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A member of the Federal Police looks on as supporters of Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro arrive on a bus after their camp was dismantled in Brasilia.
Are the men in uniform hurting Brazil's democracy?
Hardcore supporters of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro ransacked Brazil's democratic institutions à la Jan. 6 on Sunday, and there’s strong anecdotal evidence that some members of the security forces didn’t do much to stop them.
It was, at a minimum, a dereliction of duty. Or perhaps it reflected their thinly veiled sympathy for what the protesters were trying to do: overturn the result of the 2022 election to reinstate Bolsonaro.
Local media spotted civilian cops and members of the military police in Brasília chatting with protesters and even escorting them as they stormed parliament, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court. Ibaneis Rocha, the pro-Bolsonaro governor of the federal district, was suspended for 90 days for failing to prevent the attacks carried out by Bolsonaristas who reportedly arrived in Brasília days before in 100 buses that went unnoticed by the friendly men in uniform. And guess who decided to skip town and is apparently hiding in Florida? Anderson Torres, the capital’s now-fired security chief and Bolsonaro’s former justice minister.
In the end, no security personnel defied the federal order to retake the buildings. Still, the dramatic events have shone a spotlight on Brazil’s capital and on the close ties between the country’s security apparatus and Bolsonaro.
It’s unclear how widespread the phenomenon is. Brazil’s military and police don’t do surveys on the politics of its rank and file. But again, anecdotally, it’s an open secret that most of them are fans of the former president, an ex-army captain himself.
On the one hand, the military is traditionally conservative and thus ideologically aligned with a right-winger like Bolsonaro. On the other, its members have a strong incentive to respect hierarchy and to defend law and order. In that sense, they are not an immediate threat to democracy, says Chris Garman, managing director for the Americas at Eurasia Group.
Brazil's security apparatus, he explains, has strong survival instincts — in part due to lessons learned coming out of military rule in 1985. Very few of its members openly expressed any willingness to support Bolsonaro's efforts to overturn the election result or to defy orders by their commanders despite rumblings of a coup.
Yet, that's not the only risk — especially under the newly minted left-wing presidency of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva.
"It's more of a gray zone," Garman says. Bolsonarista cops and soldiers might be less aggressive in clamping down on protests that might turn violent, as they've done with thousands of pro-Bolsonaro crowds that have been stirring up trouble across the country since their idol lost re-election to Lula two months ago.
The slow-burn threat is that the crackdown against the rioters and their backers deepens their mistrust of the government and disenchantment with the political class.
A big chunk of Bolsonaro's base — including many members of Brazil’s security apparatus — "came out of this election feeling that [it] was stolen in the loose sense of the word, not the narrow sense of the word from fraud," Garman says. "They view that establishment was out to undermine Bolsonaro and elect Lula" by stacking the odds against the former.
So what, if anything, can Lula do to prevent another 8 de Janeiro? With an Erdogan-style purge of the military and police out of the question, it all comes down to how the prosecution is handled.
For Garman, Lula will have to strike a tough balance between taking effective action against the perpetrators and making sure his measures don't smack of overreach that pushes Bolsonaristas so far into their corner that next time, the security men might be even less inclined to do their job.
Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva greets supporters at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia.
Lula and the new Brazil: big plans, short honeymoon
Earlier this week, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva completed his return from the wilderness.
After 12 rocky years out of power – which included the impeachment of his hand-picked successor, jail time for a corruption conviction that was later overturned, and a narrow election win over his nemesis Jair Bolsonaro – the left-wing former union leader was inaugurated for the third time as Brazil’s president.
The last time Lula lived at the Dawn Palace in Brasilia, from 2003-2010, he oversaw a historic transformation of the country, lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty and putting Brazil on the map as an emerging leader of the new Global South. Small wonder that he left office with an approval rating of 80%. US President Barack Obama once called him “the most popular politician on earth.”
Now, at the start of his third presidential term, Lula says he wants to do many of the same things that characterized his first two: lift millions more into the middle class by increasing social spending, raising wages, reducing hunger, and investing in infrastructure.
