The Shaky Foundations of Brasilian Democracy

This is one of Santos’ famous leaning buildings and is a fitting metaphor for the fragility and surreal character of Brasilian politics in the run up to October’s election. The country remains dangerously polarised, but with the  exception of the revolutionary Socialist Workers Party, the old Communist Party, and the left of PT, the thirteen Presidential candidates are overwhelmingly conservative, right-wing, and support a neoliberal agenda. The lack of any clear ideological difference between the “Christian Democrats,” “Social Democrats”, the wholly illiberal ‘Liberals”, and the ludicrously named “New”, “Forward”, “Mission”, and “Progressive Union” parties leaves most of the public baffled, a pantomime manifest in the banners that line the streets where in the absence of any clear programme, candidates appear to be competing for who has the whitest teeth and the broadest smile. If there is a consensus, then it is that Brasil is open for business. I have yet to find any clear empirical historical evidence to support the thesis that privatisation improves public life, but despite this there is talk of selling off the federal universities, the health service, the central Bank, the Post Office, Petrobas, the state-owned oil company, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. To facilitate this agenda, one candidate is proposing the opening of “Entrepreneur Clubs” in every school, university and church. It is a desperate state of affairs. Brasil is still nominally a democracy, but the combined power of the mafia, armed militias, organised crime, and a class of openly corrupt politicians, lends itself to the idea of a ‘gangster capitalist state.’ In this respect, the prospect of the election of Flavio Bolsonaro, one of the ex-president’s sons, a coup monger with known links to militia groups and organised white-collar crime, and an advocate of American intervention, is a terrifying possibility. However, if all else fails, salvation lies in the Mission Party, who have pledged to build what Brasil has always lacked, an Atomic bomb.