The video of a debate I took part in on the Brazilian crisis back in late October in London has been posted on YouTube.
My introductory remarks start at 23:35, and my responses to questions are at 44:30, 58:05, and 1:07:00.
It is one year to the day since ISIS claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, in which they “targeted the capital of abominations and perversion.”
What followed was the predictable Je Suis Charlie-style demonstrations of ‘solidarity’ – so patently a charade when voiced by authoritarian, militarist, and censorious European leaders. Others repeated the French Republican trinity of liberté, egalité, fraternité, but – at the risk of being ungenerous – did it maybe sound hollow? Where is the commitment to these ideals: not just a defence of the liberal achievements of the past, but their continued realisation and advance into the future?
The literal and symbolic targets of the attacks were people, especially the young, enjoying themselves, mixing with one another, watching football or attending a gig (“idolaters participating in a party of perversity” according to the ISIS statement). One might suggest that even (especially?) in a post-heroic age, footballers and rock stars remain better idols than any god you care to mention.
This is something the Marquis de Sade knew, as he wrote in the years immediately following the French Revolution. France was slipping back into the dark days, and a fully fledged libertine atheism was required to rid the country of vestiges of religiosity. The future of Europe was at stake. In a pamphlet entitled “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans!” from de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, the author spelled out the new spirit required. Here I quote selectively from it.
On idolatry:
Let the slave of a crowned brigand grovel, if he pleases, at the feet of a plaster image; such an object is readymade for his soul of mud. He who can serve kings must adore gods; but we, Frenchmen, but we, my fellow countrymen, we, rather than once more crawl beneath such contemptible traces, we would die a thousand times over rather than abase ourselves anew! Since we believe a cult necessary, let us imitate the Romans: actions, passions, heroes – those were the objects of their respect. Idols of this sort elevated the soul, electrified it, and more: they communicated to the spirit the virtues of the respected being. Minerva’s devotee coveted wisdom. Courage found its abode in his heart who worshiped Mars. Not a single one of that great people’s gods was deprived of energy; all of them infused into the spirit of him who venerated them the fire with which they were themselves ablaze; and each Roman hoped someday to be himself worshiped, each aspired to become as great at least as the deity he took for a model.
Here we have an almost Sartrean suggestion that each individual has a responsibility to live as an example of freedom to others.
It is no longer before the knees of either an imaginary being or a vile impostor a republican must prostrate himself; his only gods must now be courage and liberty.
When nihilist terror attacks flagrant demonstrations of pleasure in the streets, in stadia, in bars, in clubs… our response should be to have the courage to live life publicly, without fear of the Other or one another.
De Sade explained that prostration to religion came from fear:
Man’s uncertainty with respect to his god is, precisely, the cause for his attachment to religion. Man’s fear in dark places is as much physical as moral; fear becomes habitual in him, and is changed into need: he would believe he were lacking something even were he to have nothing more to hope for or dread.
And if we give into fear…?
They will rebuild upon these foundations, and will set thereupon the same colossi, with this difference, and it will be a cruel one: the new structures will be cemented with such strength that neither your generation nor ensuing ones will avail against them.
Of course, it is not religion that oppresses Europe today. It is fear – an abjection in the face of nihilist terror, and of our own leaders who would seek to terrorise us. The imperative – the effort to be truly republican – must be rejection of facile and cowardly exits. Neither the neoconservative lashing-out at phantasmic enemies, nor pusillanimous post-liberal mea culpas in the face of reaction.
The response to the Paris attacks a year on should be cocksure.There should be no assent to fences and frisks and metal detectors. The tumult of 2016 has left us with even less to which to cling. Whatever other political struggles may be required, a joyous, libertine, arrogant filling of public squares must be an essential part. All our cities should be capitals of abominations and perversion.
Let the most insulting blasphemy, the most atheistic works next be fully and openly authorised, in order to complete the extirpation from the human heart and memory of those appalling pastimes of our childhood.
What follows are my introductory and closing remarks made at a debate on Brazil’s crisis at the Battle of Ideas. The audio and/or video should be up in due course and I’ll post here.
