Jacobin Magazine: From the Union Hall to the Church

There’s some truth to this hypothesis, but it underestimates Bolsonaro’s large number of votes from women (41 percent of valid votes), black and mixed race people (41 percent of total votes) and low-income groups concentrated in families that receive between two and five minimum wages (61 percent). In addition, this hypothesis tends to downplay the importance of the support Bolsonaro received from non-denominational evangelical churches (59 percent of the total votes, against only 26 percent of the votes for Haddad, according to Datafolha), without which, according to most political analysts, he would probably have lost the second round to the Workers’ Party candidate.[...]

The political scientist André Singer and sociologist Gustavo Venturi convincingly argue that low-income support for the ultra-right candidate stemmed from his emphasis on public safety –– a real concern in a country that sees constant street crime and over sixty thousand murders a year. [...]

Lulismo was defined by the way it aimed to stabilize social conflict in Brazil. Between 2003 and 2013 it forged two different forms of consensus. First, a form of passive consensus among the subaltern classes who were attracted to the PT’s distributivist public policies, such as the Bolsa Família program and the policy of valorization of the minimum wage. Second, the PT constructed an active consensus among the leaders of the main social movements in the country. Despite the neoliberal macroeconomic policy advocated and sustained by the PT governments, the conjunction of these two forms of consent was able to guarantee the strengthening of certain policies compatible with the project of building a wage society in Brazil. Of course, the limits of Lulismo were revealed when the international economic crisis put an end to the commodity super-cycle that had benefited the Brazilian economy during the PT governments. [...]

The popularity of certain policies, such as Bolsa Família or university racial quotas, strengthened a backlash from those precarious workers who, living in the informal sector or receiving low wages, did not directly benefit. In the eyes of many of these workers, the public policies of the PT era have done nothing more than stimulate laziness and political clientelism, transforming citizens into parasites and objects of electoral exploitation by corrupt politicians. The Brazilian far-right managed to instrumentalize this feeling through the rhetoric of “meritocracy,” appealing to popular resentment against the PT as the crisis deepened and decimated jobs. [...]

Surprisingly, the neo-Pentecostal evangelical movement was the one that benefited the most in organizational terms from the Lulista hegemony. According to data from the 2010 census, its growth went from 15.4 percent in 2000, to 22.2 percent in 2010 (see table below). This is different from what happened in the 1970s, when the flourishing of religiosity in grassroots communities occurred pari-passu with the strengthening of union power. Now a rather different theology is taking root in the sphere of low-income groups: the neo-Pentecostal theology of prosperity — a variant of US televangelism in which achieving grace correlates to the satisfaction of individual desires for protection and material prosperity.

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Vox: The biggest corruption scandal in Latin America’s history

In 2014, the largest corruption scandal in Latin America’s history erupted in Brazil. It involved bribes between Petrobras, the largest state-owned oil company on the continent, and dozens of engineering firms. It also involved politicians, including three Brazilian presidents, Lula, Dilma Rousseff, and Michel Temer, as well as almost a third of Brazil’s congress.

Politicians all over Latin America were found guilty of taking bribes and profiting immensely from infrastructure and energy projects all over the continent. The scandal hit places like Itaborai especially hard. The companies involved were fined billions of dollars and laid off hundreds of thousands of workers as their projects abruptly stopped. Four years later, Brazil is still dealing with the fallout.

The Atlantic: Brazil Turns Its Back on Democracy

Jair Bolsonaro, the former army captain who dominated the first round of Brazil’s presidential election on Sunday, talks a lot about killing people—common criminals, political opponents, the organizers of queer-art shows. Promising to cleanse the nation of corruption, he holds up the 1964–85 military dictatorship, when torture was state policy, as “a period of glory for Brazil.” Since Brazil’s return to democracy a generation ago, no major politician has spoken like this. But it turned out to be highly effective in an atmosphere of seemingly unending crisis, both economic and political—and one in which more than 60,000 people were murdered last year.

Bolsonaro still must win the runoff on October 28. But by taking 46 percent of the vote in the first round of elections on Sunday, he nearly claimed an outright majority, which would have prevented a second round altogether for the first time in 20 years. Making a mockery of the latest polls, other right-wing populists edged out established candidates in governor’s races. Bolsonaro’s Social Liberal Party, which previously had eight seats in Congress, will now have 52, second only to the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT). In São Paulo, Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo—who recently tweeted a photo of himself standing beside the former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon, a supporter—won the most votes of any congressional deputy in Brazil’s history. [...]

It’s not just the poor and the poorly educated who yearn for a strongman. Business leaders were initially put off by Bolsonaro’s fervor, common in the Brazilian military, for state intervention in the economy. But then he tapped a quasi-libertarian with a doctorate from the University of Chicago as his economic adviser, and the chance to propose cutting pensions and peeling back labor regulations proved too tempting to pass up. Now the stock market rallies when Bolsonaro gains in polls. Luciano Hang, the owner of a chain of department stores that feature towering replicas of the Statue of Liberty, has threatened to fire his 15,000 employees if Bolsonaro doesn’t become president.

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The New Yorker: Brazil After Dilma Rousseff

A majority of Brazilians had wanted Rousseff out, but few in the country appear to fully grasp the technical grounds for her impeachment: she was convicted of breaking budgetary laws by decreeing minor outlays without congressional approval and delaying payments to state banks. In practice, the impeachment trial served as a vote of no confidence in a President who had led the country into its longest recession in decades. The party she belongs to, the left-leaning Workers’ Party, had also been implicated in a corruption scheme that funnelled billions of dollars into political campaigns and offshore bank accounts during its thirteen years in power. The irony here is that many of the lawmakers who voted for Rousseff’s impeachment are themselves suspects in the scheme. [...]

In framing herself as a tragic hero fighting for the poor, Rousseff elided her own party’s pragmatic deal-making with Brazil’s corrupt establishment. She also underplayed the gravity of her budget maneuvers, which covered up a gaping deficit while she ran for reëlection, in 2014, in a campaign allegedly funded with bribe money. But questions about the process used to impeach her resonated with many Brazilians. According to one survey, only forty-nine per cent of Brazilians believe that the impeachment proceedings obeyed constitutional norms. This contrasts sharply with the broad consensus behind the last impeachment, in 1992, when Fernando Collor de Mello was forced from office amid allegations of personal enrichment. He later returned to political life, as a senator, and this week he voted for Rousseff’s impeachment—a typical twist in Brazilian politics. [...]

Another omission: not once in his first address in office did Temer speak about corruption. For Temer, this made sense. Rousseff’s downfall began when a task force leading an investigation known as Lava Jato (Car Wash) uncovered a scheme to siphon off billions from the state oil company, and Temer’s own P.M.D.B. was soon identified as the Workers’ Party’s main partner in the scheme. For a while, in the mass demonstrations calling for Rousseff’s impeachment, many protesters vowed to keep marching until they brought Temer down, too. But, for now at least, those pledges appear to have faded—even as fresh revelations raise new questions about Temer and high-ranking figures in his new administration. According to the plea-bargain testimony of a construction tycoon, for instance, Temer was the beneficiary of some three hundred thousand dollars skimmed from a nuclear-energy contract. (Temer has denied the accusation.)

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