The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff reacts during her impeachment trial at the Federal Senate in Brasilia, Brazil, Aug. 29, 2016. Eraldo Peres/Press Association. All rights reserved.The conclusion of the impeachment process
against Dilma Rousseff, elected president of Brazil for the second time in 2014,
is a watershed in the country’s recent history. Its passing in both the Chamber
of Deputies and the Senate will prove traumatic in the long run, despite the
easy majorities it mustered, since it meant a partial rupture of the 1988
Constitutional pact. This goes well beyond the actual event, however, in that
it condenses the end of three different political cycles undergone by Brazil
since the 1970s.
Political cycles
The longest cycle to be taken into account is that
which started in the positive initial stages of the struggle against military
dictatorship. Within the left there had been a debate about the limits of the Brazilian
Communist Party’s (PCB) ‘reformist’ perspective. This led to the mushrooming of
guerrilla groups, easily smashed by the regime. Eventually the democratic front
strategy, bringing together popular, left-wing forces and the liberal
opposition, paid off. The 1974 congress electoral defeat of civilian forces
that supported the regime (elections never stopped in Brazil, despite their
extremely restricted character) was the beginning of a long process of
democratization. Amnesty in 1979, elections for state governors in 1982 –
mostly won by opposition forces – and especially the election of a constituent
Congress (turned into the National Constitutional Assembly) and its outcome,
the so-called ‘citizen Constitution’ of 1988, all were hallmarks of this long
cycle of democratization. Fernando Collor de Mello was elected president in
1989, against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Worker’s Party (PT) main leader,
on a neoliberal platform, but was impeached due to corruption charges (true but
not really ever proved). Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the lauded sociologist, was
elected twice thereafter on a similar but more moderate platform, with more
consistent social policies and some success in stabilising an economy long in
crisis.
Then eventually Lula and the PT won the 2002
elections, although agreements with centre and centre-right parties were
necessary to govern. The Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (PMDB),
successor to the MDB, the democratic front party that fought against the military
regime (though much deteriorated), stood out in this regard. The left alliance
was too small to govern (including the Partido Comunista do Brasil – PcdoB, not
the one that had proposed the democratic front, Partido Socialista Brasileiro PSB,
and Partido Democrático Trabalhista PDT).
This long process represented what I refer to as the
passage from ‘instituting citizenship’ to ‘instituted citizenship’. Popular
mobilization produced a situation in which personnel and policies were changed.
Social policies multiplied – especially with the (social liberal) Bolsa Família
programme – and new agents occupied the state. A new, Latin American and
south-oriented foreign policy was put into practice.
Yet when Lula and the PT got into power, there was no sustained
popular mobilization in the country. During the 1990s the Movimento dos
Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) was the only force capable of challenging Cardoso,
even managing to secure a partial land reform. The Unified Workers’ Central
(CUT) was on the defensive, due to recession and the brutal measures taken by
Cardoso at the very beginning of his government. Lula and his party decided not
to try to resume the mobilization that marked their former years, instead
concentrating on negotiations at the top.
What was not clearly understood outside their circle
was that the neopatrimonial exploitation of the state, for electoral purposes
as well as embezzlement, buttressed the alliance with those centre and centre-right
parties. The first political-judicial problems soon appeared, though, with what
the conservative press dubbed the ‘mensalão’, in this case referring to Lula’s
first electoral campaign, when several of PT’s leading figures were convicted
by the Supreme Federal Court (STF), in a judgement considered by many rather
dubious.
During Lula’s governments, that long wave of
democratic development exhausted itself. Energies, ideas, agendas, people and leadership
based on unionism – all aged irremediably. But the success, especially of
Lula’s second government, allowed him to elect his chosen successor, Dilma
Rousseff, a former guerrilla apparatchik and minister of his (who he thought he
could control). However, the situation had dramatically changed. A new political
cycle was soon to commence, and the left was ill-prepared – lazy intellectually
(thinking had never been a strong aspect of the PT) and arrogant, as though its
former victories and popular support up to that point could last forever. The
combination of the pragmatism of trade unionists who were the main force in the
party and the closed, machine-oriented, mentality of militants who had survived
the armed struggle to take high office exacted its inevitable toll (the
Catholics, so important at the beginning, saw their influence dwindle).
Everything was allowed it seemed, to keep power.
The 2013 demonstrations were the proof that a new cycle
was opening. They consisted of millions of people filling the streets of Brazil
in a very peculiar way. They were individualistic but also very collectively
oriented, with demands for social policies but a rejection of political parties,
with a ‘magmatic’ quality mainly relished by young people of all political
persuasions, and especially with none, at least as clearly formulated. They also
clearly showed a desire to re-connect with the former period of mobilization.
