The support of the Brazilian militias and the Neo-Pentecostal churches may have guaranteed Brazilian President Jair ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s victories as a federal deputy in Rio de Janeiro (1991–2018), but they would not be enough to support him in a bid for the presidency. Even the support of the armed forces would be restricted to highly urbanized areas, only reaching as far as military families and retired personnel. So, to become president, Bolsonaro would need to extend his support base into the country.

In Brazil, of the population lives in only 6% of the cities, many of those state capitals. But the political contribution of smaller cities near rural production areas is significant; of municipalities have fewer than 50,000 inhabitants. These voters are crucial in electing representatives to state legislative chambers and both federal houses.

Before we return to Bolsonaro, let us take a look at the political development of Brazil’s countryside and small cities.

Brazil’s agriculture: powerful, unfair and built on historic slavery

Brazil has been an agricultural powerhouse for centuries. It has a unique potential of growing production, with the most arable land on the planet. It is the of 32 commodities, being the largest net exporter globally. is the main economic activity in the states of Mato Grosso, Paraná, Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais. Goiás, Mato Grosso do Sul and Santa Catarina have increased their production in the last decades.

The population of these states alone reaches over . Five million rural properties occupy of the national territory, with over agricultural workers. They are responsible for almost of the country’s GDP. This powerful economic sector has always been crucial for Brazil’s political pathways.

Rural areas suffer from growing inequality. An estimated of the population is impoverished, resulting from a to amass in the hands of particular people groups. These issues are far from being solved.

Until 1850, land was not a commodity in Brazil. Settlers could toil and occupy the country, but property rights were given by monarchs — first Portuguese kings, then Brazilian emperors — to their children or godchildren, as a means of feeding the growing European mercantilist economy. Over of the production went to Europe.

To this end, those with the right of use to the land would create , enormous landed estates with primitive agriculture and labor, often in a state of partial servitude. These measured billions of square yards and were covered in monocultures. There were economic cycles based on Brazilwood, sugarcane, cotton, coffee and cattle. The workforce comprised peoples enslaved by the Portuguese. During the first economic cycle, the extractivism-based “,” were captured and enslaved, sometimes traded by tribes allied to the Portuguese.

When the economy changed to a basis in agriculture, indigenous peoples lost their usefulness; they were not helpful to plantations, as they were unacquainted with cattle and plants brought from Asia and Africa. Over the next centuries, an estimated seven million people — corresponding to 70% of the whole Transatlantic slave trade — were from Portuguese strongholds in Africa, with the support of the general society and , and taken to Brazil to produce all the country’s wealth. As German educator Ina von Binzen in the 1880s, “the white Brazilian just doesn’t work.”

How the 1850 Land Law changed Brazilian farmers and politics

The vastness of Brazilian territory was too enticing to not be turned into a commodity. In 1850, Emperor Pedro II, Brazil’s last emperor, signed Law 601, or the “,” which established territorial property rights to individuals and turned all uncolonized areas within the country’s borders into public land that could be purchased from the state. While had been applied in several countries since antiquity, guaranteeing the permanence of early settlers, this issue was never discussed in imperial Brazil. In fact, the 1850 Land Law resulted in the displacement of poorer early settlers and virtually property rights to recently freed African descendants.

After the abolition of slavery in 1888, 700,000 freed slaves were left to their own devices, unable to and having to to stay on their former owners’ land. These practices persisted until the 20th century in a phenomenon known as “.” This was especially the case in Northeast Brazil, which was still one of the main of cane sugar.

Under the Coronelist system, landed oligarchs were the behind the State — they controlled politics and the economy, and they assassinated rivals. Most “Coronels” had, in fact, been part of military forces during the genocidal Paraguayan War (1864–1870), the of 1889 or one of the many military coup attempts until the successful installation of the in 1930.

The 1889 of Pedro II by Marshall Deodoro da Fonseca came about largely because of the of slavery in 1888 and the lack of compensation to landed oligarchs. This was due to the intrinsic connection between the military and �����پ���ú�Ի徱�Dz�.

With slavery abolished, the Brazilian government decided that, instead of educating or providing land to the Afro-Brazilian population, they should “whiten” Brazil by bringing over three million European and Asian . Many of those immigrants, however, ended up manning established monocultures owned by “coffee and rubber barons.” They did not have resources to buy land and thus ended up living in conditions to slavery. Over the next decades, the impoverished, landless European settlers became the campesinos (“peasant farmers”) fighting for , especially in the south of Brazil.

The Land Law fueled land conflicts in Brazil. Land-grabbing became the norm, especially as frontiers were pushed inland. Landowners would falsify property titles by sticking brand new documents into boxes with crickets, which would give them the appearance of old titles. This practice is known as (from grilo, meaning “cricket”), and it continues to this day. In fact, businessman is currently the largest grileiro (person who illicitly owns land through false property titles) in the Amazon, with 11 extensive farms in public lands from nine states — this territory altogether is three times larger than the city of Sao Paulo.

The greed of land-grabbers led to conflicts that would be considered prolonged by the United Nations, such as that at , state of Pernambuco. With Bolsonaro in power and the retraction of policing operations in rural areas, land conflicts and involved almost one million people. Approximately of invaded territories officially belonged to indigenous peoples. Auxiliary military forces, such as the Military Police, are often involved in . They are the ostensive used by ruralistas (large landowners who now head the agribusiness in Brazil) to drive small family farmers off their desired areas.

On August 10, 2019, ruralistas supporting ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s caused the infamous (“Fire Day”), a coordinated arson effort that increased Amazon fires by 300% in just 24 hours. Despite prosecutors warning the federal government about the upcoming effort, Bolsonaro accused nongovernmental organizations of creating the disaster to “bring the government’s .” A year later, affected areas were already by cattle. The culprits are still on the .

When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva began his third term in 2023, environmental protection programs restarted. Brazil’s environmental and climate took a progressive turn, with promising . Favorable, albeit , results continued to Lula’s annual review, and he created programs to reduce deforestation caused by . The problem of �����پ��ڳܲԻ徱á�����Dz� and land-grabbers trying to replace forests with pastures continues for one simple reason: Land is in the hands of an agrarian elite with political power that is all but the law.

The movement in Brazil, personified by ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s term in office, is supported by agribusiness, in the so-called “” movement. Some authors blame a failure of the left for the rise of neofascism in Brazil. Others recognize that the land issue is historic and to the territorial conflict that has plagued Brazil since European occupation. They remind us of the behind agribusiness and highlight the between the agrarian elite and Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro, politics and the demand for land reform

Bolsonaro is currently banned from running for political office. However, for him began cropping up in wealthy cities in April 2024 and continues to this day, once again by the .

Brazil has been experiencing a in Amazon forest fires since last year, with dry conditions facilitating the spread. Agribusiness frontiers like the state of Roraima have been burning for a while, with fires threatening the Indigenous Territory of the . But it wasn’t until the smoke choked , Brazil’s richest city, that the to the devastating Dia do Fogo became clear. With uncontrolled fires blazing in at least Amazon municipalities and the smoke reaching , the government deployed nearly to the region. Federal prosecutors and environmental agencies warn that the pattern of fires could only come from . Meanwhile, Tarcísio de Freitas, the governor of Sao Paulo state and an of Bolsonaro, insists that there was no coordinated criminal effort; the fires were the result of individual “.”

The far-right movement in Brazil is gathering force with the upcoming in October 2024. Sao Paulo is, according to Lula, the stage of a “Lula-Bolsonaro .” In the countryside, agribusiness-founded rural militias supporting Bolsonaro kill and use violence against land reform settlers. This movement is called “.” The alliance between military and paramilitary forces with large landowners in Brazil is an . The of armed forces and land oligarchs was also at the root of the 1964 coup d’état.

Since the 1950s, rural workers had been organizing themselves into political groups, demanding and an end to rural violence. President Jânio Quadros resigned in 1961, citing “terrible .” His vice president, João Goulart, succeeded him and took progressive steps regarding national resources, including nationalizing and discussing land distribution.

Not only was he violently ousted a mere two weeks later, but his efforts were in vain: The 1964 coup swiftly quashed the demands of rural workers and family farmers. The following two decades saw the of over 1,500 rural workers and 8,000 indigenous peoples, their lands stolen by the same wealthy families of centuries past; their descendents are now populating the and Senate. It was a against land rights.

In 1984, rural workers organized themselves into the Landless Workers’ Movement (), pressuring the new civilian government of José Sarney to address land reform. Despite suffering a by the most powerful media of the country, the movement managed to converse with legislative representatives. Thus, the Land Reform was included in the 1988 Constitution. The new constitution also guaranteed for the first time in Brazilian history the of indigenous peoples to their land and sovereignty.

Nowadays, MST has over 1.5 million members and is the largest organic in Latin America, spreading agro-ecological methods of cultivation. As of Brazil’s food comes from family farms, training and legal advice offered by MST and other rural workers’ organizations are fundamental for the country’s food chain.

As a reaction to the Landless Workers’ Movement, wealthy landowners and land-grabbers founded the Democratic Rural Union (União Democrática Ruralista, or ). This group was so politically influential that it took credit for frustrating any governmental attempt to apply land reform. UDR participated in the of several environmental activists, including the leader of the rubber tappers union and renowned environmentalist . UDR leader Ronaldo Caiado became a congressman heading the ruralista caucus and was elected governor of the state of Goiás in 2018, during the far-right wave that swept the country.��

In 1995, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso started initiating land reform projects. He gave property rights to around families until 2001. The following president, Lula, settled a further between 2003 and 2010. The next, Dilma Rousseff, gave property rights to families from 2011 to 2015. After the soft coup to remove Dilma, her replacement, Michel Temer, drastically land reform projects. The next president in line, Bolsonaro, would go on to these. Further, he provided only provisional , gave property rights to , legalized the grilagem practice and stopped . This strangled small farmers.

The same scenario repeats with regard to indigenous lands, although land demarcation started earlier, in Sarney’s government. Up to Dilma’s term, all presidents for hundreds of ethnicities. This stopped under ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s regime, as he had promised during his presidential campaign to not give “” of land to indigenous peoples or (Afro-Brazilian people dwelling in settlements established by escaped slaves).

