Brazil Apart by Perry Anderson;

Author:Perry Anderson;
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 1)
Published: 2020-01-11T00:10:08.423533+00:00

5

BOLSONARO

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

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