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Jair Bolsonaro's decisive victory in the second round of Brazil's presidential elections showed a clear right-wing turn in the politics of Latin America. Three of the largest economies-Argentina, Brazil, and Chile-are now in the hands of right-wing governments. Aim Bolsonaro is a figure significantly more than Mauricio Macri of Argentina and Sebastian Piñera of Chile, both successful businessmen who came to power in the markets. Bolsonaro, by contrast, is an outright reactionary and the best manifestation yet of the "Trumpification" of the Latin American right.
Bolsonaro is an unabashed misogynist, having once told a female colleague in the Brazilian National Congress that she was "too ugly" to rape, he has characterized Haitian and Syrian political refugees coming from Brazil as "the scum of the world," and he has I was shown outright hatred at the LGBT community by noting that he would be a bit of a gay guy. Bolsonaro has also made inflammatory remarks about race, that Brazil does not know anything about Afro-Brazilians since Africans "themselves over the slaves."
Displaying a Trumpian hostility towards the environment, Bolsonaro Last but not least is Bolsonaro's fondness for the military and penchant for authoritarianism, which is rooted in the Latin American tradition of the caudillo, or strongman. As a trainer parachutist in Brazil's last military dictatorship, in place from 1964 to 1985, Bolsonaro has heaped praise on the leaders of the dictatorship. This urge has come despite a damming 2014 report of the Committee on the Law of the United States, which was responsible for a host of human rights abuses, President Dilma Rousseff.
Understandably, much of the report about Bolsonaro's rise in the US media is predicting a dramatic upheaval in Brazilian politics with apocalyptic overtones. A few months before the elections, an article in the New York Times Bolsonaro's candidacy and the notion of dangerous militarization of Brazilian politics. Some outlets have come back to the Philippines by Rodrigo Duterte, while others have contended that a Bolsonaro win would be a "victory" for the "global Christian right," a movement that -As practiced in Russia, Hungary, Poland, and the United States-justifies the use of religion to suppress women's rights and homosexuality.
Bolsonaro poses to Brazil and the international community as a whole, it will take a lot to radically upend. Indeed, a compelling case can be made that Brazilian democracy, despite its youth, is more than capable of coping with the stress on the democratic system by the Bolsonaro presidency. Much of this is the legacy of recent left-wing administrations. They have facilitated Bolsonaro's rise, but they have prepared for the country for him.
Despite having become a democracy only in 1985, Brazil has had a rich political experience since then. It is much more important in 1990, when Mello's Fernando Collor and Bolsonaro's in-depth studies and comprehensive state reform. Collor's presidency imploded spectacularly; he resigned in 1992 under the threat of impeachment by Congress on corruption charges. But, more importantly, Collor's ambitious, liberalizing economic program went nowhere. If anything, an economic agenda anchored on privatization and state reform could prove to be more effective in Brazil than in the early 1990s.
Since the Collor era, privatization has been co-opted by much of the left in Latin America, including Brazil's Workers' Party (PT). And much of what remains to be privatized in Brazil will prove hard to pull off. Any discussion of privatization must involve the oil giant Petrobras, the crown jewel of the Brazilian public sector. It is not clear that the public will go along with this privatization or that Congress will approve it. It is not even clear that Bolsonaro is committed to it. As congressman, Bolsonaro displayed a "clear preference for nationalist, protectionist policies." While Bolsonaro's University of Chicago-educated economic advisor Paulo Guedes has spoken enthusiastically about privatizing Petrobras and the utilities Giant Eletrobras, Bolsonaro himself, talking about "preserving" the core of Petrobras and about his fears that Eletrobras might fall into Chinese hands .
On the other hand, Macri and Piñera have discovered, undoing the legacy of left-wing governments is far from easy. And, according to the World Bank, more than 29 million people have been lifted out of poverty and into the ranks of the middle class by the anti-poverty programs implemented by the PT. In fact, there is little evidence to suggest that Bolsonaro's victory signals approval by the voters of the dismantling of these social programs. More than anything, Bolsonaro's victory is a reflection of a tiredness of PT politicians rather than a rejection of PT policies. This year, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (popularly known as Lula) was the leading candidate for the presidency largely on the strength of nostalgia for PT economic policies. Not surprisingly, late in the campaign Bolsonaro announced that he would expand one of Lula's most popular anti-poverty programs, Bolsa Familia, or Family Purse, a conditional-cash-transfer scheme, by adding an extra monthly payment, which he argued would come from eliminating fraud and inefficiencies in the program.