Bolsonaro just implemented what powerful landowners always fought for, as Brazilian politics were increasingly taken by representatives of �����پ��ڳܲԻ徱á�����Dz� and those sympathetic to their cause. By 2012, the Federal Congress and Senate were filled with members of evangelical religions (the “”), (the “”) and the militias (the “”). Known as the “,” they were a majority in the Congress when Dilma was and were responsible for the start of the of constitutional rights that peaked under Bolsonaro.����

Brazil still has a long way to go before it can stop those interests from interfering with the application of constitutional rights, especially regarding the environment and the rights of workers and indigenous peoples. The are still fighting for the interests of , with the help of morality agendas and organized crime.

Foreign exploitation and interference

Brazil started as a cash cow for the European mercantilist economy from the 1500s, and the sentiment of the most powerful Brazilians — all of European descent — was always one of detachment from the country. In his seminal , The Brazilian People: The Formation and Meaning of Brazil, anthropologist and sociologist Darcy Ribeiro explains how this alienation from their own country created a cruel, perverted, fascistic, racist and misogynistic elite that Brazil and its poor inhabitants. The Brazilian elite is deeply , with a visceral hatred for the general population. In Ribeiro’s words, the elite sees the populace as nothing more than “coal to be ” for its own growth.

This hatred resulted in a peculiar modus operandi for the Brazilian wealthy: They exploit workers, extract as much wealth as possible from Brazil and send their money and children . Using some perverted logic, Brazilian elites also interfere as much as they can to keep Brazil poor and ; any effort by the people to end this situation faces ferocious resistance and threats of . This was revealed by the , which listed millions of dollars owned by right-wing politicians.

In his , A Elite do Atraso: Da Escravidão A Bolsonaro (which loosely translates to “The Backward Elite: From Slavery to Bolsonaro”), sociologist Jessé Souza says that a significant portion of Brazilian elite is proto-fascist. It uses its technical knowledge to serve international capitalist systems at the expense of the population’s poor majority. Simultaneously, it shamelessly uses racist, misogynistic and oppressive discourse. This is the part of society that has been in power in Brazil since 2016; its highest manifestation is in Bolsonaro.

Political analyst Tales Ab’Sáber goes further by affirming that Brazilian elites are so disgusted by the lower classes that they prefer to keep an authoritarian, aporophobic while losing money than allow for an increase in equality. This sentiment is clear in declarations such as those by ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s Minister of Finance, Paulo Guedes — he in 2020 that the high prices of American dollars in relation to the Brazilian real were excellent because, during Lula’s terms, “[It was] everyone going to Disneyland, maids going to Disneyland, a hell of a party.” For the Brazilian elites, traveling abroad was and always will be a luxury exclusive to the higher classes.

The elites’ detachment from the country and hatred of its population made them prone to accept or even ask for international interference in Brazilian economics and politics. Being such a resource-rich country, Brazil attracts the interest of transnational corporations and nations that seek to exploit those resources and take the profits , leaving behind . Such a mechanism became clearer during the Covid-19 pandemic, when wealth out of developing nations to the developed world, deepening the crisis in the former and leading to record profits in the latter.

International interference in Brazil with the ultimate goal of controlling its resources was not restricted to , and this has not stopped after , despite how it violates human rights. From of vast expanses of land to the country’s water through grain exports, transnational corporations have been Brazil’s industrialization, resilience and independence, while paying to Brazilian companies and . Bribery has long been rampant among Brazilian companies, with key examples being construction leader and meatpacking giant . However, the judiciary did not have many obstacles to arrest and fine those responsible, and some of what was lost could be recovered. The problem is more insidious for Brazil when , which cannot be prosecuted in the country, are involved.

The most unfair expression of this trend is the political interference by international actors to force regime changes in Brazil. It’s at its worst when democratically-elected governments do not allow to the developed world to continue, or the of a developed, industrialized country is threatened.

The 1964 coup d’état to oust Goulart is to have been part of , with the excuse to eradicate communism in Latin America. However, scholars now believe that Goulart’s determination to the country, using nationalized oil royalties to cover costs and land reform to ensure food production for the workforce, may have been what actually triggered America’s will to depose the president. The organized the 1953 deposition of Iranian Prime Minister , after all, because he nationalized oil production there.

Similarly, America backed the 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, because of the nation’s economic independence through resource nationalization. Indeed, the CIA began violently removing developing nations’ leaders when they began to foment true independence. This practice started in 1945 and only became less conspicuous after an American Senate in 1970, though more sophisticated actions continued to be used to force on all continents.

Brazil seemed to be juggling national and international interests well under Lula’s first two terms. That changed in 2005, when the Petrobras oil company confirmed significant natural gas and oil deposits in the within Brazil’s territorial waters. Exploring these reserves no less than 2,000 m (over 6,500 ft) below the seafloor was expensive and complex, until Petrobras developed new technologies that cheapened the process and allowed profitable oil extraction in 2006. In 2009, Lula, with support from Congress, approved laws to give Petrobras priority for exploration. The laws also government shares of royalties coming from the fields, in case a private company won the bid to explore.

Although oil companies said they agreed with the move, oil giant Chevron promptly contacted José Serra, Dilma’s opponent in the 2014 presidential elections, to urge the opposition to change the rules in their favor. Serra promised to do so if he won, as shown in cables from the US Embassy. Dilma won the election and, by 2014, Petrobras was able to reach an even larger pre-salt oil deposit at 6,000 m (over 19,600 ft). This increased its yield fourfold, to over per day.

The 2014 elections saw Dilma re-elected to a second term. It also saw the most Congress and Senate since re-democratization, including the of Bolsonaro with almost 500,000 votes — a “disquieting” record in that house. The massive success of right-wing and far-right candidates came after a series of protests in late 2012 and early 2013; these started as a student movement against high bus fare and were quickly co-opted by elite organizations such as patronal unions, bankers, religious media and agribusinessmen. A crucial element was the creation of , a multimedia campaign sponsored by the economic elite and international interests, which dealt the final blow to progressive politicians in all levels of government.

Scholars now discuss if the of anti-politics and far-right parties was gestated in these movements, which culminated with Dilma’s impeachment, a loss of labor rights under Temer and ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s election in 2018. Documents leaked by revealed that heavy American was taking place during Dilma’s term in 2013, and that America considered Brazil to be at risk of “instability.” In fact, American were adamant to secure pre-salt oil deposits for themselves. Furthermore, Dilma’s term in office became unsustainable in February 2014, when she declared that royalties from those reserves would be in Brazilian education and health projects. With Temer at the wheel, the country was set to reclaim its role as a source of international wealth.

Interference from foreign interests did not stop there, however. Land-grabbing by foreign powers, using caveats of the law that prohibit the of rural areas for investment by international agents, has affected land value and distribution. It has also influenced for centuries, to the of smallholders and family farmers who feed the country. With the help of friendly lawmakers, continue their deforestation to produce exports. The financialization of Brazilian agribusiness has become to secure foreign . The incompatibility of the Brazilian , foreign and is clear.

The historical formula that joins foreign interests, armed forces, religious leaders and land-grabbers has been established in Brazil for time enough to create a dangerous movement. They will use coordinated acts of violence to prevail. A strong movement for and redistribution is necessary to create the conditions to sort out territorial disputes and wealth evasion, and to curb against family farmers and indigenous peoples. Protecting the Amazon could be to Brazil in the long run, but agrarian elites and their do not seem to share the idea.

As with other issues Brazil has faced over its history, the country will perhaps need the initiative of the international market to stop these practices, as happened with the of slavery. The forces behind this rise of neofascism and the destruction it creates cannot be controlled by 1,500 firemen or 530 Brazilian lawmakers. It will need the cessation of international funding to its most notorious actors.
[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Big Agribusiness: A Look at Brazil’s Disastrous Rural Feudalism appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Related Reading

The Secrets Behind Brazil’s Military and the January 8 Insurrection

It is no secret that Bolsonaro had his hand in criminal factions. In fact, his to the infamous Office of Crime , headed by Adriano da Nóbrega, are still under . It is also no secret that Bolsonaro was a staunch supporter of violent militia. In a to the National Congress in 2003, he defended the idea that “death squads” were a perfect solution for Rio de Janeiro’s public security crisis. He had consistently used his position as a politician to support death squads and medals and jobs among well-known militia members, especially from Rio.

In 2008, Bolsonaro intended to find a way to militias as a part of the governmental apparatus against crime. It is clear that he bolstered the relation between paramilitary groups and organized crime. The Brazilian state has become unstable due to this rise in war as . Unfortunately, the ignorance did not start with him. The problem runs much deeper.

How criminal groups have become Rio’s political elite

In the state of Rio, paramilitary death squads were and ordered by army generals and police commanders to eliminate “undesirables.” This includes journalists, academics and those in the military who disagree with the regime. In fact, a new book about Nóbrega reveals that three Rio de Janeiro politicians were by Brazil’s Office of Crime. Death squads are also responsible for the development of torture techniques and methods to dispose of bodies.

These infamous paramilitary groups first appeared in the late . They didn’t rise to power until the 1960s, when a Ku Klux Klan-inspired became legal and official after a military coup in 1964. Composed of low-ranking, retired and expelled military personnel, these militias acted much like the . They would sell “protection” for businesses in violent, low-income communities while simultaneously acting as guns-for-hire to the political and economic elites.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, these militias took of expanding favelas — Brazilian slums — in Rio and São Paulo, disputing power with drugs and weapons. These groups often with criminal organizations. In some cases, paramilitaries would completely them. Their chokehold over such as Rio das Pedras went from offering protection and assassinations to controlling basic services and transit.

By the 1990s, militias had shifted their focus to . Militia members exchanged safety for votes and quickly became a large within both state and federal houses of representatives. The war over territories grew exponentially during this decade. The two largest , Comando Vermelho (CV) and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), gathered support from criminal organizations across the country. The subsequent conflict led to an exponential in the number of casualties and an escalation in weaponry. Militias into the territories under the guise of arresting or killing faction commanders. They were seen as agents of the state. Instead of ending the criminal activities, the militias became the kingpins of organized crime.

