by loss of sovereignty as in the EU, or by imperial decline as in the US or UK, the two drivers of right-wing populism in the North. His patriotic chest-beating is more factitious. So today he is no enemy of foreign capital. His nationalism, in expression hyperbolic enough, essentially takes the form of virulent tropes of anti-socialism, anti-feminism and homophobia as so many excrescences alien to the Brazilian soul. But it has no quarrel with free markets. In local parlance, it offers the paradox of a populismo entreguista—one perfectly willing, in principle at least, to hand over national assets to global banks and corporations.
Comparison with Trump, Bolsonaro’s closest analogue as a politician, indicates a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Personally, though he comes from a much humbler background, he is less illiterate. Education in a military academy saw to that: books are not a complete mystery to him. Aware of certain of his limitations, he lacks Trump’s degree of egomania. Trump’s overweening confidence in himself comes not just from a millionaire family background, but a long career of success in real estate speculation and show business. Bolsonaro, who has never run anything in his life, has known no such existential build-up. He is much less secure. Given, like Trump, to every kind of intemperate outburst—his have often been the more rabid—he will, unlike Trump, quickly back off if reactions become too negative. The first weeks of his administration have been a cacophony of conflicting statements and retractions or denials of them.
It is not just in character, but by circumstance, that he is a more brittle figure. Both he and Trump catapulted to power virtually overnight, against all expectation. Trump took the presidency with a much lower percentage of the vote—46 per cent—than the 55 per cent majority Bolsonaro won. But his supporters are ideologically fervent and solidly behind him, whereas Bolsonaro’s support may be wider, but is shallower, as post-electoral polls indicating rejection of many of his proposed policies show. Trump, moreover, came to power by taking over one of the two great parties of the country, with a history going back two centuries, where Bolsonaro won it effectively on his own, without any institutional support at the polls. Once elected, on the other hand, he will not, because he cannot, rule without taking account of the institutions around him, as Trump has tried to do. This doesn’t mean he will be less brutal, since in Brazil many of these are more authoritarian than in the US. The indigenous peoples of the Amazon are a sure victim: unlike blacks a quantité négligeable at the polls, they will be the first to suffer from his rule, as cattle ranchers sweep across their habitat. So too it is easy to imagine—especially if the economy fails to pick up, and he needs to distract attention from it—Bolsonaro cracking down viciously on student protests; rounding up activists of the MST, landless invaders of latifundia, or its urban equivalent the MTST, occupier of squats, and banning their organizations; breaking strikes, where necessary. But rainforest apart, such repression is likely to be retail, not wholesale. More, for the moment, would be surplus to requirements.
Where will that leave the PT? Far from flourishing, but so far surviving. With 10 per cent of the vote and 11 per cent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, it avoided the rout of the PSDB and PMDB. With Lula in jail, what is likely to become of it? Here qualified opinion divides. For Singer, the central reality of the PT years was, as the titles of his two books make plain, lulismo—the person overshadowing the party. For the best American scholar on contemporary Brazil, David Samuels, it is the reverse: the deeper, more durable phenomenon was petismo—the party rather than the person. Lula, in his view, was not a charismatic leader like Vargas, or his heirs from Rio Grande do Sul, Goulart or Brizola, politicians without real roots in a party. Nor, for that matter, unlike these figures, was he a populist. Financially orthodox, respectful of democratic institutions, he neither created a political system around himself, nor gave way to inflammatory Manichaean rhetoric of ‘them’ and ‘us’. So lulismo itself never amounted to more than a ‘thin psychological attachment’, compared to the PT’s organizational strength and solid racination in civil society. Singer was wrong both to exaggerate the importance of Lula, and to attribute a generally conservative outlook to the poor, offset by a special investment in him. In 2014, Samuels and his Brazilian colleague could write: ‘Peering into our crystal ball, we see the PT as the fulcrum of Brazil’s party system. Without it, governance will be difficult.’33
Singer’s predictions have worn better. Events have shown that his sense of the mentality of the dispossessed, their fear of disorder and anxious desire for stability, was accurate. In their clairvoyance, many pages from Os sentidos do Lulismo, noting the precedents of Quadros and Collor, read like a scenario for Bolsonaro’s triumph in popular zones of Brazil six years later. What has this meant for the relations between the PT and its leader since? On the eve of his imprisonment, an interviewer remarked to Lula: ‘There are those who say that the problem in Brazil is that it never knew a war, a rupture’. His answer was: ‘I agree. It’s funny the way each time Brazil was on the verge of a rupture, there was an agreement. An agreement reached from above. Those who are above never want to leave’.34 The reply is revealing: what it excludes is the possibility that those above might want a rupture—a break instigated from the Right, not the Left.35 Yet this is effectively what hit the PT in 2016–18, and with which it has yet to come to terms. In power, so long as the going was good, it benefited the poor; but it neither educated nor mobilized them. Its enemies, meanwhile, not only mobilized but educated themselves, up to the latest postmodern standards. The result was a one-sided class war, which only one camp could win. The huge demonstrations that ended by toppling Dilma were the outcome of a galvanization of the middle class such as Brazil had never witnessed in its history; enabled by a mastery of social media, transmitted from its youth to Bolsonaro, reflecting a transformation of the country little short of a social revolution. Between 2014 and 2018, despite the recession, the number of smartphones surpassed the number of its inhabitants,36 and their use would put any other political deployment of them, in Europe or America, in the shade.