The Brazilian crisis is over. There is nothing more to discuss.
At least, that’s how the Temer government sees it. Or as Michel’s favoured slogan has it: “DON’T THINK ABOUT THE CRISIS, WORK!”
It doesn’t quite inspire confidence, does it?
In fact, what we have in the current moment in Brazil is an intermission. Stability has been bought. And it has been bought at the cost of treason to the majority of the Brazilian people. And not just because of the anti-democratic deposition of Dilma Rousseff, but also because of the betrayal of the streets: the protests have stood, in their different ways, for better government, and against corruption. And the consummation of the ‘soft coup’ we’ve had in Brazil represents neither.
Let me first spell out what the crisis is. Then I’ll move onto the two faces of the protest wave since 2013. And finally I’ll explain how several actors have conspired to take advantage of the crisis and satisfy the demands of no one, except those of the elite.
As we know, the crisis is political as much as economic.
Economically, it is a deep recession caused by the end of the commodities super-cycle, as well as Dilma’s policy zigzag of stimulus & austerity, which satisfied neither her supporters nor the markets. However, it also reflects a deeper failure of Brazil to actively insert itself into the global division of labour through higher-tech industry. This is PT’s failure – or rather, missed opportunity.
Politically, it is represented by street protests, the destabilisation wrought by Lava Jato and its necessarily accompanying media spectacle, and the consequent ungovernability that emerged.
But it’s important to understand that these are not impersonal forces and independent variables. These factors impact upon each other. Often deliberately so. Everyone knows the economic situation rightly fuelled discontent, but it’s also the case that the economy was harmed by Lava Jato putting construction companies on ice, as well as there being a politically motivated investment strike. Protests were also fuelled by Lava Jato’s leaks to the media, and Congress reacted to this by making things difficult for the President – as is their right. Protests consequently escalated further.
So there is objectively a crisis. But it has also been accelerated so as to be taken advantage of by some of the most retrograde forces in Brazil.
Let’s rewind a second to the start of the protest wave.
From June 2013 onwards, protests were treated as part of the uprising of the global middle class. Like those in other emerging economies, it was a rising tide of expectation, and not crisis, that birthed the protests. The demand was for better public services and better government in general. This then mutated into a much more anti-political protest declaiming that ‘they do not represent us’ and calling for an ‘end to corruption’.
These can be distinguished as state engaging versus state resisting protests. And they point in very different directions.
But what we have with the Temer government is the worst of both worlds: very much a government of old elites, that with its austerity programme will devastate Brazil’s capacity to develop. That is, we end up with neither better public services nor an end to corruption.
Under PT we had a period of win-win: significant gains for the bourgeoisie, especially financial capital, as well as the taking of 40m people out of poverty and the expansion of consumption for the middle class. But this was precarious, and once the economic winds changed, PT was always going to lose elite support.
Now we have a lose-lose.
So while temporary stability has been bought, the system lacks legitimacy. As much as the right might cheer at PT’s downfall, the legacy of the protest wave is anti-political. The victor of the municipal elections this month was not the right, but the ‘no’: abstention, null votes and scratched ballots. An overweening focus on corruption has contributed to the delegitimisation of politics itself.
So the situation today is more precarious and volatile than simple headlines about the ‘end of the Latin American Pink Wave’ reveal. The crisis continues.
Closing Remarks
Cheerleaders of Lava Jato and accompanying protests saw people power in action. What might have been happening was actually anti-people power.
That is: a decline in trust and in governability. A disbelief that politics can achieve anything.
But given matters have not been conclusively decided, let us finish on a positive note. Former speaker of the chamber of deputies, Eduardo Cunha, has been arrested, and has threatened to tell all. This could well explode matters once again. Now the stakes will be raised.
But plus point is this. The more popular sections of the anti-corruption crowds are there to be won by democratic forces. Meanwhile, the one benefit of the impeachment has been to reacquaint the left with importance of representation and the key learning that anti-politics is default rightist: ‘get the bastards out’ ends up not with the exit of the corrupt, but a withering of trust and the perpetuation of oligarchical rule. The ones who end up ‘kicked out’ are not ‘the bastards’ from government, but the people from the plane of history.