During the neoliberal governments of Fernando Collor de Melo and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, which lasted from 1990 to 1992 and 1995 to 2003, respectively, organized crime and militias their distinction. The criminal activities of the militias brought on an enormous cash flow, which created a need to establish money laundering schemes. This was especially important as many militia members were, at this point, starting political careers that drew the eyes of the .

Business such as , motorcycle companies, shops and restaurants were all used by militias as laundering hubs. Many of these schemes were caught by the due to discrepancies in their books. However, one scheme in particular remains prevalent today: the phenomenon of narco-Pentecostalism.

Rio’s state religions are a political force

Around this time, a religious revolution was taking place. Historically, the Roman Catholic Church has held a strong majority in Brazil. The Roman Catholic religion its priests to hold political offices. From the 1970s on, however, religion no longer remained separate from Brazilian politics. Neo-Pentecostal megachurches preaching the American-inspired started to spread their own political messages all over the country. The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God () founded by bishop Edir Macedo became the most infamous of these religious-political sects. 

Macedo is a controversial character. He gave blatant political speeches in his temples, placed many of his in politics and funded political parties and candidates. Accused of charlatanism, money laundering and other crimes, Macedo was in 1992. By that time, he had already gained influential political power and escaped justice.

Macedo’s political power came from his absolute control over Brazilian media.  In 1989, Macedo anonymously put up a bid to purchase the television network for 45 million reais. He did this despite knowing that the transfer of broadcasting rights to the head of a multimillionaire church could be challenged by Article 19 of the 1988 Constitution. The 1988 Constitution established Brazil as a secular country, and clearly forbade any governmental connection to religious institutions on its . As all media in Brazil are public concessions, the article could be interpreted as a to the purchase of radio, television and printed media by churches. 

Despite the illegality, the network quickly gathered a significantly large audience. Macedo preached that his followers would be awarded riches in life only if they contributed to his church. Under the government of Itamar Franco, in 1993, Macedo managed to get a allowing him to become the sole owner of Record Group, which also included many radio stations. Macedo amassed extensive political power as a result of this approval from the federal government. The purchase was only formally in 2005.

By the end of the century, tax-exempt churches of various denominations followed Macedo’s lead and combined political messages with their religious ones. The Evangelical Parliamentary Front in the Brazilian Congress and Senate already 189 members, representing 80% of political parties. Half of those parties belong to neo-Pentecostal denominations.

Religions are also a criminal force

Neo-Pentecostal parties didn’t restrain themselves to the legal sector of politics, however. Many old kingpins of favelas, of African-derived religions, became of neo-Pentecostals under the guise of a fight against forces. With the growth of Neo-Pentecostal churches, African-derived religious temples and priests started suffering . Many were even from their homes as militias affiliated themselves to intolerant denominations.

The intolerance is a result of a centuries-old prejudice that is intermingled with racism since . Rio’s favelas had been historically populated by members of religions. Descendants of enslaved African peoples were left penniless and homeless after the of slavery in 1888, and moved to large port cities such as Rio to look for work. Historically-entrenched racism drives neo-Pentecostal affiliated militias to target the African diaspora in favelas heavily.

As recently as 2021, of religious intolerance attacks in Rio de Janeiro were aimed at African religions, and half of African-derived religious houses each suffered up to between 2020 and 2022. Their removal — either by threats or assassinations — quickly opened power vacuums that were promptly occupied by evangelical criminals. The new neo-Pentecostal kingpins pushed the population to vote for their candidates.

The rapid growth of the neo-Pentecostal denominations in favelas gave militias and organized crime a way to illegal earnings. As all churches are in Brazil, they can declare any amount of money they receive as tithes. Churches are able to invest in those earnings, legitimate or not, without legal obstacles. Thus, , and are tightly connected with neo-Pentecostal churches, as they can move money through temples without raising concerns from criminal investigators. The connection between these groups is illustrated by the dangerous campaign by the UCKG to the police force throughout Brazil. The mixing of religious indoctrination and security forces has been deemed “” by some authors.

As a consequence of this tight-knit partnership, Brazil developed the very peculiar of neo-Pentecostal-narco-militias, or . The phenomenon quickly took over large swaths of territory in Brazil’s most important cities. Consequently, narco-Pentecostalism has become influential in politics, business and media. In certain localities, like the city of Rio and the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, political candidates will not be unless they have the support of these groups. The political sector has been hijacked by crime.

The relationship between crime and politics has damaged Rio

Rio has witnessed between police forces, militias and organized crime for decades, especially in the metropolitan area. Since 1992, armed forces have been called upon many times to with Rio’s security issues. Yet it seemed like they could never successfully solve the problem of rampant crime. In fact, scholars believe many of these attempts — such as the creation of Pacifying Police Units () in 2007 — gave definite control over large territories to the militias.

In the past, the called-upon armed forces remained under state control. The 1988 Brazilian Federal Constitution guarantees to Brazilian states, making them responsible for their own . There are instruments, however, that allow the federal government to intervene in states under certain circumstances. These conditions are established in . Operations using armed forces to restore order in states are called “Provision of Law and Order” (in Portuguese, Garantia da Lei e da Ordem, or “ �DZ������پ��DzԲ�”).

It is important to emphasize that the application of GLO operations can only be triggered in circumstances, and exclusively under presidential order. However, it seemed like former Brazilian President Michel Temer chose to ignore the “exceptional circumstances” stipulation when he ordered the 2018 federal intervention into Rio.  

After the against former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, her right-wing vice-president Michel Temer took office. In his 2020 autobiographical , he wrote how the armed forces commanders disapproved of Dilma’s attempt to modernize the syllabuses of military academies. A move to topple Dilma was welcome, Temer explained, and thus Dilma was out of the way on August 31, 2016. Temer later confirmed that he had several “conversations” with such as General Eduardo Villas-Bôas and General Sérgio Etchegoyen — the latter of whom was later rewarded with command of the Institutional Security Bureau (in Portuguese, Gabinete de Segurança Institucional da Presidência da República, or GSI) — from 2015 to 2016.

Temer promptly gave the military complete control over areas of the government. He ensured his austere did not affect the armed forces. In October 2017, Temer even signed a law military personnel working on a GLO operation from being taken to a civilian court in case of civilian deaths. This move virtually gave the armed forces free rein — including their most feared auxiliary branch, the Military Police — to kill with absolute impunity in case of military intervention.

The combination of Temer’s leniency toward the military and Rio’s neo-Pentecostal mayor proved fatal to Rio’s citizens. In January 2017, Marcel Crivella, nephew of Macedo, finally took office as mayor. He had received almost 60% of the city’s votes — over 1.7 million people — in the second round against left-wing lawmaker . Freixo had been a sworn of militias for more than a decade. As a provocation, Crivella’s last campaign rally was held in a tightly-controlled militia , as militia members had their support in his bid against Freixo. 

Any federal move in the city could only proceed with the support of the state’s capital mayor, and Crivella was more than happy to provide that support. Thus, the state of Rio went under in February 2018. was applied due to “grave danger to public order,” despite the fact that the crisis was connected more to the in public finances than any particular violent act. In fact, an increase of in the state, not the in poorer communities, became an excuse to remove the acting governor’s powers. This was the a GLO instrument took place since re-democratization.

Armed platoons invaded citizen’s houses and took over territories, yet militia-controlled areas. Community residents denounced soldiers and police agents for , and innocent civilians. Scholars to the intervention as a war against the poor. 95% of the operations happened in low-income communities, using , and shoot-outs as tools.

In the first months of the GLO, police killings increased while no reduction larger than 20% in crime was recorded. The most notorious violence of that period was the of Marielle Franco, Rio’s councilwoman. She had bravely denounced the intervention and brutal police tactics and pointed out the between state and militias. This defiance cost Franco her life.

Overall, the operation was highly ineffective. Anthropologist Jacqueline Muniz, a specialist on public security, described the overtake as “the economic policy of fear production” from an authoritarian regime based on public unsafety. Many warned, even before the intervention, that strangling Rio’s poor communities would not end the problem. Militias still held complete in 15 states. The ten-month intervention actually militias, as they counted on the well-armed reinforcements sent for the GLO. It is obvious that militia members, armed forces and politicians share an relationship.

Sociologist José Cláudio Souza Alves of the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro this when he stated that Rio’s criminal militias are not a State-like power, but are the State. The strengthening and spread of militias as a result of the intervention was also in Congress, where representatives denounced the operation’s outcomes.

Even before the end of the intervention, residents, police officers and soldiers agreed that the whole was “ineffective and full of lies.” Those involved in the atrocities got off . did not push forward any procedures, either.

In the end, Temer’s intervention in Rio was nothing more than a mere taste of a . Yet violence and crime continued even after the intervention ended in December 2018.

Bolsonaro was already elected and awaiting office when the intervention ended. Rather than withdrawing the military, Bolsonaro sent troops to to “impose order” in the state. He used the army for other interventions, such as the in the Federal District and rescue efforts after natural disasters in and the . He also gun laws and removed Brazilian troops from the UN .

���DZ����DzԲ�����’s term also saw the continued growth of at the hands of state agents. In April 2019, armed forces were still working in the streets of Rio. Musician Evandro Rosa was returning home with his family when his car was “mistakenly” with over 80 bullets fired by an Army platoon doing police duty. 

Bolsonaro became a very convenient — and — scapegoat for the issues following the intervention. However, while it is true that his policies caused great harm, the problem goes deeper than bad politics. Federal military and violent militias are close cousins. Criminal organizations have found comfortable seats in the government. In the end, Michel Temer’s intervention in Rio de Janeiro was nothing but an amuse-bouche of a in the country. The intervention exacerbated that which Brazilian citizens have fought against for decades: far-right politicians have allowed for military police to gain a stronghold on federal law-making instances. 

[ and edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Crime, Churches and Corruption: The Case Behind Rio’s Surging Violence appeared first on 51�Թ�.

For the global audience, it looked like a hastily made copy of the of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The visibly crowd sported the shirts of Brazil’s national football team. Watching older men behaving in a disorderly and dangerous manner in the largely empty city was surreal.

