Brazil’s Unsteady Democracy

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, is on trial in the country’s Supreme Court, accused of masterminding a plot to stage a coup after he lost the 2022 presidential elections to leftist candidate Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva.

It marks the first time in Brazilian history that a former head of state is being tried for attempting to overthrow the government. His supporters also stormed Brazil’s Congress building and Presidential offices in Brasilia on Jan. 8, 2023.

Federal police earlier this year released two reports that detailed the accusations, including that he personally edited a decree for a national state of emergency designed to prevent the election’s winner from taking office. He abandoned the plan after leaders of Brazil’s military refused to take part. If convicted, he could face up to 12 years in prison. 

Bolsonaro has already been barred from running for office until 2030, but he retains continued political influence and popularity. He is hoping that Congress will overturn his election ban. He called the ruling “a rape of democracy” and said he was trying to find a way to run in next year’s presidential election.

Two Supreme Court justices he nominated will lead the electoral court before the election. Those judges have told him, he has said, “that my ineligibility is absurd.” In March, thousands of his followers rallied at Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach to protest the charges. Other supporters came together at a public demonstration in Sao Paulo in late June as well, to oppose his ongoing trial.

Meanwhile, the election’s victor, President “Lula,” as he is known, doesn’t feel Bolsonaro’s arrest has proved that Brazil’s future as a democracy is assured. In an interview with Jon Lee Anderson, published in the New Yorker magazine May 8, he feared that “the entire post-Second World War order, created largely through the intervention of the United States, seemed on the verge of collapse.”

Part of the problem is economic. “Democracy starts to fall when it no longer meets the people’s interests. Since 1980, the working people in countries that built welfare states have only lost, while income concentration has increased. So what response can we give to Brazilian society?”

This is not only a Brazilian issue. “Last year, the world spent $2.4 trillion on weapons, while seven hundred and thirty million people go to sleep every night not knowing if they’ll have breakfast when they wake up,” he said. “That should be humanity’s main concern.”

In November, Brazil will host the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly known as COP30, in the city of Belém, a location, at the edge of the Amazon rainforest, chosen to bring attention to the crisis of deforestation. Yet it is hard to imagine that it will bring radical change.

The Amazon is now close to a tipping point beyond which it may not generate enough rainfall to sustain its own ecosystem, as well as agriculture, hydropower, water supply, and industries that have fueled Brazil’s growth.

Lula has himself lost popularity. Last month Brazil’s Congress nullified a presidential decree for the first time in decades, rejecting a move by Lula’s government to hike a financial transactions tax. Lula’s allies had only 98 votes against 383 in the lower house to keep the tax increase on some transactions, including foreign exchange and credit cards. The Senate also defeated the move. It was the first time lawmakers overturned a presidential decree in Brazil since 1992, in a rebuke of Lula one year ahead of the country’s next presidential election campaign, and it signaled flagging support for his left-of-center administration.

Thomas Traumann, an independent political consultant, said the decision by lawmakers indicates Lula does “not have a stable majority in Congress. If this was a parliamentary system, it would have been the end of this government,” he asserted.

Recent polls show Lula losing to most potential candidates in next year’s election. Assuming Bolsonaro remains ineligible, the most likely winner would be the current governor of Sao Paulo, Tarcisio Gomes de Freitas, who served as the minister of infrastructure for Bolsonaro.

He defeated Fernando Haddad, a professor of political science who is a member of Lula’s Workers’ Party and the current finance minister, for governor of the state. Haddad also lost the 2018 presidential election to Bolsonaro. This doesn’t auger well for him, should he replace Lula as the party’s candidate.