On top of that, in 2014 there appeared the Lava-Jato
Operation (the Quick-Wash Operation, as it is known). It started by chance with
an investigation into money laundering via a gas station. This led to the discovery
of a huge scheme of corruption in the national oil company, Petrobras, the
jewel and icon of Brazilian nationalism. Mostly centre and centre-right parties
were implicated, but also the PT. Furthermore this was under Lula’s and Rousseff’s
governments. Instead of supporting the investigation by the Public Ministry
(MP), as it would have done in previous decades, the PT reacted as if this was
a plot to get it out of government and even to destroy it. The ‘mensalão’ case has
already undermined the party’s credibility and alienated its former support in
the middle classes, but this later case was even more devastating.
If the first and longest aforementioned cycle featured
a process of democratization, the other two established the absolute hegemony
of the PT within the Brazilian left and in government. The first of these is
over, since there has been a pluralization within the centre-left and the left,
while the second ended with Rousseff’s extremely unsuccessful governments, thanks to very poor political
skills and a process of political isolation that was constructed piecemeal. It is
the superimposition of these three cycles, the last one abbreviated by
impeachment, that has lent such a dramatic character to the political dynamic
in the last three years or so. This was compounded by the fact that the political
system is in tatters, seen by most of the population as corrupt and unrepresentative
– an astonishing outcome given the fact that until very recently Lula and Dilma
secured very high approval ratings. But this is by no means any longer the case.
In fact, the Lava-Jato Operation is uncovering hidden schemes
related to building companies that involve all political parties and several
state governments and mayors. The ‘delação premiada’, as it is popularly known
– meaning the full exposure of these schemes in exchange for a (drastic) reduction
in the length of sentences – as admitted to by these companies’ executives and
some politicians, is having a profound impact on the entire system.
The final turn of
the tide
Rousseff still managed to win the 2014 elections, against
a background of economic crisis, but promising more than she could deliver,
pushing hard a left agenda against her neoliberal competitor, Aécio Neves, of
the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB), Cardoso’s party. Before
even being re-inaugurated president, Rousseff announced a U-turn in her
policies, taking up Neves’ defeated programme in an effort to appease
capitalists disgruntled both by her ill-designed ‘neo-developmentalist’ economic
policies and by earlier rises in wage levels (though they had benefited a lot
from the former and even the latter, with the expansion of the internal market).
At the same time the PSDB, now firmly positioned on
the right, did not accept defeat. Since nothing could be alleged about the
elections, a very imaginative and opportunistic reading of impeachment
constitutional provisions was formulated in order to bring her government down
(as if she had committed a crime). With the left demoralized to a great extent,
large swathes of the middle classes (older than those in 2013) took to the
streets. But in fact more than 70 percent of the population supported the
impeachment process, further legitimized by similar procedures against Collor.
The difference was that Collor had no proper party and confronted both congress
and society, so that eventually almost the whole country turned against him. By
contrast Rousseff had the organized left – including most of the currents that
did not support her government – backing her against the impeachment process.
This allowed for huge street demonstrations, regardless of their
ineffectiveness.
This meant that a parliamentary coup was staged
against Rousseff, with dedicated support from the media monopolies (which Lula
never touched), in particular the infamous Globo Organizations. At several
points the left discourse compared this situation to the 1964 putsch, but the
comparison does not stand up. The Brazilian population would not back a military
adventure (in which the army is not interested, in any case), but as the impeachment
process formally proceeded according to the law, it was seen as legitimate and
has led to no institutional rupture.
Yet most of the population also want to get rid of
vice-president Michel Temer, of the PMDB, who openly conspired against Rousseff
and is seen a corrupt figure in his own right, alongside the powerful, sinister
and extremely corrupt former president of the Chamber of Deputies, Eduardo
Cunha, who he has covertly defended from losing his mandate, out of fear of
being denounced by him.
Temer is seen by the population as having a shared
responsibility in the situation of the country. His government suffers from
illegitimacy and is rather fragile not least as a result of corruption problems
its own members have with the law. On the other hand, this can make it quite desperate
to please the businessmen who supported the coup, triggering populist reactions.
So far, however, tough measures have been avoided. Its future is uncertain.
Some would say that the judiciary was part of the coup,
pointing to the MP’s supposed choice of the PT and Lula personally, as well as
the inaction of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) against it. This is a mistaken
interpretation, although the centre-right parties will themselves be tested as
to their impartiality, or at least their strength in surpassing the obstacles and
traps these forces throw up, as the investigation moves closer to them. The
judiciary has become a powerful and awfully wealthy system in its own right in Brazil,
affording very high wages and enjoying many advantages. But in particular the
MP has its own agenda, in which the fight against corruption has played a
prominent role, with the full support of a number of judges, including Sérgio
Moro who is in charge of the Lava-Jato operation. Meanwhile, the STF has
implicitly considered impeachment to be a political problem, to be sorted out
by politicians, not having the internal unity to take any bolder steps with
respect to the issue in any event.