On the surface, the insurrection looked like a spontaneous movement that a few months prior and got out of hand, again spontaneously, on that infamous Sunday afternoon. In reality, the January 8 riots marked the culmination of a decade-long process. The of the global far right and caused by drove this process. Also at work was the Brazilian armed forces’ ambition to political power, stemming from Brazil’s of exploiting natural resources and human beings. These forces came together with the sole objective of public and natural assets for personal gain.

are still ongoing, with the Supreme Court starting trials of alleged in September. Until these are completed, we will not have the whole picture. However, we can examine the connections between these forces and pinpoint the main characters of the latest rebellion attempt in Brazil. That is what we will do in this and following articles.  

The isolated and privileged military caste

Since the dawn of the First Brazilian Republic in 1889, the armed forces have removed, or at least tried to remove, democratically elected governments several times. So, Brazil has a long history of suffering under military dictatorships.

The last military dictatorship (1964–1985) was a regime. It created artificial economic “growth” by putting the country deeply in . In the transition to democracy, instead of punishing those responsible — like Argentina did with the and — Brazil decided to give to the perpetrators, both for crimes against humanity and for sedition. This encouraged the armed forces to believe that they are .

The infamous torturer Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra — to whom Bolsonaro his vote for the impeachment of one of Ustra’s victims, President Dilma Rousseff — lived to enjoy his retirement peacefully until he in 2015, leaving a sizable pension to his daughters.

Consequently, the Brazilian armed forces enjoy unique powers and that no other military enjoys. Lawmakers trod very lightly around the subject, leaving those privileges after promulgating the 1988 Federal Constitution. The military justice system has over violent crimes committed by soldiers against civilians. The military has its own of labor and social security . Indeed, the military seems to have Brazilian democracy cowed into maintaining its anachronistic and excessive rights.

Aside from all these privileges, the military in Brazil lives in its own bubble, disconnected from civilian life. The children of officers study in the spread around the country. These schools serve over 15,000 students. The teachers are military officers and teach children “ related to the military culture.” The schools are governed by their own and curricula only need to be loosely equivalent to civilian education. They use the Marshall Trompowski Collection books, which teach that the 1964 military coup was a “” necessary to protect Brazil from “subversive terrorists.” The Brazilian Army offers a book blatantly in favor of the dictatorship on . Worryingly, Bolsonaro increased the number of “militarized” schools to , with a total budget of over 128 million reais ($26.4 million).

The situation gets more complicated at military colleges. To become a general in Brazil, one needs a degree at the Military Academy of Agulhas Negras (AMAN). AMAN’s is “House of Values — Cradle of Traditions.” It students that military personnel are serious, professional, mature, orderly and competent, while civilians (or paisanos) are unprofessional, incompetent, idle and infantile.

AMAN students are isolated from and go through a regimen of exercise, discipline and reading outdated or plain delusional books. The authors include infamous self-proclaimed philosopher and far-right conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho, who believed that the left is destroying society with progressive ideas, and another by his disciple Flávio Gordon, in which he journalists, university professors, scientists and artists. Another book used in the institution teaches that the ended with the escape of the resistance fighters, omitting the arrest, torture and of over 60 of them.

Even more outrageous is a book by Colonel Carlos Menna Barreto, printed by the army’s publishing company, entitled . The Yanomami are a group of indigenous people that live in the Amazon rainforest in the north of Brazil. Menna Barreto holds that the Yanomami do not exist and are rather part of a plot by NGOs to weaken Brazilian sovereignty in the Amazon. This conspiracy is widely believed in military circles and may be the inspiration for ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s against the Yanomami.

As most high-ranking officers come from military families, they come up through this system and are disconnected from civilian needs and struggles. General Eduardo Villas-Bôas, Commander of the Army from 2015 to 2019, that he only started socializing with civilians when he was 50 years old and that it was “tough” and “an exercise in patience and intellectual flexibility.” Villas-Bôas was responsible for a addressed to the Supreme Federal Court on April 3, 2018. The court was about to discuss the release of then-former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then held at the federal police headquarters in Curitiba. The tweet subtly warned that Lula’s release would not go unpunished by the armed forces. Mainstream media underreported the move.

Another infamous example of the disconnect between officers and the general population is General Eduardo Pazuello, ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s Minister of Health from September 2020 to March 2021, who after taking office that he did not know what the Brazilian Unified Health System was at all. The military has its own , with total medical, dental, and psychological coverage for personnel and their families. It has over 600 nationwide units, including 11 general hospitals, dozens of clinics and health schools — all taxpayer-funded. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Pazuello ineffective treatments like hydroxychloroquine and an oxygen shortage that led to hundreds of deaths in Manaus. He to the Congressional Inquiry Commission on COVID-19 in order to cover up ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s responsibility for the mishandling of the pandemic. Pazuello may yet be with crimes against public health, malfeasance and perjury.

The armed forces interfere in politics

Since 2002, active-duty military have been by law to opine on politics without authorization. Nevertheless, generals have been meddling with politics since at least the Rousseff administration.

In 2011, Rousseff, who had been during the dictatorship, installed the National Truth Commission to investigate human rights violations by military authorities. The 2,000-page , released in 2014, exposed damning evidence of crimes by more than 377 state agents. Rousseff presented the results during an emotional and personal speech. This seemed to be the first step toward healing Brazil’s decades-old wounds.

Some were not very impressed, however. One was General . The Etchegoyens are an old military family that has been involved in army since the 1920s, when Alcides and Nelson Etchegoyen attempted to prevent the inauguration of President Washington Luís.

Sérgio Etchegoyen vehemently the inclusion of his father, a general who commanded a fourth of the whole Brazilian Army during the dictatorship, and his uncle, who participated in the 1964 coup, in the National Truth Commission report. He called the accusations “frivolous,” despite abundant proof of criminal orders issued by the two men.

Sérgio Etchegoyen and Villas-Bôas had with Vice President Michel Temer a year before the move to impeach Rousseff in 2016. They were also involved in during Temer’s term. In an interview with Celso Castro, Villas-Bôas that the military had wanted to remove the Lula and Rousseff’s Workers’ Party from power since 2008 and that Rousseff’s impeachment was part of a “long coup” to put the military back in power.

The military did not want to remove the leftists from power from the start. Lula’s and Rousseff’s governments had in the military, renewing military equipment and infrastructure. They did not touch the relationship between civilian powers and the armed forces. However, the armed forces began plotting to topple the leftists because they planned to the military curriculum and civilian courts to try military police officers.

The military police is the de facto street policing force in Brazil. Military police have been involved in countless episodes of and thousands of across the country, but they rarely for crimes against civilians in civilian courts. Conversely, the of a military police officer can, in practice, send a civilian to prison. Rousseff threatened the military by discussing the of the police forces.

Another incident involved the Institutional Security Bureau of the Presidency of the Republic (GSI). The GSI is responsible for the personal security of the president and vice-president and their families and the of buildings and institutions of the presidency. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso made the GSI a federal ministry in 1999. In 2015, Rousseff dissolved the ministry and incorporated it into the Presidency Office, an action by the military establishment.

As soon as Rousseff was suspended, and before she was impeached, Temer the GSI as a ministry. He even put the whole Brazilian Intelligence System under — with as minister. This effectively put Brazil back under .

Recent developments show how ill-advised this idea was. The armed forces hang like a over Brazil, just waiting to decapitate democracy, aware of any action they may see as threatening to their power, their or their .

The uncomfortable rise of Bolsonaro

In November 2014, Bolsonaro made a speech to graduating cadets of the Agulhas Negras military academy, where he was received with shouts of “” He his bid to run for president in 2018 to “bring this country to the right” and reinforce the separation between civilians and the military.

Bolsonaro’s relationship with the armed forces is very complicated. After completing the preparatory army cadet course in 1972, he failed to join the Air Force Academy but managed to enroll at AMAN in 1973. There, he middling grades and stood out for his excellent athleticism, which earned him the nickname “.” He finished the training to become a paratrooper but nearly died after of his parachute and hitting the side of a building in Rio de Janeiro. He broke both arms and legs.

In 1983, ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s superiors him as aggressive, “excessively ambitious and obsessed with personal financial gains.” He admitted his desire to become “a wealthy man.”

In 1986, while posted as a captain at the paratrooper battalion in Rio de Janeiro, he faced disciplinary action after publishing an op-ed without permission. Veja, the most popular magazine at the time, published the article. In it, he about the earnings of lower-ranking officers and enlisted personnel.

The following year, Veja Bolsonaro as the mastermind of a plot to plant bombs at army barracks to undermine Army Commander Leônidas Pires Gonçalves. The article contained detailed plans drawn by Bolsonaro. After a lengthy secret trial by the Supreme Military Court, Bolsonaro was not discharged. Nine of 13 justices voted in his favor. The evidence connecting him to the plans was “inconclusive,” the court decided. Later, federal police analysts ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s authorship of the plans.

Military dictator General Ernesto Geisel (1974–1979) Bolsonaro in his autobiography, describing him as “completely out of the normal” and “a bad military man.” Many within the army command — career officers with no interest in politics — him as dangerous because his heroes were not moderate generals. Instead, Bolsonaro looked up to torturers like Ustra and bloody regimes like the worst phases of the dictatorship.

Bolsonaro left the army in 1988 as a captain. He ran a successful campaign for the City Council of Rio de Janeiro, boosted by his appearances in the press. with over 11,000 votes, he was surprised to learn that he got only seven votes at the polling station of the Military Village but got overwhelming support from paramilitary groups and militias. His City Council colleagues him as “private and uncommunicative.” Bolsonaro made only two speeches, both in favor of the armed forces.�� He presented projects to improve salaries and military privileges.

Bolsonaro did not complete his term, as he ran for a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in 1990, winning the first of six terms. Though he began as a Christian Democratic Party candidate, he his political affiliation seven times. He always, however, joined right-wing parties.

���DZ����DzԲ�����’s presence in the legislature was marked by outrageous , politically incorrect and even of the death squads and militias that terrorized the state of Rio de Janeiro for decades. He proposed 171 draft bills, including one to on official documents of the preferred names of transsexuals and transvestites. Most of ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s proposals were discarded for poor writing. Only two of his proposals became law: a for IT products and the of synthetic phosphoethanolamine, a compound falsely purported to be a cure for cancer. Upon advice from scientists and the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency, the Supreme Federal Court later the latter law.