The timing of his message is spot on. In the wake of the pandemic, local researchers found that more than 30% of Brazilian households experience moderate or severe hunger – three times higher than a decade ago. The World Bank says a fifth of Brazilians are still “chronically poor.”
But Brazil, and the world outside it, have changed dramatically since the early 2000s in ways that could complicate Lula’s plans fast.
“Lula wants to write the last chapter of his own biography,” says Eurasia Group Brazil expert Silvio Cascione. “He wants to go down in history as Brazil's greatest president ever, but he won't have another chance like what he had in the past.”
For one thing, there’s much less money to throw around. In the 2000s, Lula was blessed with a massive commodity boom, as a roaring Chinese economy gobbled up Brazil’s main exports of soybeans, iron ore, and oil. Historically low interest rates in the US, meanwhile, meant that investors were pouring money into fast-growing markets like Brazil. With annual growth figures averaging around 6%, low levels of inflation, and the government awash in cash, o Brasil ‘tava bombando, as they used to say – “Brazil was booming.”
Today, things are bleaker. Brazil’s economy – battered first by mismanagement under Lula’s successors and then by the pandemic – is growing at barely 2% a year. And while commodity prices are high, the IMF warns that as much as a third of the world may slide into recession this year. No one, meanwhile, is quite sure what will come of Xi Jinping’s grand reopening of the Chinese economy, and high interest rates in the US and Europe are choking off investment in Brazil while making its debt burden loom larger.
The politics are no cakewalk either. In both 2002 and 2006, Lula won the presidency by margins of more than 12 points, while his Workers’ Party had a firm grip on Congress. In last year’s election, by contrast, he scraped through with just 51% of the vote and saw his party lose out in Congress to a coalition that backs Bolsonaro.
“Lula’s mandate is much weaker this time around,” says Brian Winter, a long-time Brazil expert who is editor-in-chief of America’s Quarterly. “It's a much more conservative and vastly more polarized country than it was back in 2003 when Lula first took office.”
So times have changed – has Lula? On the one hand, in order to reach out to a broader swathe of the public, he has named a more politically diverse cabinet than ever before, says Cascione.
His vice president, for example, is one-time rival Geraldo Alckmin, a center-right former governor of São Paulo. “For perspective, this would be roughly akin to Obama coming back and appointing Romney as vice president,” says Winter.
He has also become greener with time. Lula has made protecting the Amazon a far more important part of his platform today than it ever was in the 2000s, when his main concern was reducing poverty. With much of the world keenly focused on climate change, Lula is playing one of Brazil’s best cards at the international table.
But at the same time, experts say that since coming out of prison, he is much more insulated and mistrustful than in the past. “This is probably the most important difference between Lula now and 20 years ago,” says Cascione. “Even if his cabinet is more diverse, he’s relying on a smaller group of people to actually make decisions. And that may lead to more inconsistent policies or make him more prone to error.”
An early signpost: the numbers. To better understand how Lula will govern, and what the response will be, all eyes are on how Lula stakes out his spending plans in the next few months. Although the constitution limits what he can spend, Lula has already convinced Congress to allow him to propose new spending rules of his own this year.
In crafting those, Lula and his Finance Minister Fernando Haddad must tread carefully. He has promised a lot to the Brazilian people, but if financial markets get spooked by his spending plans, the currency could falter, driving up inflation and pushing the country into a fresh recession that would anger voters and embolden his opponents in a hurry.
And that is one of the biggest challenges of all, says Cascione.
“The new middle class that emerged during Lula’s first term is now better informed and much more difficult to satisfy,” explains Cascione, “so not only will the opposition to Lula be stronger, his honeymoon period could be shorter too.”
A Brazilian hip hop artist who brings his community not just music, but food
An intimate look at a popular Brazilian rapper who has become an unlikely hero for the poorest of the poor in a sprawling community outside of Brasilia, Brazil's capital. Marcos Vinícius de Jesus Morais, aka Japão, has organized an effort to supply poor families with critically needed food and medical equipment, because "they put me in the position where I am. So today I just give them back everything they did for me. You see that today in the capital of Brazil, people are going through this kind of need, it is sad, regrettable, and cruel."
Watch the episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer: Brazil on the brink
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