As I’ve argued since the beginning of the year, the Lava Jato investigation is one of two things: either a limited initiative that stops after ensnaring its primary targets, or a thoroughgoing campaign-cum-crusade that ends up eviscerating the whole political class. It’s hard to decide which would be preferable. The one would be, effectively, a highly partisan manoeuvre to deligitimise the Workers Party (PT), and by extension the left as a whole. The other would create a vacuum similar to Italy in 1994 and would result in Berlusconism – or worse.
At least since Dilma’s impeachment, it has looked to many that the former was in operation. Already Lula’s arrest without charge back in March 2016 raised the hackles of many for privileging spectacle over due process, and brought to the fore pre-existing doubts about the neutrality of the judges. A few weeks ago the conservative America’s Quarterly entered the fray with a widely shared and discussed article by its editor Brian Winter, asking, ‘tell me how this ends‘:
Will the case result in a substantial long-term improvement in Brazilian justice and institutions, as its supporters hope? Or will it fizzle out like the “Clean Hands” investigation in Italy of the 1990s, which resulted in more than 1,000 arrests but little decline in systemic corruption over time?
The extent of its follow-through is intimately tied up with the question of the investigation’s politicisation. If it stops now, it looks rather partisan. In March the distinguished legal scholar Boaventura da Sousa Santos strongly criticised Lava Jato:
Blatantly illegal and unconstitutional judicial measures, a crassly selective persecutory zeal, an aberrant promiscuity in which media outlets are at the service of the conservative political elites, and a seemingly anarchic judicial hyper-activism
Only in the space of the past month we have seen preventative arrests of two former finance ministers – Antonio Palocci and Guido Mantega – in separate incidents, the latter carried out in a hospital cancer ward as his wife was receiving treatment; investigator Dallagnol’s absurdly inflated charges against Lula; and then indication from the Federal Police that they would not be seeking any more plea bargains – key to Lava Jato’s progress from the start. Most problematically, this seems to have been urged by the Temer government itself, with a view to protecting PMDB politicians named by Oderbrecht, one of the construction companies at the heart of the Petrolão scandal.
So has it become politicised? Winter again:
Hell yes [… ] But out of necessity, rather than design. Indeed, I’d argue that the politicization of the case is exactly what has allowed it to progress this far without being shut down by its enemies.
Judicial proceedings should be politically independent. How is such politicisation justifiable? Winter continues:
[The prosecutors] bet – correctly, I think – that a robotic, faceless, by-the-book recitation of charges and sentences was not going to accomplish [its objectives] alone. To build a sufficiently high firewall, they’d have to play the game of public relations – which meant talking to journalists, speaking at conferences and setting up a user-friendly website about the case – with the ultimate goal of convincing Brazilians that the Car Wash probe, if allowed to do its job without interference, would lead to a less corrupt, more fair Brazil.
This all has a certain logic. Perhaps Lava Jato would never have got off the ground without public – and above all media – pressure. Taking this at face value, then, one would wish to see the job done and all those culpable, or at least the ringleaders, brought to justice. One would not want the judiciary to be compromised by appearing partisan in its targeting of PT, especially given evidence of wrongdoing across the spectrum. But apparently, Lava Jato cannot carry on much longer. According to Winter:
Once you start to play the political game, once you step on that field, a kind of countdown clock starts to go tick tick tick. Because by moving beyond pure jurisprudence, and including public relations in your focus, you become vulnerable to the inevitable ebbs and flows of public opinion.
As ‘public opinion’ (by which read elite opinion, mediated by the press and TV) seems to have had its fill, it is time for Lava Jato to wrap up. Italy’s Mani Pulite, on which Lava Jato was consciously modelled, was held to have sprawled, carrying on too long, eventually dissipating, and leaving much corruption intact. Already in May, as Dilma’s impeachment for unrelated ‘crimes’ was looking increasingly likely, Lava Jato seemed to be drawing to a close.