The troublesome relationship between the armed forces and politics led them to despite his mediocre record. He their privileges, providing a less conspicuous path for the military to return as the actual rulers of the nation. Anthropologist Piero Leirner it a “hybrid war to come back to power,” using Bolsonaro as a façade.

While men in uniform were involved in all steps of ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s rise to power, the armed forces tried to themselves from their creation every time he overstepped the bounds of decency. Now that Bolsonaro is no longer president, they are still fighting to interfere in the newly elected Lula government and are to step down from politics.

Dictator Ernesto Geisel was right when he it was effortless for the armed forces to become a political force, but it is challenging to remove them from power. With Rousseff gone after the 2016 impeachment, the military used Bolsonaro to consolidate its power.

[ and edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

Brazil’s New President and Hope for a Democratic Revival

Who Will Win Argentina’s Presidency After 28 Years Of Peronism?

Brazil Rejects ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s Anti-Politics

Is Brazil Headed for a Dictatorship?

The post The Secrets Behind Brazil’s Military and the January 8 Insurrection appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Even governors loyal to defeated ex-president Jair Bolsonaro either showed up or sent representatives. It was in ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s name that the protesters had stormed the presidential palace, the seat of the National Congress and the Supreme Court building, declaring that last year’s election – the closest since the end of military rule in 1985 – was a sham.

But the united front against what Lula called a coup attempt hid a darker reality: Brazil’s democracy is being killed by the people who claim to be saving it.

What Lula intended as a show of unity could also have been seen as him, his government, and executives of every state bowing to the real power in Brazil right now: the unelected Supreme Court in general and a single judge in particular named Alexandre de Moraes.

Judge, Jury and Executioner

As Lula looks on, Moraes has become Brazil’s de facto dictator. After Sunday’s riots, Moraes threatened to arrest elected officials, police and military leaders for not acting quickly enough to restore order. He made good on his threats, suspending the elected governor of the Federal District, which includes Brasilia, for 90 days, and ordering the arrest of several other officials, including the local police chief.

This action has created misgivings. “We cannot disrespect democracy in order to protect it,” Irapuã Santana, a lawyer and legal columnist for O Globo, The New York Times.

Lula’s election to a third term as president was widely seen as a tectonic shift from right back to left in Brazilian politics. But in fact, Lula has no mandate other than as an executive in the country’s federal system of government with its three co-equal branches. No party has a majority in the Congress, though ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s right-wing allies gained enough seats to be the largest faction.

Moraes, backed by the court’s other judges, has interpreted his role as head of the Supreme Electoral Court and guardian of the integrity of democratic elections as a mandate to assume dramatic powers. He is decisively acting on key national issues while the other two branches are still getting organized. Moraes has become the sole judge of truth and falsehood in Brazilian political discourse.

It’s unclear whether Lula supports Moraes’ powergrab, but this veteran politician has done nothing to stop it.

Brazil’s New President and Hope for a Democratic Revival

A Rather Sweeping Judicial Order

On January 13, as Lula workers helping repair the damage to the presidential palace, Moraes issued a sweeping order demanding six international social media companies – Facebook, Rumble, Telegram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube – remove accounts of several individuals, including journalists and elected members of the national Congress, within two hours or face fines. This all-powerful judge then went on to demand these companies keep his order secret.

One of those banished from social media was Deputy Nikolas Ferreira — Brazil’s lower house of the National Congress is called the Chamber of Deputies. This incoming deputy is a 26-year-old Bolsonaro ally who received the most votes of anyone in October’s congressional elections. Ferreira slammed the order on his Twitter feed, which was still up a day later.  “They took down all my accounts for no reason,” he . “In the name of ‘democracy,’ they are silencing all opposition. It is forbidden to disagree in Brazil.”

This is not the first time Moraes has acted to remove elected officials from social media or banned journalists from reporting what he considers “fake news.” But for the most part, reaction to those moves has split along ideological lines. To the left and the national media, he’s a hero. To ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s allies, he’s Public Enemy No. 1.

Will Bolsonaro Leave Trumpism Behind to Embrace a Biden-led US?

The argument is that Moraes is acting to protect democracy in the face of threats of a military coup, which many of ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s supporters have sought. But the military, which ruled from 1964 to 1985, wants nothing to do with government after having left the nation’s economy and its own reputation in a shambles. Remember that the military voluntarily gave up power and slunk back to the barracks after disgracing itself.

Lula initially treaded carefully with the military when he came back into office. He has since changed course. On January 21, Lula his own choice for army commander: General Julio Cesar de Arruda. Apparently, the general allegedly shielded the rioters in Brasilia from prosecution, and said Bolsonaro had “polluted” the armed forces. The new commander — General Tomás Miguel Ribeiro Paiva  — is seen in some circles as the preferred choice of Moraes.

The influential newsmagazine Veja that some in Lula’s Workers’ Party see Moraes as a potential problem for the government.  Many current and former military leaders see the judge’s actions as a “signal of indignation” with the state of affairs and a clear desire to assert control over the country. Meanwhile, Moraes’ reach has become so broad that many independent observers are becoming worried. “To Defend Democracy, Is Brazil’s Top Court Going Too Far?” The New York Times in a September 26 article.

“Is there now, or has there ever been, a modern democracy where a single judge exercises the power that Alexandre de Moraes possesses in Brazil?” journalist Glenn Greenwald on Twitter. Greenwald, whose husband, David Miranda, is also a deputy in the National Congress from a left-wing party, exposed the judge’s order on his podcast.

How Did Brazil Get Here?

Moraes was to the Supreme Court in February 2017, a month after his predecessor, Teori Zavascki, was killed in a plane crash. Zavascki had been the court’s liaison in the massive Lava Jato (Car Wash) scandal that had ensnared hundreds of Brazilian politicians, including Lula and his political protégée and successor, Dilma Rousseff. Corruption, including vote-buying, had been the engine that kept Brazil’s democracy from gridlocking in a system where dozens of political parties of all sorts of ideological orientations were represented in the National Congress but none of them had a majority.

Rousseff was impeached and removed from office in 2016 for reasons unrelated to the scandal. This move was widely seen as engineered by Michel Temer, who was her vice president and also under investigation but went on to replace Rousseff as president. Moraes became Temer’s justice minister after having been defense lawyer for Eduardo Cunha, the former president of the lower house of Congress who was convicted of corruption in 2017. Cunha and Temer were both from the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party.

The impeachment of Rousseff was condemned by many on the left as a “coup,” and the anger only grew when Lula was to nine years and six months in prison for corruption and money-laundering. Sergio Moro, the federal judge who had launched the Lava Jato investigation and supervised the prosecution, passed the sentence. This left many on the left feeling that Moro had exceeded his authority as an unelected judge by his excessively aggressive prosecution of popular politicians.

The World This Week: Dilma Ousted as Bleak Future Bedevils Brazil

Lula’s conviction left him unable to run in the 2018 election, which he had been widely expected to win. Instead, Bolsonaro, up until then the leader of a fringe right-wing party based in Rio de Janeiro, came to office on a wave of public outrage over the scandal. Moro became ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s justice minister.

After leaked messages emerged that Moro had colluded with prosecutors in Lula’s case, the Supreme Court overturned Lula’s conviction and restored his political rights. This March 2021 decision cleared the way for Lula to challenge Bolsonaro, who had been weakened by his inability to tackle corruption as promised. Bolsonaro also was dogged by accusations that he and his family were just as corrupt as the other politicians he criticized. He was also widely seen as having badly bungled Brazil’s response to COVID-19 as thousands died while he underplayed the risks from the virus.

After his loss, Bolsonaro was unable to gain support among the political class for his claims the election was rigged. After all, many of his allies had won in the same elections and his party had become the largest faction in the National Congress since the 1990s. Cannily, Bolsonaro flew to Florida on the day before the handover of power on January 1 to avoid demands from within the Workers’ Party that he be arrested and investigated for corruption, and for claiming the election was a fraud. 

Though Bolsonaro has been silent about the events of January 8, Moraes has opened a criminal probe into whether the former president was responsible. Officials have even held out the possibility that Brazil may ask the United States to extradite him. At the same time, the Supreme Court ordered the arrest of Anderson Torres, who had replaced Moro, now a senator, as justice minister. Torres became head of public security in Brasilia after Bolsonaro left office and was accused of allowing the protests to happen.

It’s unclear how this will end. When Telegram refused the judge’s order to block Ferreira’s account, Moraes fined the social media outlet (about $237,000). Meanwhile, in the National Congress, Moraes is facing at least for his impeachment, largely from ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s allies. However, Brazilians are now so deeply divided that the country is almost ungovernable. Alarmingly, there is no significant support for standing up against an action that might be breaking the democratic order. This gives Moraes a free hand and he continues to feel justified in his actions.Given the zeitgeist, Moraes is not just issuing edicts and passing sentences. In a recent speech, Moraes the January 8 rioters: “These people are not civilized. Just look what they did.” This crusading judge went on to say, “The Supreme Court, I am absolutely sure, with legal support, with our constitution, and the Federal Police, will punish everyone responsible.” It seems disinformation and political violence are not the only two threats facing Brazilian democracy, judicial authoritarianism might be the new cat on the prowl.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Destroying Democracy in Order to Save It appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Lula owes his triumph to the formation of a broad political front built during the election campaign to reverse the unpopular policies of ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s far-right government. The 60 million Brazilians that elected Lula hope that Brazil will be politically rejuvenated, marking the end of ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s effort to erode Brazilian democracy.

Lula’s comeback

Lula  began his long political career as a trade union leader in the early 1980s. In 2003 he was the first leftist leader to be elected president in Brazil. After two terms in power, his government ended in 2011 with the highest popularity rating of any democratic government in Brazil’s history.

Will Brazil See Justice for the Mismanagement of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

READ MORE

Lula cannot however dissociate himself from the scandal known as Operation Car Wash, a corruption probe that uncovered a web of money laundering schemes involving the Brazilian state’s oil company. The unraveling of the judicial procedures that followed led to the jailing of the president in 2011. However, the Brazilian Supreme Court ultimately annulled all criminal convictions against Lula on the grounds of a series of judicial procedural errors by the prosecution.

