Brazil’s Presidential Election Remains a Cliff-hanger

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

This coming Sunday, the largest country in South America will finally know who its next president will be. On Oct. 30, Brazil’s acrimonious presidential race goes into a second round, after a former president failed to secure the overall majority he needed to avoid a runoff with the incumbent.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, who served as the 35th president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, faces off against Jair Messias Bolsonaro, the former military officer who has been the 38th president of Brazil since 2019.

On Oct. 2 Lula secured 48.4 per cent of the vote, while Bolsonaro received 43.2. If polls are accurate, the leftist veteran will win the runoff, taking charge of a deeply polarized country in 2023.

NOT A FLUKE

Bolsonaro is no accident of history. It might have been possible to dismiss his surprising election four years ago, when he rose to power on a wave of widespread anti-left sentiment, as a fluke. No longer.

Underlying his vague appeals to “God, fatherland and family” is a bedrock of support, spread across the country and encompassing a wide cross-section of society. Also, several of Bolsonaro’s former cabinet ministers and allies across the country rode his coattails to success in local elections on Oct. 2. They won major victories against candidates backed by Lula in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

But only those who don’t know Brazil’s political culture and history will be surprised. An army captain, Bolsonaro first came to national attention in the mid-1980s as the armed forces were beginning a tactical retreat from political life after two decades of military rule. In 1988, after the restoration of Brazilian democracy, he began his political career.

Bolsonaro, who has been called the “Trump of the Tropics,” is seen by his opponents as a populist demagogue. But how much better is Lula, who has already spent time in jail for corruption?

CORRUPTION SCANDALS

He has, for instance, compared participants of pro-Bolsonaro rallies to Ku Klux Klan sympathizers. While Bolsonaro claims he must protect Brazil from demons, the devil and Communism, and accuses Lula of being a thief, Lula says the country faces the danger of fascism, the Ku Klux Klan, and illiberalism. He even accuses Bolsonaro of committing genocide in the Amazon region.

Until this day, Lula’s involvement in huge corruption scandals has not been properly investigated. After 13 years in power under him and his successor Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached, Brazil found itself in such a bad state that voters turned to Bolsonaro in 2018.

But this is a country that has never been a paragon of democracy. In 1964 the Brazilian military carried out a coup and ruled the country for over two decades. In 1965 political parties were banned and in 1966 a strict bipartisanship was instated, limiting participation in elections to the governmental party, Aliança Renovadora Nacional (National Renewal Alliance), or the opposition party, Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (Brazilian Democratic Movement).

1970S BRAZIL

This was the situation when I visited relatives in Brazil in 1976-1977, when General Ernesto Geisel, a career army officer from an immigrant family of German Lutherans, was head of the military junta. It was not a happy place.

By 1984 a movement had formed to pressure the government to reinstate direct elections. In the same year a constitutional amendment reinstituted the direct vote for president. This amendment allowed the registration of new (and old) political parties, including the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party), the banner under which Lula and Rousseff would later run.

It was not until the 1988 Constitution, enacted at the end of a military dictatorship that had made a farce of democracy in Brazil for over two decades, that all adult Brazilians, regardless of income or literacy, could vote.

This constitution opened the door for the poor, particularly from the northeast, to vote for Lula, himself a northeasterner born to a poor family in Caetés, a rural town in Pernambuco.

After two consecutive terms as president, 2003-2010, an extended break from the executive office and a stint in federal prison for corruption charges that have since been dropped, Lula now seeks to be elected for a third presidential term. We’ll soon know how this turns out.

 

China Seems Powerful, But Has Big Problems

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

The twentieth congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that took place Oct. 16-22 in Beijing made Xi Jinping, the party’s general secretary and China’s president, effectively in charge for life. It seems to have completed his elevation to uncontested paramount leader of the country.

Over the last decade, Xi has reversed the political changes of the 1980s designed to prevent over-centralization of power. He has done away with presidential term limits, reasserted party control, and elevated his personal status to a level unseen in at least 30 years, if not as far back as the Mao Zedong era.

It is a dramatic step away from the collective leadership devised by Deng Xiaoping to forestall future Mao-style dictatorship; and, by endorsing Xi’s key goal of reimposing the Communist Party’s absolute primacy, it rolls back Deng’s efforts at distinguishing between party and state, ideology and governance.

Since coming to power at the eighteenth CCP Congress in 2012, Xi has shaken up China’s politics, including a relentless anti-corruption campaign. A key Xi focus became cadre integrity, clean government and the need for the party to find its “moral compass.”

“Xi Jinping Thought” was included in the CCP’s fundamental documents at the nineteenth congress in 2017. In China, having a political philosophy named after a leader carries enormous significance. For Xi, it is a core expression of his expanding power. At his speech opening the congress, he said that “fully implementing” his thought was a key theme.

In September, the CCP published new regulations on the promotion and demotion of leading party cadres, which removed mandatory retirement ages and term limits, allowing for the advancement of Xi loyalists.

Xi unveiled the members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top ruling body, now filled with close allies from his inner circle, limiting potential resistance. Among them, Li Qiang, currently the party secretary of Shanghai, will become premier and therefore the one to manage the economy.

As he begins his third term, Xi must contend with a severe economic slowdown exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, tensions with the United States over the contested island of Taiwan and China’s militarization of disputed atolls in the South China Sea, and his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin as war rages in Ukraine. 

