Jair Bolsonaro defeated Fernando Haddad (candidate of the Workers Party) in Brazil’s runoff elections for the presidency, winning 55,2% of the votes. Even though about 30% of eligible voters abstained from the elections, this was not based on any unified political alternative to the far right.
Brazilians did not only vote for a new president. The electorate also voted for senators and 513 seats in the lower house of congress in the federal government. Furthermore, this electoral cycle included a ballot for governors and legislators in 26 states and Brasília, the capital.
The Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores-PT) won the largest number of seats in the lower house of congress. At this level, Bolsonaro’s party, the Social Liberal Party (PSL), secured the second largest number of seats. This suggests that Bolsonaro will coerce smaller right-wing and centrist parties into alliances to help push his conservative laws and policies (Constitutional amendments!) through congress.
Liberal Democratic Myths
Geraldo Alckmin’s electoral front, constructed around the traditional champion of neoliberalism in Brazil, the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB), fell apart despite its huge financial backing and free television advertising. The Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), Michel Temer’s party that spearheaded the coup d’etat against the PT (orchestrating Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and Lula’s imprisonment) lost key seats in the senate and suffered big setbacks in the lower house too. Shady political elites like Temer involved in ‘Operation Car Wash’, the large-scale corruption scandal, evaded jail through backdoor deals with those at the top of the politico-judicial apparatus (Brian Mier, The Crumbling of a Coup Government, NACLA, 8 June 2017). What else does this unmask if not the limits or exhaustion of liberal democracy? It demonstrates how those who preach the sacredness of liberal democracy manipulate and subvert it in defence of their own theft and lies.
Bolsonaro was a congressman for 28 years after he had been a captain in the military. Long before his 2018 presidential campaign, he boldly espoused his far-right political convictions on crime and corruption(The Economist, 9 Nov. 2017). In concert with his sons and ex-military men earmarked for ministerial posts in his cabinet, Bolsonaro revved up his racist, homophobic, misogynist and climate-change-denialism slogans to a new pitch. Through hate speech and lies, propagated through Facebook and social media soundbites (‘memes’), they rallied a recession-battered middle class behind the PSL far-right agenda (Anne Vigna, Brazil’s right challenges the Workers’ Party, Le Monde Diplomatique, Dec. 2017). Censorship of the media and the curricula of schools and universities accused of leftist deviance is a priority on their agenda. Surrounding themselves with reactionary evangelical fundamentalists and agribusiness, they declared war on all leftists, labelling the landless peasant movement (MST) a terrorist group (The Guardian, 3 Nov. 2018). Taken together, this paves the way for the criminalisation of anti-neoliberal protests and ruthless repression. These are the dreadful hallmarks of an authoritarian dictatorship.
Explaining the surge and domination of far right forces in terms of the determination, arrogance, bullying, nauseating brutality and social media savviness of the bourgeoisie and the Bolsonaros is true but inadequate. It is one-sided reasoning which oversimplifies reality, especially in Brazil where the PT had been the governing party for more than a decade.
A fuller account must incorporate the fragmented resistance of weakened social movements and trade unions. In addition, the misguided strategies and tactics of political currents, flowing from their own programmatic disorientation, aggravated this crisis of the workers’ movement and leftist parties. It manifested itself in illusions and entrapment in the bourgeois parliamentary system that the conservative political forces ultimately exploited to their advantage.
Resist Far Right Onslaught
As in a number of other countries, Brazil’s far right politicians constantly threaten to crush and decimate progressive anti-fascist and anti-neoliberal resistance. Such blatant intolerance of the left, on the one hand, has emboldened the followers of the far right. On the other hand, this tirade against the left also bolsters the momentum of the imperialist offensive in Latin America.
US imperialism views Bolsonaro as their chief ally in South America as Brazil is an economic powerhouse with solid connections to its neighbours. The national security advisor of the Trump administration in Washington, John Bolton, met Bolsonaro & Co towards the end of November to work out a joint campaign against Venezuela and Cuba. In Bolton’s worldview, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua form a ‘triangle’ or ‘troika of tyranny’ that the United States is determined to remove from the hemisphere (The Guardian, 1 Nov. 2018). This harsh terminology is a deliberate attempt to justify and match imperialism’s ruthless regime change objective.
This reactionary cycle has been progressing by fits and starts for several years. It is a right-wing backlash aimed at the demolition of anti-neoliberal currents inaugurated by Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution. In December 2017, Sebastián Piñera, a billionaire businessman replaced Michelle Bachelet, a moderate socialist, at the helm of the Chilean state, a country in the grip of intense social turmoil. It so returned an ultra-conservative businessman to the presidency for a second term (following Piñera’s 2010-2014 term).
The outcomes of Argentina’s October 2019 presidential election will also indicate how far this ultra-right counterrevolution proceeds in the region. Mauricio Macri, ex-mayor of Buenos Aires and business tycoon, beat a leftist Peronists candidate (Daniel Scioli) in Argentina’s presidential race in November 2015. A major British newspaper described it as ‘the most significant defeat for a leftist candidate in South America for more than 10 years’(The Guardian 23 Nov. 2015). In the meanwhile, a corruption scandal similar to the Brazilian case is unfolding in Argentina, replete with the duplicity and insolence of conspirators in the judiciary and political elite. Macri plans to win a second term. The Panama Papers on money laundering and tax evasion (leaked by Mossack Fonseca) exposed the shady dealings of Macri’s wealthy empire registered under his father’s name. At the behest of President Macri and his cronies, a federal judge is trying to indict Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as an apparent beneficiary of a bribery network linked to public works projects that allegedly operated under her administration. If they can find credible evidence, they hope to impeach Senator Fernández de Kirchner and thereby exclude her from Argentina’s forthcoming presidential contest.
How to resist and ultimately defeat this onslaught of the far right tops the agendas of social movements, trade unions and progressive political forces within countries across Latin America. It is clear that the success of this fightback hinges on united action of the broadest range of organisations of oppressed, exploited and impoverished people in each country. In this situation, mobilising global solidarity with united fronts against the far right can help revitalise working class internationalism.