In the  extremely polarized country that Brazil has become, Many Brazilians view Lula as the  leader who led Brazil to a brief period of prosperity. Lula’s administrations may boast of a number of achievements, in particular, a considerable reduction of poverty and hunger in Brazil, an increase of Brazilians’ real income, the expansion of social programs and policies, sustainable economic growth, creation of a domestic regime for environmental preservation, and the strengthening of Brazil’s multilateral vision in global debates.

Despite Lula’s many accomplishments as president, the corruption crisis involving Lula and his party provided the pretext for the rise of Bolsonaro to power as a far-right leader. In effect, Lula’s disapproval rating among the electorate still stands at approximately 46% (according to two opinion polls, Datafolha and Ipec). What saved him in the election is the fact that ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s disapproval rating was even higher.

Brazil Rejects ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s Anti-Politics

READ MORE

For an important percentage of citizens Lula’s return to power has sparked great optimism for the future. 44% of Brazilians believe their lives will change for the better with Lula in the presidency, compared to 21% who believe their lives will improve if Bolsonaro were to continue as president (Datafolha).

Brazil and the Latin American “pink tide”

Lula’s government will be confronted with strong opposition in the national congress. He will have to govern with a National Congress dominated by a majority of far-right senators and deputies, who will do everything in their power to block his political agenda.

The parties forming the pro-Lula alliance in the senate and the lower house do not have the numbers that will permit them to pass laws. Lula will have to negotiate with the pragmatic parties representing the center of the ideological political spectrum who are in the habit of trading their congressional support in exchange for political benefits (for example, political appointments in ministries).

Unlike other Latin American countries that have turned to the left in what analysts have called a “pink tide” in the region, there are doubts whether Lula has enough political strength to implement progressive policies. Lula won the elections with a narrow margin of 2 million votes, revealing a deeply divided country. In his victory speech, Lula focused on the urgent need to reconcile the country: “There aren’t two “Brazils, he proclaimed. “It’s time to lay down our arms”.

Brazil’s deep social divisions

The majority of Lula’s votes +came from women, the poor, and Catholics. The poorest voters, those who earn up to two minimum wages (45% of the Brazilian electorate),  supported Lula, who received 61% of their vote intention, compared to 33% support for Bolsonaro. Also, Lula showed a great capacity for attracting female voters (53% of the electorate). In pre-election polls, around 52% of women declared they would vote for Lula. Only 41% expressed the intention to vote for Bolsonaro.

In recent years, there has been a marked politicization of Pentecostal churches in Brazil, the country that hosts the largest Catholic population in the world. Aligned behindBolsonaro, 62% of Evangelicals (27% of the electorate) declared their intention to vote for him, while only 32% intended to support Lula. In contrast, 55% of Catholics (52% of the electorate) showed a preference for Lula, whereas 39% declared their intention to vote for Bolsonaro.

Policy changes under Lula

The fight against hunger is urgent in a country that has experienced an increase in child malnutrition. 33 million Brazilians suffer from food insecurity. Lula’s popularity among poor Brazilians derives from his policies aimed at combating poverty and hunger, such as the creation of the cash-transfer program, Bolsa Família, which lifted over 40 million Brazilians out of poverty. Many Brazilians expect that Lula will once again innovate in his social policies, in contrast with ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s failure to promote policies aimed at alleviating hunger.

Lula has a strong commitment to environmental preservation. One of his campaign promises concerned the creation of a ministry to deal with the interests of indigenous peoples. Lula also guaranteed the reactivation of existing institutions and legislation to combat environmental destruction. Currently, Brazil has one of its highest deforestation rates in decades and a significant increase in land conflicts culminating in record killings of environmentalists and indigenous people.

Beyond Latin America’s Lost Decade

READ MORE

Brazil’s foreign policy will undergo a radical change as Lula will vigorously participate in global debates. Furthermore, Lula will bring Brazil closer to its Latin American neighbors, increase the weight of Brazil in the reform of international organizations, actively participate in the BRICS’ initiatives, and create cooperation mechanisms between Brazil and developing countries.

Challenges ahead

Since becoming president in 2018, Bolsonaro immersed Brazil in a permanent democratic crisis. In this year’s elections, Bolsonaro used the tools of the state for political purposes to influence the electoral process. In recent months, the ministry of economy increased social benefits, granted special credit for the beneficiaries of social assistance, and decreased taxes to reduce the price of gasoline and electricity. In addition to electoral abuses, Bolsonaro attacked democratic institutions in an attempt to generate public mistrust in the election results in the case of his defeat. Bolsonaro until now has not explicitly conceded the election.

After four years of democratic setbacks, politics must now seek solutions to the real-life problems that afflict most Brazilians. Lula has committed to transforming Brazil’s harsh social reality while at the same time seeking a way of appeasing the followers of ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s ultra-right movement. This task seems particularly difficult so long as ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s anti-democratic extreme right movement remains present and active in the political landscape.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Brazil’s New President and Hope for a Democratic Revival appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The planet faces enormous threats at the moment. The pandemic is still raging throughout the world. Climate change is an immediate risk. Wars continue to devastate Yemen, Ethiopia and Syria.

The Wicked Problem of Climate, Blah, Blah, Blah

READ MORE

Given these crises, the United Nations is needed more than ever. And yet the body could not compel Bolsonaro to get vaccinated or risk the fallout of preventing him from speaking to the General Assembly.

This problem of rogue actors has long bedeviled the United Nations. But the rise of right-wing populists who insist on their sovereign (and often selfish) right to do whatever they please poses an additional challenge to the international community.

Vaccines

Nation-states frequently use the principle of sovereignty — the exclusive authority to determine the rules within national boundaries — as a justification for their actions. The COVID-19 pandemic is only the most recent example of the shortcomings of sovereignty. With little regard for the common good, the richest countries made sure to secure more than their fair share of vaccines. The World Health Organization, UNICEF and the World Bank tried to ensure access to vaccines for poorer countries by setting up Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. It was supposed to distribute 2 billion doses by the end of 2021. So far, it has managed to distribute only 240 million.

The problem has largely been one of supply, given the huge purchases of vaccines by richer countries. But there is also the challenge of delivering doses to countries where medical infrastructure is weak. As a result, the reports that, as of September 21, just 3.31% of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated with at least one dose, compared to 61.51% of people in high-income countries.

Let’s face it: The rich run the world and the United Nations just doesn’t have the power to change that.

Climate Change

Nor has the UN risen to the challenge of climate change. Here the problem is one of brokering effective compromises. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is the body responsible for convening the Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting every year. In Paris, COP21 in 2015 did manage to produce a binding treaty on climate change. But the commitments made by all the parties to the agreement were not sufficient to reduce carbon emissions fast enough to prevent a catastrophic increase in global temperatures.

Moreover, the commitments were voluntary. The US delegation insisted on this because it feared that Congress would reject any binding pledges. It’s no surprise, then, that carbon emissions are expected to rise this year by , the second-largest increase in history.

The fault here again lies mostly with the richest countries — China, the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea, Canada, Saudi Arabia — that have been the biggest emitters of carbon. But rich countries have also refused to provide enough money to help poorer countries transition to cleaner energy. In 2009, rich countries promised to mobilize $100 billion by 2020 for this transition. A dozen years later, the fund is still  short.

Other Problems

Of course, many countries face another deadly scourge: war. Imagine how many lives would be saved, how much reconstruction could take place, and how waves of refugees could be reduced if the UN were able to conduct a peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, establish an on-the-ground presence in Syria and separate warring parties in Tigray province in Ethiopia. Instead, the UN is relegated to the task of providing humanitarian assistance. Its program in Syria, with a target of $4.2 billion a year, is the largest in the world.

But humanitarian assistance is a never-ending drain in the absence of security on the ground. Most of the peacekeeping budget of the UN goes to the existing 13 missions. The Biden administration has  to pay down the over $1 billion peacekeeping bill it owes the UN, but the UN is going to need a lot more than that to play an effective role in bringing peace and security to the most conflict-torn areas of the world.

Make Sense of the World

Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

I agree to receive emails and other content from 51�Թ�. I understand that I may repeal my consent at any time. You can review our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for further information .

For one thing, the UN doesn’t have the capability to respond quickly to emergencies around the world. An  could fill that gap. It has some support internationally and it’s even come up twice as bills in the US Congress. Without a permanent, professional corps of emergency responders, the UN will constantly be one step behind in dealing with crises around the world.

The Underfunded UN

This is not an easy time for the United Nations. It is underfunded. Proposals to reform its governance have largely gone nowhere. It has been forced to cobble together ad hoc responses to the world’s biggest problems.

But perhaps the biggest challenge to the UN is the refusal of nation-states to delegate sufficient authority to international institutions. Right-wing populists like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro attacked “globalists” on a daily basis. They have done as much as possible to destroy international agreements, but they’re not alone. Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping have insisted that they have the right to do whatever they want within their own national borders. Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines is resisting any “interference” in his drug war as part of an investigation into his government’s human rights abuses. Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua has similarly pushed back against UN criticism of his human rights record. Most strong-arm leaders eye the UN skeptically.

Without a lot of money or institutional credibility and facing a strong anti-internationalist philosophy, the United Nations has a great deal of difficulty compelling its members to protect human rights, the environment or the rule of law. Look how ineffectual it was in dealing with Jair Bolsonaro.

Without credible enforcement mechanisms, the UN will be incapable of making the Bolsonaros of the world behave responsibly. And unfortunately, the disease of Bolsonarism is spreading.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The UN Faces a Crisis appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In late April, Anitta released her most expensive video for her new song, “.” She had one goal in mind: conquer the ears of the world. Her method was by reshaping a notorious Brazilian cultural soft power known as bossa nova.

The music video begins with clips of the singer dressed like a Hollywood star in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. Surrounded by thin, mostly white men, Anitta sings an English adaptation of the internationally famous “Girl From Ipanema,” which was released in 1962 by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes. The video then shows viewers the real Rio de Janeiro. A trap beat drops and our eyes shift to black people dancing in Piscinao de Ramos (Ramos’ Pool), an artificial beach created by the government in 2000 in the suburbs of Rio.

Bolsonaro’s Conservative Brazil?