From Marx to Huntington social scientists have recognized
that when the link between the represented and representatives is broken other
societal or state forces emerge that may steer the country in an unexpected
direction, be that an individual or a corporation. Though we cannot really speak
of a ‘praetorian’ perspective since the judiciary has refrained from embracing
open political roles, the MP has decided to moralize politics in the country
(proposing also a tougher legislation). This may entail authoritarian practices
(and some argue that this is what is happening) and has usually been associated
with right-wing thinking. But due to the levels of corruption found in the
current investigations there has been strong support for their continuation.
All parties and many of the big names in politics – such as Neves in particular
– are being denounced and are likely to be eventually sued if, beyond ‘delações’,
there is more concrete evidence against them (despite various complications in
the process). This is not to deny that a liberal (though not neoliberal) outlook
is strong across the judiciary in Brazil, often combined with conservative
tendencies. But it is clear also that the left has been showing itself
incapable of disputing this perspective within the judiciary.
It is worth noting that this return of the right is
happening across Latin America. In Argentina Maurício Macri’s victory,
alongside now the internal problems of Peronism, has radically changed the
landscape and in Venezuela the Chavista experience is ending as badly as possible.
In Colombia, in addition, a centre-right government is striking a long-awaited
deal to finish the even longer civil war. In Uruguay, Bolivia and Chile,
despite problems, the situation is not so difficult, but overall it is not
promising regarding what was once defined as the Latin American ‘left turn’,
let alone the dire situation of Mexico and the slow reconversion of Cuba.
A new cycle
We are beginning a new political cycle in Brazil, but
its contours are difficult to fathom.
In principle it could be easily characterized as the hegemony of the
right. In a sense this is actually what has been happening, since neoliberalism
– in all its dimensions – is today deep-seated in Brazilian society, beyond
economic policies. But they have troubles of their own, since especially the
PSDB is a party divided and beset. Such policies, if followed systematically,
spell disaster for the country and are profoundly unpopular.
In any case, Temer, who is at the head of an obviously
illegitimate government, has promised businessmen – now under the hegemony of
finance capital once again – a tough neoliberal adjustment. He did not make any
stronger move until the impeachment was secured and will probably wait as well until
the October municipal elections are over. But maybe in 2017 he will go for it.
Except, perhaps, if his PMDB decides that it wants to have a go at the
presidential elections (having contented itself so far with getting into
government by supporting either the PT or the PSDB). It could then not afford
to be unpopular, though fixing the economy could also be an asset.
They will in any case implement a social liberal
policy much more restricted than that of the Lula and Rousseff governments.
Besides, they seem to be planning a self-amnesty to deliver themselves from
charges related to corrupt campaign schemes as well as a political reform that
will block the renewal of the political system. At rock bottom, what matters is
to escape the Lava-Jato.
A new, heterogeneous centre is emerging, which has a
strong left-of-centre countenance, though often until now inclined to
centre-right alliances. This is represented mainly by Marina Silva, the old
PT’s environmentalist militant, Lula’s former minister and presidential
candidate, and her Sustainability Network (Rede) party. Whether it will end up in
the medium term allied to right-wing forces or will eventually strike a deal with
the left is an open question, though the latter has systematically shown itself
hostile to her.
The left as such is undergoing a difficult and painful
process of reorganization. New social movements have emerged (some with a
decidedly more horizontal perspective); older ones struggle to reawaken. The PT
is in a deep crisis (which may lead to its fracturing, given its stubborn and
narrow-minded character). The Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL) is growing,
but overall styles and programmes are still limited, let alone coalitions
between its different expressions. It is as if most are either banking on a
Lula candidacy in 2018 (the so-called ‘Lulistas’) or a return – away from ‘class
conciliation’ – to the PT’s 1980s model, to solve the stalemates of the left.
They won’t. Unfortunately, little strategic thinking is being developed right
now.
A new cycle will unfold, no matter what. The options
are open and our sociological skills will be necessary to make sense of it, as
well as possibly our practical imagination, at least for some of us, if we are to
contribute to pushing the political process in a progressive direction.
How to cite:
Domingues J.M.(2016) Brazilian political cycles and the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, Open Democracy / ISA RC-47: Open Movements,1 September.https://opendemocracy.net/jos-maur-cio-domingues/brazilian-political-cycles-and-impeachment-of-president-dilma-rousseff