Why not carry on? One of the Lava Jato team claimed they “probably could put close to 100 percent of Congress in jail.” Brian Winter argues, consequently, that “in the real world, they know this is more than the system would bear.” Fine – that would result in the second concern I mentioned above. But is that fair? Winter’s answer?
No, it’s not. But it’s not even a political tactic – it’s a classic investigative one. It may also be the strategy that gives Car Wash the best odds of leaving a strong, intact legacy.
There is a deep perversity here. It is as follows: Mani Pulite is held to have gone on too long and dissipated. At the same time we know it exploded the party system and led to the end of the First Republic. It also failed to ‘end’ corruption. Consequently, Lava Jato is to stop early to avoid the same errors, but leave the system intact… but at the cost of delegitimising one party alone, while also comprising the judiciary’s commitment to order, independence, serenity and restraint. And also not ending corruption, thus leaving a prejudicial ‘legacy’.
Seems rather like the worst of both worlds.
Of course, it would be wrong to expect the judiciary to carry out the job of politics. The Brazilian party system is rotten and in need of serious democratising reform. That is at the root of a lot of corruption. At the same time, it is mistaken to believe one can ‘end’ corruption. Even the cleanest political systems in the world are corrupt, and often appear clean because their ‘corruption’ is legalised. This deserves further explanation.
The concept of corruption in the modern world is premised on the separation of public and private interests. Private interests in market society are not pathological. But the intrusion of private interests into the public realm of state and government is. This is called corruption. Yet in market society, it is impossible to create and protect a disinterested public realm, driven purely by republican virtue. Indeed, many of the business interests who cheerled Lava Jato would not tolerate such a set-up. Banning all forms of lobbying – if such a thing were possible – would be shrilly denounced. And who is to say business interests should not have a voice, alongside those of organised labour, NGOs, and other civil society organisations?
So it is perhaps right that Lava Jato should have aimed to be a discreet investigation, riding a wave of public intolerance for corruption until it could no longer. Strike while the iron is hot, right? But given the impossibility of protecting public interest from contamination by the private, what were the anti-corruption zealots – beyond the members of the police and judiciary involved – really hoping for?
It is important to understand that ‘anti-corruption’ has largely been superseded by the concept of transparency, led by the work of Transparency International and the IFIs. This concept signifies predictability, lower transaction costs for capital, and the elimination of all informality in regulation and rules. ‘Transparency‘ is hence not the protection of the public realm from private interests but the protection of specific private interests (especially international capital) from rent-seeking by public servants or other unpredictability related to clientelistic networks. One wouldn’t want to defend clientelism, but it should be clear that ‘transparency’ is intimately associated with neoliberal globalisation and the political priority that states be open to international capital.
In and of itself, one may still conclude that a partial Lava Jato is better than no Lava Jato; at least some of the responsible for the Petrolão are behind bars. It does send a powerful message about impunity… for some.
Let’s detour to the hugely instructive Italian crisis of 1992-4. This crisis was not reducible to the impact of Tangentopoli and Mani Pulite. The crisis happened on several planes and lacked a single ‘key’ cause. The overarching international context was the end of the Cold War and the impact this had on the Italian Communist Party – and the end of anti-communism as a cohering strategy amongst the bourgeois parties. Equally important was Italy’s desire to meet the Maastricht criteria for European monetary union. As Paul Ginsborg explains in his excellent book on Italian history 1980-2001, there were also several national causes. On the institutional plane, we find the inefficiency of the Italian state, the degradation of party government, widespread corruption, and elite impunity. Additionally there were social actors which came to bear: a minority within the state, especially in the judiciary, with a sense of morality and fealty to the Republic, who had had enough; popular disgust with corruption and the failure of effective government; and finally the Mafia’s power and destabilising influence.
Enough of this should sound familiar to Brazilian ears. But let us unpick it further. The international context is vastly different, of course. There is neither a Communist threat, nor its defeat and the consequent end of elite consensus, to explain the Brazilian situation (as I explained here, if it is a ‘coup’, it was not to depose a left-wing regime). In the opening of the economy we do find a contextual similarity. In Italy, it was regional integration, while in Brazil there may be a confluence of the transparency agenda with international economic interests. Then domestically, leaving aside the question of the Mafia, the Brazilian crisis looks remarkably similar.