Meanwhile, the structures of the Brazilian political system should have any dramatic transformation of the country's politics or even a radical shift in social and economic policy. Most telling of all is the endemic gridlock of the Brazilian political system, which makes its Congress one of the least productive in all of Latin America, if not the entire democratic world. This resistance to bullying against a Bolsonaro assault on the regime of laws, to protect the environment, and to increase the risk of child sexual abuse.
Brazil is, after all, the paradigmatic political science example of a "deadlock democracy," a system that generates and rewards a multiplicity of weak parties and individualistic, pork-oriented politicians with little accountability to the citizenry. A key feature of the electoral system created since 1985 is an open-list system of proportional representation. Intended to enhance democratic representation, it also works to undermine democratic governance by generating a multiplicity of weak parties while encouraging pork-barrel payoffs, political horse-trading, and corruption. To be sure, the Congress that awaits Bolsonaro is quite conservative, reflecting the strength of the so-called "beef, bullets, and Bible caucuses" -the cluster of legislators representing the interests of agrarian oligarchs, law enforcement, and the evangelical community.
But Congress is also more fragmented than ever: Chamber of Deputies. The largest party will be PT (with 56 seats), followed by Bolsonaro's Social Liberal Party (with 52 seats). As in the recent past, this extraordinary fragmentation in the political party system will make a difference in the law, and the PT's control of the largest share of the budget will be achieved. And so far, there is very little to suggest that Bolsonaro is particularly skilled at navigating the complexity of Congress, with no bill of substance attached to his term in Rio de Janeiro congressman.
Finally, Brazilian democracy is not as fragile as many international observers make it out to be. There are pockets of extraordinary strength in the political system that should serve as guardrails to protect against any democratic breaches, starting with a remarkably clean and efficient electoral system. There was a whiff of corruption or malfeasance in two back-to-back rounds of voting. This is no small feat considering that Brazil is the world's fourth-largest democracy, with a complex electorate not unlike that of the United States. Brazil is also in possession of a strong and vibrant civil society, noted for its broad and independent media, powerful social movements, and a long history of protest. Unsurprisingly, Reacting to the Regression of Many Brazilians to His Divisive Rhetoric, Bolsonaro has recanted some of his most fiery comments, and there is no doubt that they are discriminating against the LGBT community. by the law.
Also noteworthy is the burst of judicial autonomy that Brazil has experienced in recent years and which unintentionally, contributed to Bolsonaro's rise. Historically, the judiciary has been the weakest branch of the Brazilian government, usually employed as a tool for the executive branch. A goal emboldened by the anti-corruption laws enacted by the PT, the judiciary has shown its teeth by launching the country's largest anti-corruption campaign. So far, the campaign has ensured 60% of the Brazilian Congress, prevented the incumbent president from running for re-election, and feels Lula, the country's most popular politician, to prison. Less apparent, at least to the outside world, is that the judiciary, which has been transformed with the appointment of many women and minorities to the courts, especially the Supreme Court of Justice, protecting civil rights, such as the 2011 ruling that paved the way for the legalization of same-sex marriage.
None of this is to say that Bolsonaro's presidency will be inconsequential or that Bolsonaro can not find a way to bend Congress and the courts to his will. Rather, that we should be cautious in proclaiming doom or in making uninformed comparisons. There's a tendency in the U.S. media, and even among some scholars, to overreact to political developments in Latin America. Indeed, the reaction of the American left to Bolsonaro's is reminiscent of the American right of reaction to Lula's rise in 2003, and the widespread fears at the time of the formation of a left-wing troika of Lula, Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chávez, "which never came to pass. As the American experience under Trump reveals, there is no insurance in any democratie, but consolidated or mature, against the rise of a leader of policies and demeanor are a direct offense, if not an outright threat, to democracy and its values.