In September alone, a month of only minor Covid-19 outbreaks, Xi’s Covid lockdowns imprisoned 313 million people indoors. The “Zero-Covid” policy has crushed consumption, bankrupting thousands of small businesses and dragging down growth this year to three per cent, the lowest figure in four decades.

Youth unemployment has swelled to about 18 per cent, even as the population is starting to decline. The Zero-Covid campaign is probably the clearest testament to the power of President Xi, and he intends to retain it. “Covid is political in China,” explained William Hurst, professor of Chinese development at Cambridge University.

Compared with the boom years following 1992, these are grim times for many Chinese. It hasn’t helped that Xi has diluted or reversed some of the reforms that fuelled China’s extraordinary rise, starting with a subjugation of the key ministries of state to his personal control.

The challenge, maintains the historian Frank Dikotter, who specializes in modern Chinese politics, is how to address a wide range of “longstanding structural issues,” including the thorny problems of Communist Party monopoly over power and the means of production.

His reinsertion of Party cells into private businesses as decision-makers is counterproductive, writes Rosemary Righter, the former chief editorial writer at the Times of London, who specializes in international economics: “He cannot see that CCP control over the private sector will dampen, not invigorate, the newly laggard economy.”

Meanwhile, the Covid clampdowns have been a pretext to reinforce the already constant surveillance of everyday life, the all-pervading censorship and suppression of dissent. The security apparatus keeps a lid on popular unrest, though discontent is beginning to grow over plummeting house prices and mounting environmental scandals. Does this indicate a political vulnerability that the Party is papering over?

Imperative in Xi’s mind is national unity: every ethnic group, not just the majority Han Chinese, must fuse into one indivisible state, from Tibet and Xinjiang in the west to Taiwan in the east. He has called for a unified “community of Chinese nationhood” as a bulwark against threats at home and abroad. “The rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is now on an irreversible historical course,” Xi told the delegates.

In May, Xi told the CCP Politburo that Westerners often wrongly perceive China. “They don’t view China from the vantage point of over 5,000 years of civilization,” he explained, “so it’s hard for them to truly understand China’s past, present and future.”

Xi’s crowning achievement would be getting Taiwan back into the Beijing fold. Delegates voted to enshrine opposition to Taiwan’s independence in the constitution.

“China is not a democracy, and as we have seen throughout the proceedings at the Party Congress, only one man’s opinion matters,” remarked Victor Shih, an expert on elite Chinese politics at the University of California San Diego. But as Cai Xia, a former professor at the CCP Central Party School until forced to flee in 2019 after criticizing Xi’s policies, insists, “Even in China, it takes more than sheer force and intimidation to stay in power: performance still matters.”

 

Why U.S. Political Loyalties Don’t Waver

 Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

As Americans prepare to vote in midterm elections Nov. 8, why does American politics seem so rigid today? Part of the reason is the long-standing trend in partisan polarization.

According to an American National Election Studies (ANES) Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behaviour survey released Aug. 16, 2021, in the fall of 2020, 90 per cent of Americans said there were important differences in what the parties stood for -- the highest number recorded by the ANES in almost 70 years.

Voters are increasingly tied to their political loyalties and values. They have become less likely to change their basic political evaluations or vote for the other party’s candidate.

Landslide victories in presidential elections are a thing of the past. There were no blue or red states back then. In 1972, Richard Nixon carried 49 states, as did Ronald Reagan in 1984. This would be unthinkable today.

Why is this happening? It is rooted in divides between the parties on issues tied to racial, ethnic, national and religious identities. These issues, ones that Americans consider very important, tend to exacerbate, not mitigate, their differences.  

Paradoxically, this co-exists with frequent changes in who controls the government, because of the increasing parity in the two parties’ electoral strength. You can see this partisan parity in the national electorate.

By 2020, the Democratic advantage over Republicans in party identification was just four percentage points, the smallest in seven decades, according to the same ANES survey. Partisan parity is visible in Congress as well, where the parties can expect to compete for control in most elections.

When control of government is always within reach, there is less need for the losing party to adapt and recalibrate. And so if it stays on the same path, voters have little reason to revise their political loyalties.

Therefore even major events like the coronavirus pandemic and George Floyd’s murder in 2020 did not disrupt partisan alignments in that fall election. Instead, those events were subsumed into the existing axis of partisan conflict.

This was evident in the outcome. True, the changes between 2016 and 2020 were enough to help Joe Biden beat incumbent Donald Trump. But those changes were small by historical standards.

In fact the 2020 election continued partisan polarization: People saw Donald Trump as more conservative than he was perceived in 2016 and saw Biden as more liberal than they viewed Hillary Clinton in 2016. And Democratic and Republican voters were even further apart on important issues.

Given this situation, a shift of even a few percentage points can matter. And this increases the incentive for people to countenance their own party’s undemocratic behavior in order to win an election.

So now we see a majority of Republican nominees on the ballot this November for Congress and key statewide offices -- 299 in all -- who have or denied or questioned the outcome of the last presidential election, according to an Oct. 6 Washington Post analysis.

As Milan W. Svolik, a professor of political science at Yale University, noted his article “Polarization Versus Democracy” in the July 2019 issue of the Journal of Democracy, “Survey experiments in several countries suggest that many voters are willing to put their partisan interests above democratic principles -- a finding that may be key to understanding democratic backsliding.”

Should this pattern of behaviour continue to become more pronounced, American democracy will be in even bigger trouble than it is now.