One additional conjunctural factor about Brazil must be noted, however. The raised expectations caused by a decade of economic growth, unmatched by improvements in public services or government. This is what exploded in June 2013. This inchoate, party-less wave of discontent was a crucial factor in the making of the crisis.
Thus when Lava Jato began rounding up the culprits behind one of the largest corruption schemes ever discovered, many rejoiced. Ginsborg noted the following about Mani Pulite:
A festive air pervaded many parts of Italy, as always happens when the habitual ordering of a society is suddenly brought into question.
But as in Italy, so in Brazil: behind the celebration were divergent motivations, reflecting differences of class and culture. For your average worker, seeing businessmen and politicians led away in handcuffs might look like the end of upper-class impunity and – finally! – the impartial application of the laws of the land. For the small businessman, it might signal the end of the use of political influence – denied to him, but available to the big businessman – for private gain. For the big bourgeois, it represents the downfall of an inconvenient political party and the ideology of ‘statism’.
But the celebration was less than universal in Brazil, because there was a pattern to the victimisation, and it seemed to only be helping the Right. Here is a crucial difference between the Italian and Brazilian investigations. I’ll call Boaventura de Sousa Santos to the witness stand again:
On the one hand, the Italian magistrates always kept a scrupulous respect for the criminal proceedings and, at most, did nothing but apply rules that had been strategically ignored by a judicial system that was not only conformist but also complicit with the privileges of the ruling political elites in Italy’s post-war politics. On the other hand, they sought to apply the same unvarying zeal in investigating the crimes committed by the leaders of the various governing political parties. They assumed a politically neutral position precisely to defend the judicial system from the attacks it would surely be subjected to by those targeted by their investigations and prosecutions. This is the very antithesis of the sad spectacle currently offered to the world by a sector of the Brazilian judicial system.
Moro may have self-consciously modelled his investigation on Mani Pulite, and took advantage of similar contexts. But if one articulates Lava Jato’s politicisation to the other factors which led to Dilma’s ouster, it all begins to look awfully conspiratorial. Indeed, since I posted my piece on whether it was a ‘coup’, Temer was caught on camera stating that Dilma was deposed because she failed to adopt the PMDB’s neoliberal ‘Bridge to the Future‘ plan. His government, which has scant legitimacy, has since tried to pass a constitutional amendment, PEC 241, which would freeze public spending for twenty years.
It would be easy, then, to string the factors together – protest channelled rightwards by the media, a partisan Lava Jato investigation, the dodgy removal of the President, the implementation of neoliberal reforms – and conclude it was all one big conspiracy. But the crisis is real. And not just in its ‘objective’ economic dimension (though this too has been affected by an investment strike and the freezing of construction due to Lava Jato itself).
A mock-up of the execrable and much-mocked Powerpoint presentation used to suggest Lula masterminded everything
Popular frustration with a dysfunctional political system, an ineffective and extremely bureaucratic state, and poor public services is a fact, and legitimate. The severe recession, corruption revelations and street protests are a concatenation that led to a crisis of legitimacy. However much powerful interests have been able to swing matters in their favour, the Brazilian people have not been mere bystanders.
Here, another Italian parallel presents itself to us. In Italy, popular disgust at the political class was found amongst two sections of the broad middle class, what we might call – again following Ginsborg – the entrepreneurial and civic middle classes. The former bristled at high taxes and bureaucracy, and contrasted its own putative dynamism with a lethargic state. The latter held to republican virtues and sought to defend the public realm from its degradation by private interests. Anger would be directed at the coexistence of private wealth with public squalor. Blame for the situation, then, rested at the feet of the oligarchy, corrupting politics. For the entrepreneurial segment, culpability lay instead with politicians, whose corruption harmed those trying to get by. These social groups are present, mutatis mutandis, in Brazil today.
Just as the these fractions have divergent world-views and villains, so their political responses to the Brazil’s political denouement differ. The entrepreneurial middle class wishes to see reform and liberalisation. The civic middle class would also like reform, but without liberalisation. Both would like a ‘fairer’ Brazil in which ‘things work’.