For two years, Anitta was heavily criticized by fans and artists for not taking a public stance over Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president. During the 2018 election campaign, she was questioned about her absence in the #EleNao (#NotHim) movement against Bolsonaro. At the time, she that she was only 25 years old and had zero political knowledge.

���DZ����DzԲ�����’s nationalist policies aim to bring back the beauty and glory of Brazil’s past. But the truth is that he is more known for his , homophobic and declarations from his time in the Chamber of Deputies. Last year, one of his most trusted colleagues, Damares Alves, the minister of human rights, family and women, acted to stop a legal on a 10-year-old girl, who became pregnant after being raped by her own uncle.

With Bolsonaro in power, Brazilians are currently living under a conservative administration. This is particularly reflected in the federal government’s cultural decisions. ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s government monitors exhibitions, music, films and TV shows and assesses if they align with the state’s view of family and religious values.

Anitta has finally posted statements on social media criticizing ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s administration. Yet none of her tweets are as powerful as the message her new video carries.

A Different Rio

“Hot girls, where I’m from, we don’t look like models,” she sings, with scantily clad women dancing on an artificial beach. The song puts an emphasis on women without silicone breasts showing off their bodies with cellulite. The video also shows black men putting cream on women to bleach their body hair, while others barbecue meat on the beach. Some couples even look like they’re almost having sex in the sea. This is a completely different Brazil from the country Bolsonaro wants to portray to the world.

Anitta’s video presents clips of the Rio suburb’s poverty, but in a funny and sexy way. The video focuses on the nostalgic past of a white Rio de Janeiro that never really existed, but whose image was created with the help of the most popular Brazilian rhythm of all time, bossa nova. Translated as “new wave,” this genre is a mix of jazz, African beats and samba.

In 1962, the historical debut at by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Joao Gilberto helped bring bossa nova to the world stage. In the same year, Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes released “Garota de Ipanema” (Girl From Ipanema), one of the most famous Brazilian songs of all time. The muse to inspire the composers was , a 17-year-old girl with blonde hair and blue eyes who walked every day on the beach.

As a successful singer whose fortune is estimated at at the age of 28, Anitta’s cultural power overseas is being built song by song. In the past four years, 24 of her 32 singles were to international markets. Giovanni Bianco, a Brazilian creative director, produced the “Girl From Rio” video. He has worked several times with Madonna, who released the song “” with Anitta in 2019.

Changing Bossa Nova

With bossa nova becoming more popular worldwide, the “Girl From Rio” video cost at least $200,000. Anitta has already collaborated with international stars like Maluma, Major Lazer, Cardi B. and J. Balvin. The official launch party of the song took place at Strawberry Moon, a bar at The GoodTime Hotel in Miami whose partner is Pharrell Williams, an American singer and producer.

In May, “Girl from Rio” was the 8th most-listened song on Spotify after its release, with 1 million plays in Brazil and 400,000 in other countries. Although Anitta featured on popular US shows with NBC and also on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” the song soon fell out of the top 100. With 54 million followers on Instagram, the singer’s fans accused Warner Music — the label Anitta is associated with — of not promoting the song worldwide.

In the video, the white images of the 1950s, carried by bossa nova’s soft pace and soft power, give way to the colorful scenes in “Girl From Rio.” With its trap beat and variation of funk, this is the Brazilian genre in the world today. With the help of her record label or not, Anitta wants to conquer the world with a Rio de Janeiro that is far from the one shown on postcards or holiday brochures — and certainly not the one Bolsonaro wants to promote.

Anitta wants to focus on empowering black people, women and those with standard bodies, not with abs, breasts and butts like models. She definitely knows what she’s doing.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Cultural Power of Anitta in ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s Brazil appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Authoritarianism, like war, makes headlines. It’s hard for democracy to compete against political crackdowns, military coups and unhinged pronouncements. Sure, democracies engage in periodic elections and produce landmark pieces of legislation. But what makes democracy, like peace, successful is not the unexpected rupture, such as the election of Barack Obama, but the boring quotidian. Citizens express their opinions in public meetings. Lawmakers receive constituents in their offices. Potholes get fixed. That’s not exactly clickbait.

Because the absence of war doesn’t make headlines, as Stephen Pinker has , the news media amplifies the impression that violence is omnipresent and constantly escalating when it splashes mass murder, genocide and war crimes on the front page. Peace may well be prevalent, but it isn’t newsworthy.

Russia Ramps Up Pressure Against Kremlin Critics

READ MORE

The same can be said about democracy, which has been suffering for some time from bad press. Democracies have been dragged down by corruption, hijacked by authoritarian politicians, associated with unpopular economic reforms and proven incapable (so far) of addressing major global problems like the climate crisis. After a brief surge in popularity in the immediate post-Cold War period, democracy according to the general consensus has been in retreat.

Judging from recent quantitative assessments, the retreat has become a rout. The title of the latest Freedom House , for instance, is “Democracy Under Siege.” The report details how freedom around the world has eroded for the last 15 years, with 2020 featuring the greatest decline yet. The Economist Intelligence Unit, which produces a Democracy Index every year, promoted its 2020 report with the headline, “Global Democracy Has a Very Bad Year.” The authoritarian responses to the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the worst so far for the model, with the average global score plummeting from the previous year. Meanwhile, the Rule of Law Index for 2020 also  a drop for the third year in a row.

If we extrapolate from the current trend lines, democracy will be gone in a couple of decades, melted away like the polar ice. But it’s always dangerous to make such extrapolations given history’s tendency to move in cycles not straight lines. So, let’s look at some reasons why democracy might be in for a comeback.

The Pandemic Recedes in America

Much of the reason for democracy’s dismal record in 2020 was the expansion of executive power and state controls in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Some of those power grabs, such as Vladimir Putin’s  changes in Russia, are still in place. Some countries, like India and Brazil, are still struggling with both COVID-19 and powerful authoritarian leaders.

But even with the continued high rate of infection in a number of countries, the overall trajectory of the disease is downward. Since peaking in late April, the reported number of global cases has dropped nearly by half. So, two trend lines are now intersecting: the lifting of pandemic restrictions and the backlash against hapless authoritarians.

Americans, for instance, are coming to terms with both the retreat of COVID and the removal of Donald Trump from the White House, Facebook and Twitter. The Biden administration is undoing many of Trump’s undemocratic moves, including those imposed during the pandemic around immigration and refugees. The attempts by the Republican Party to tamp down voter turnout proved spectacularly unsuccessful in 2020, which despite the pandemic featured the largest-ever  in votes from one election to the next. In terms of the voting-age population, you have to go back to 1960 to find an election with a higher percentage turnout than the 62% rate in 2020.

This surge in voters helped put Joe Biden over the top. It has also motivated the Republican Party to redouble its efforts, this time at the state level, to suppress the vote. It is doing so under the false narrative that electoral fraud is widespread and that President Biden’s victory is somehow illegitimate. And it is setting the stage to orchestrate an authentic election  in 2024.

The backlash against these anti-democratic moves has been encouraging, however. When the state of Georgia passed its voting restrictions in April, pressure from voting rights advocates forced prominent Georgia corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta to reverse  and come out against the bill (though only after the bill had already passed). Major League Baseball  its all-star game from Atlanta, and Hollywood has also threatened a boycott.

These moves motivated Texas-based companies to  that state’s version of voting restrictions before the legislature scheduled a vote. None of that stopped Texas Republicans from pushing ahead with the bill. So, last weekend, Texas Democrats had to deploy the nuclear option of  out of the chamber to stop the vote suppression bill from passing. These courageous Texans, up against a powerful and determined state Republican Party, are now  to the federal government to safeguard voting rights.

At the federal level, the Democrats have put forward for the second time a comprehensive voting reform bill, the For the People Act, to expand access, reduce corruption and limit the impact of money on politics. The House approved a version of this bill in 2019, but it died in the Republican-controlled Senate. The House passed the  in March, but it again faces a difficult road to passage in the Senate because filibuster rules require at least 60 votes to pass and Democrats can muster only 50 (plus the vice-president’s).

A failure to find “10 good Republicans” for this bill, the cadre that Senator Joe Manchin naively expected to step forward to pass legislation creating a commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill, may  the Democrats to scrap or at least significantly modify the filibuster rules, which were  to block further enfranchisement of African-Americans in the 20^th century.

High voter turnout and efforts to secure voting rights are not the only signs of a healthy US democracy. Last year, the largest civic protests in US history took place as tens of millions of Americans expressed their disgust with police violence in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Civic organizations stepped forward to fight the pandemic and ensure more equitable access to vaccines. Young people, in particular, are engaged in large numbers on the climate crisis, gun control and reproductive health. After a long winter of discontent under Trump, perhaps it’s time for an “American Spring.”

Mixed Record Elsewhere for Democracy

Europe, meanwhile, is coming out of the pandemic in slightly stronger shape politically. The budget compromise that took place at the end of 2020, which ended up providing considerable relief to the economically disadvantaged countries of the southern tier, effectively  the European Union from disintegrating out of a lack of solidarity. Alas, the compromise also watered down the EU’s criticism of its easternmost members, particularly Poland and Hungary, for their violations of the bloc’s commitments to human rights and rule of law.

But there’s hope on the horizon here as well. Eastern Europe appears to be on the verge of a political sea change. Voters brought down Bulgaria’s right-wing populist leader Boyko Borissov in elections in April, and the new caretaker government has  to dismantle his political system of cronyism. In Slovenia, tens of thousands of protesters have massed in the capital of Ljubljana, the largest demonstration in years, to demand the resignation of the Trump-like prime minister Janez Jansa. The near-total ban on abortion orchestrated by the right-wing government in Poland has motivated mass  by women throughout the country, and even “Polish grannies” have  in support of a free press and the rule of law. A finally united opposition in Hungary, meanwhile, is  in the polls to Prime Minister Viktor Orban ahead of elections next year.

The far right, with their contempt for human rights, free media, rule of law and political checks and balances, are the greatest threat to democracy within democracies. Fortunately, they are not doing very well in Western Europe either. The anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland has witnessed a significant  in support in Germany, while Lega in Italy has also  in popularity. Golden Dawn has  from the scene in Greece. Vox is still the third most popular party in Spain, but it hasn’t managed to rise much 15% in the polls, which is the same story for the Sweden Democrats (stuck at 19%). Only in France and Finland are the far-right parties continuing to prosper. Marine Le Pen  leads the polls against French President Emmanuel Macron ahead of next year’s election, while the Finns Party  by a couple of percentage points in the polls but with elections not likely before 2023.