That, of course, was not the only lethal reality which the PT failed to recognize. In office, it had rejected mobilization—Lula was frank about his scepticism of it37—in favour of co-option; and co-option—of the Brazilian political and business class—meant corruption. That was in the logic of its strategic choice in office. ‘Between consent and force stands corruption’, wrote Gramsci, ‘which is characteristic of situations when it is hard to exercise the hegemonic function and the use of force is too risky’.38 Renouncing hegemony, which required a sustained effort of popular enlightenment and collective organization, and refusing coercion, towards which it never felt any temptation, the party was left with corruption. To its leaders, anything else seemed too hard or too risky. Corruption was the price of its ‘weak reformism’, in Singer’s phrase, and the real benefits it made possible. But once it was exposed, the party could find no words to name and criticize what it had done. Instead, in an all too revealing—in its way, disastrously accurate—euphemism, it explained that it needed to ‘overcome its adaptation to the modus vivendi of traditional Brazilian politics’.39 Modus vivendi—a way of living together: just so.
Resort to euphemisms offers no escape from a past to which the PT remains fettered, in the most painful and paralyzing way. For Lava Jato is far from finished with its star victim. Lula’s twelve-year sentence for his inspection of a beach-side condominium is just the beginning. A second trial on a similar charge, employing a construction firm that had received government contracts while he was in office for improvement of a friend’s retreat, is currently nearing conclusion, with a similar verdict in view. These charges are still, in the sum of things, relatively trivial, though the sentences are not. Coming down the pike, however, are far more serious accusations, not of private dereliction, but malversation of huge sums of public money—hundreds of millions of dollars at the disposal of Petrobras when he was president—based on the rewarded testimony of the leading Judas of the party, his one-time right-hand man, former minister of finance, Antonio Palocci, at present selling himself as a witness on yet further cases for prosecution. The government will ensure maximum publicity for the mega-trials to come. It needs to finish off Lula.
The PT, and its sympathizers, deeply and understandably angered at the lack of commutative justice with which Lula’s personal affairs have been handled, are likely to have to confront evidence, however tainted, potentially far more damaging, in what threatens to be an indefinitely extended process to discredit and confine, for life, the former president. How is the party to react? Lula, who has not been diminished in prison, remains its overwhelmingly most important political asset; yet now one in danger of becoming, for many, almost equally a liability. To do him historical justice seems beyond its powers.40 The party depends on him for steady leadership, but risks forfeiting credibility without independence of him. Anchor or albatross? If he were fully abstracted from the scene, many think the PT would rapidly split. In such an impasse, militants may well be driven to hope that under Bolsonaro conditions in Brazil will so much worsen that few will any longer care about the venial scandals of the past, their traces obliterated in some vaster upheaval to come.
For a dozen years, Brazil was the only major country in the world to defy the epoch, to refuse the deepening of the neo-liberal regime of capital, and relax some of its rigours in favour of the least well off. Whether the experience had to end as it did is imponderable. The masses were not called to defend what they had gained. Did the centuries of slavery that set the country apart from the rest of Latin America make popular passivity insuperable, the PT’s modus vivendi the best that could be done? At times, Singer has implied something like this. At others, he is more stringent. Brazil, he recently wrote, has failed to achieve the social inclusion of all its citizens that was the task of his generation after the dictatorship. But in its absence, no other projects are viable.41 In a slightly more optimistic vein, another acute observer, a little to his right, Celso Rocha de Barros, has remarked that Lulismo will not be finished in Brazil until something better replaces it.42 One must hope these judgments hold good. But memories can fade, and elsewhere, social exclusion has proved only too cruelly viable. The Left has always been inclined to make predictions of its preferences. It would be an error to count on defeat self-correcting itself with time.