What is emerging, however, is a situation of no reform and a lot of liberalisation. Those with most agency in the crisis will also be the big winners: the ‘external bourgeoisie’ (which political-economist Alfredo Saad-Filho defines as the owners of financial capital, transnational and internationally-integrated manufacturing capital, and the media, to be distinguished from the national bourgeoisie of domestic manufacturing and agriculture). The jewels in the crown for this narrow section of the population are the sell-off of rights to the pre-salt oil fields, the passing of PEC241, and the arrest and loss of political rights for Lula, probably the PT’s only chance in 2018.
This scenario explains why a section of the left – in part constituted by the ‘civic middle class’, and which has supported PT – have turned on the entrepreneurial middle class with fury. To the former, the latter were mere ‘useful idiots’ of the crisis. They may have succeeded in getting rid of PT, but they’ll have rid themselves of their social rights at the same time. “Just you wait”, they say, “until the cuts hit you”. Indeed, let us see.
For me, the left has failed – demonstrably – to make any hay from the crisis. The entrepreneurial middle class (composed of small business owners, the lesser traditional professions, and better-off workers) is still there to be won, and the spite is unhelpful. The left cannot be seen to be defending Brazilian business-as-usual. That’s best left to those who have most gained from the system. Thoroughgoing reform – but not the neoliberal recipe – is required, both to make the state less of a burden and to democratise society. In this, workers and the lower middle class have a common interest.
Unfortunately, as I’ve discussed before, the political victim of the crisis is not just PT (for which we should feel little pity – they made their bed…) but politics itself. In Italy, where the old parties were eviscerated, they suffered Berlusconi. As well as neoliberal reforms, Berlusconi also pioneered a style of politics, a unity of technocracy and populism, which emphasised practical business know-how instead of politicking, combined with astute use of the mass media – at the time referred to as ‘videocracy’. It was also a unity of old and new: traditional clientelism, but allied to a sense of modern entrepreneurialism, unconcerned with the fustiness of the public sector and comfortable old arrangements.
Perhaps in Brazil we are witnessing similar. São Paulo, the place with the most ‘modern’ politics in the country, just elected wealthy businessman João Dória Jr as mayor – a man who made every effort to present himself as a non-politician, but who has cultivated close relations with the PSDB for a long time and was rightly described by The Intercept “unscrupulous, superficial and sly”. Sound familiar?
Hopefully that is not the pattern of politics for the foreseeable. The crisis after all is not over; it is merely in a new phase. For now, it is unquestionable that Lava Jato has been a partisan crusade and not the political holocaust I feared. But anti-politics remains the major force. The saving grace is that while anti-politics can manifest as retreat and indifference, it can also be angry and engaged. That at least is a better platform for democracy – and democratisation.
Brazil’s first elections since Dilma’s impeachment are already being reported as a ‘slap‘ to the Workers’ Party (PT). This was always going to be the case. The governing party bore the brunt of anti-corruption protests, the Lava Jato investigations, and responsibility for recession. More interesting is the rise of another force – anti-politics. None-of-the-above may turn out to be the biggest winner.
In Brazil’s biggest city, São Paulo, millionaire businessman João Dória won an unprecedented absolute majority, heavily defeating PT’s Fernando Haddad. Dória’s appeal as successful businessman, non-politician and former host of Brazil’s version of The Apprentice did him favours in the current climate. But equally notable was that nul or white votes beat Haddad into second place. Indeed, the story was similar in mayoral elections across Brazil.
Four of the country’s five largest cities saw nul/white come in second place. Likewise in eight of the 20 biggest. Most remarkably, the protest vote came in first in three significant municipalities (all in the top 30 nationally): São Gonçalo (pop. 1m) and Nova Iguaçú (pop. 800k) in Greater Rio, and Osasco (pop. 700k) in Greater São Paulo. And this is without counting abstention rates that hovered around 20%. There were regional disparities, with abstention and blank votes in the Northeast region generally lower, while much higher in the metropolises of the Southeast.
This deserves further exploration later this week. But for now, a broader lens on trust in democracy. Brazil’s political crisis and anti-political wave seem like a part of global trends.
2016: making the strongest argument against electoral democracy in recent memory. https://t.co/bTINPLo7ES
— Colin Snider (@ColinMSnider) October 2, 2016
2016: The year where the world’s governments fell apart. #brexit #Trump #Brazil #mexico #Venezuela
— Apollo (@belhasclass) June 24, 2016
Yet Brazil operates on a different timescale. Attempts to fit it into ‘universal’ periodisations are mistaken. While democracy was being hollowed-out across the West in the 2000s, Brazil was living perhaps its greatest democratising moment (in a history hardly ennobled by them). While left critics rightly point out social movement and labour demobilisation during the PT’s period in office, by the standards of formal liberal democracy, this was a peak of institutional representation of popular wishes. At least at the executive level, a majority of Brazilians voted for representatives who promised improvements in standards of living for the majority and these were duly delivered. Yes, there was graft, vote-buying and so on, while oligarchical politics carried on as usual. But it still presented a contrast to the European or North American pattern of promising nothing and getting even less in return. So what happened?
The protests which erupted in June 2013 were testament to rising expectations coaxed from the previous decade’s success. The failure of public institutions to match up to these new aspirations then crashed into a severe economic downturn and resulted in the political crisis we see today. For all the ins and outs of political manoeuvring, the primary dynamic here is undeniable.
@BrazilBrian it’s impossible to separate public support for Lava-Jato, intertwined w/ the impeachment movement, from the economic downturn
— Alex Cuadros (@alexcuadros) September 28, 2016
Indeed, for all that this is ostensibly “about corruption”, the defining feature is a loss of trust in establishment politics. Witness data about support for democracy from the latest Latinobarómetro:
If we chart net support for democracy (pro-democracy, minus authoritarianism and ambivalence) alongside GDP per capita, the results are unsurprising: support for democracy accompanies GDP per capita figures.
NB: Survey data on democracy is from the early part of the year. Therefore GDP per capita data has been taken from the preceding year (i.e. 2015’s democracy score is presented alongside 2014’s GDP figures). 2016 GDP per capita data is not yet available, but it will likely accompany 2016’s steep decline in net support for democracy (-23%, down from+22% in 2015).
This isn’t to suggest that support for democracy is inherently fickle and dependent on it ‘delivering’ economically. But they are not unconnected. And opinion surveys likely magnify this relationship (you’re struggling to get by, you see institutions not operating as well as they might, and you tell your interviewer you’re unsure about this whole democracy thing.)
Today’s election results should be seen in this light. But the deep impact of the anti-corruption crusade led by Judge Sérgio Moro should not be underestimated. Lava Jato is not just an investigation into massive graft. It’s also a media event, whose impartiality is deeply questionable. Even if its intentions were not partisan, its effects on the broader culture are. This is seen in the fall in PT candidates’ popularity – both in polling and in these municipal elections.
But worse than delegitimising the PT, the anti-corruption investigations (and the wave of protest they rode and helped direct and sustain) may be in the process of de-legitimising politics as a pursuit in itself. While political corruption is a betrayal of trust from those holding public office, anti-corruption politics (as opposed to anti-corruption policies) are themselves corrosive of trust. Moro, one notes, benefits from high approval ratings and even figures in putative 2018 presidential election surveys. But even he has seen his standing fall in the past months as his tactics seem to fall foul of the ethical high standards he ostensibly demands. If corruption seems to be everywhere, who can be trusted?
Trust is a fungible property. Loss of trust in one area can mean it gets displaced onto others. As representative institutions get called into question, people can displace trust into counter-majoritarian institutions, such as the judiciary.
There is thus far no evidence of this in Brazil, and in fact the judiciary seems to have suffered from the same loss of trust affecting representative institutions. This may be a small mercy. A fully fleshed democracy requires trust in representatives, whatever the institutional configuration may be; and rule by judges is not that. But abstention and blank votes do not presage a re-engagement with politics. Anti-politics continues the winner for now.