Elsewhere in the world, the pandemic may result in more political casualties for far-right populists, as they get caught in the ebbing of the Trump wave. Brazilians are  throughout the country under the banner of impeaching Jair Bolsonaro, a president who, like Trump, has compiled a spectacularly poor record in dealing with COVID-19. ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s approval rating has to a new low under 25%. The still-popular former leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, recently cleared by the courts to run again for office,  to be assembling a broad political coalition to oust Bolsonaro in the elections set for next year.

Hard-right leader Ivan Duque has achieved the distinction of being the least popular  in Colombian history. Politically, it doesn’t matter so much, since he can’t run again for president in next year’s election. But the public’s disgust with the violence in Colombia and the economic inequality exacerbated by the pandemic will likely apply as well to any of his would-be hard-right successors.

The extraordinary mishandling of the pandemic in India has had a similar effect on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity, which has also recently fallen to a new low. However, after seven years in office, he remains quite popular, with a 63%  rating.

Modi’s Teflon reputation speaks to the fragility of democracy in many parts of the world. Many voters are attracted to right-wing nationalists like Modi —  in Turkey, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador — who promise to “get the job done” regardless of the political and economic costs. Such leaders can rapidly turn a democratic country into a putatively democratic one, which makes the step into authentic authoritarianism that much easier.

The coups in Mali and Myanmar, China’s crackdown in Hong Kong, the enduring miseries in North Korea, Venezuela and Eritrea — these are all reminders that, however fragile democracy might be in formally democratic states, politics can always get a lot worse.

Lukashenko: Strong or Weak?

Take the example of Belarus, where Alexander Lukashenko has ruled supreme since 1994. Thanks to his own ruthlessness and the patronage of neighboring Russia, Lukashenko has weathered mass protests that would have ousted leaders of weaker disposition.

His latest outrage was to order the grounding of a Ryanair flight from Greece to Lithuania as it was flying over Belarus — just so that he could apprehend a young dissident, Roman Protasevich, and his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Virtually everyone has decried this blatant violation of international laws and norms with the exception, of course, of Putin and others in the Russian president’s orbit. The editor of the Russian media conglomerate RT, Margarita Simonyan, , “Never did I think I would envy Belarus. But now I do. [Lukashenko] performed beautifully.”

Lukashenko indeed came across as all-powerful in this episode. But this is an illusion. Putin has not hesitated to assassinate his critics, even when they are living outside Russia. Lukashenko doesn’t have that kind of reach or audacity, so he has to wait until dissidents are within his own airspace to strike. I’d like to believe that the opposition in Belarus takes heart from this desperate move — is Lukashenko really so scared of a single dissident? —  and doubles down on its efforts to oust the tyrant.

Outside of Putin and his toadies, Lukashenko doesn’t have many defenders. This elaborate effort to capture a dissident only further isolates the Belarussian strongman. Even putatively democratic states, like  and , have unequivocally denounced Lukashenko.

Anti-democratic actions like the Ryanair stunt capture headlines in ways that pro-democratic efforts rarely do. Honestly, had you even heard of Roman Protasevich before this affair? Along with all the other depressing news of the day, from Texas to Mali, this brazen move suggests that democracy is teetering on the edge of an abyss.

But all the patient organizing against the strongmen that doesn’t make it into the news will ultimately prove the fragility of tyranny. When it comes to anti-democrats like Lukashenko, they will one day discover that the military, the police and the party have abandoned them. And it will be they who teeter at the abyss, their hands scrabbling for a secure hold, when along comes democracy to give them a firm pat on the back.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Democracy Is Down but Not Out appeared first on 51�Թ�.

It was a golden opportunity to close borders, suppress civil society and issue decrees left and right (mostly right). Donald Trump in the United States, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and others took advantage of the crisis to advance their me-first agendas and consolidate power. Best of all, they could count on the fear of infection to keep protestors off the streets.

However, as the global death toll approaches a million and autocrats face heightened criticism of their COVID responses, the pandemic is looking less and less like a gift.

Russia’s Denials of Navalny’s Poisoning Fall on Deaf Ears

READ MORE

The news from Mali, Belarus and the Philippines should put the fear of regime change in the hearts of autocrats from Washington to Moscow. Despite all the recent  that democracy is on the wane, people are voting with their feet by massing on the streets to make their voices heard, particularly in places where voting with their hands has not been honored.

The pandemic is not the only factor behind growing public disaffection for these strongmen. But for men whose chief selling point is strong leadership, the failure to contain a microscopic virus is pretty damning.

Yet, as the case of Belarus demonstrates, dictators do not give up power easily. And even when they do, as in Mali, it’s often military power, not people power, that fills the vacuum. Meanwhile, all eyes are fixed on what will happen in the US. Will American citizens take inspiration from the people of Belarus and Mali to remove their own elected autocrat?

People Power in Mali

Ibrahim Boubacar Keita won the presidential election in Mali in 2013 in a landslide with 78% of the vote. One of his chief selling points was a promise of  “” for corruption. Easier said than done. The country was notoriously corrupt, and Keita had been in the thick of it during his tenure as prime minister in the 1990s. His return to power was also marked by corruption — a $40-million presidential jet, overpriced military imports, a son with expensive tastes — none of which goes over well in one of the poorest countries in the world.

Mali is not only poor, it’s conflict-prone. It has been subject to military coups at roughly 20-year intervals (1968, 1991, 2012). Several Islamist groups and a group of Tuareg separatists have battled the central government — and occasionally each other — over control of the country. French forces intervened at one point to suppress the Islamists, and France has been one of the strongest backers of Keita.

Mali held parliamentary elections in the spring, the first since 2013 after numerous delays. The turnout was , due to coronavirus fears and sporadic violence as well as the sheer number of people displaced by conflict. Radical Islamists kidnapped the main opposition leader, Soumaila Cisse, three days before the first round. After the second round, Keita’s party, Rally for Mali, claimed a parliamentary majority, but only thanks to the constitutional court, which  the results for 31 seats and shifted the advantage to the ruling party.

This court decision sparked the initial protests. The main protest group, Movement of June 5 — Rally of Patriotic Force, eventually called for Keita’s resignation, the dissolution of parliament and new elections. In July, government security forces tried to suppress the growing protests, killing more than a dozen people. International mediators were unable to resolve the stand-off. When Keita tried to pack the constitutional court with a new set of friends, protesters returned to the street.

On August 18, the military detained Keita and that night he stepped down. The coup was led by Assimi Goita, who’d  with the US military on counterinsurgency campaigns. Instead of acceding to demands for early elections, however, the new ruling junta says that Malians won’t go to the polls .

The people of Mali showed tremendous courage to stand up to their autocrat. Unfortunately, given the history of coups and various insurgencies, the military has gotten used to playing a dominant role in the country. The US and France are also partly to blame for lavishing money, arms and training on the army on behalf of their “war on terrorism” rather than rebuilding Mali’s economy and strengthening its political infrastructure.

Mali is a potent reminder that one alternative to autocrats is a military junta with little interest in democracy.

Democracy in Action in Belarus

Alexander Lukashenko is the longest-serving leader in Europe. He’s been the president of Belarus since 1994, having risen to power like Keita on an anti-corruption platform. He’s never before faced much of a political challenge in the country’s tightly-controlled elections.

Until these last elections. In the August 9 elections, Lukashenko was seeking his sixth term in office. He expected smooth sailing since, after all, he’d jailed the country’s most prominent dissidents, he presided over loyal security forces, and he controlled the media.

But he didn’t control Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. The wife of jailed oppositionist Sergei Tikhanovsky managed to unite the opposition prior to the election and brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets for campaign rallies.

Nevertheless, Lukashenko declared victory in the election with 80% of the vote (even though he enjoyed, depending on which poll you consult, either a 33% or a ). Tikhanovskaya fled to Lithuania. And that seemed to be that.

Except that the citizens of Belarus are not accepting the results of the election. As many as 200,000 people rallied in Minsk on August 23 to demand that Lukashenko step down. In US terms, that would be as if 6 million Americans gathered in Washington to demand Trump’s resignation. So far, Lukashenko is ignoring the crowd’s demand. He has tried to send a signal of defiance by  at the presidential palace in a flak jacket and carrying an automatic weapon. More recently, he has  to quiet detentions and vague promises of reform.

Just like the Republicans in the US who appeared as speakers at the Democratic National Convention, key people are abandoning Lukashenko’s side. The workers at the Minsk Tractor Factory are on an anti-Lukashenko , and many other workers at state-controlled enterprises have  off the job. Police are . The ambassador to Slovakia . The state theaters have  the autocrat for the first time in 26 years.

Despite COVID-19, Belarus doesn’t have any prohibitions against mass gatherings. That’s because Lukashenko has been a prominent COVID-19 denialist, refusing to shut down the country or adopt any significant medical precautions. His recommendations: take a sauna and vodka. Like Boris Johnson in the UK and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Lukashenko subsequently contracted the disease, though he claims that he was asymptomatic. The country has around 70,000 infections and about 650 deaths, but the numbers have started to rise again in recent days.

There are plenty of oppositionists ready to usher in democratic elections once Lukashenko is out of the way. A new coordinating council  this month includes former Culture Minister Pavel Latushko as well as prominent dissidents like Olga Kovalkova and Maria Kolesnikova.

Even  from Russia won’t help Lukashenko if the whole country turns against him. But beware the autocrat who can still count on support from a state apparatus and a militant minority.

The End of Duterte? 

Nothing Rodrigo Duterte could do seemed to diminish his popularity in the Philippines. He insulted people left and right. He launched a war on drugs that left 27,000 alleged drug dealers dead from extrajudicial murders. Another 250 human rights  have also been killed.

Still, his approval ratings remained high,  as recently as May. But Duterte’s failure to deal with the coronavirus and the resulting economic dislocation may finally unseat him, if not from office then at least from the political imagination of Filipinos.

The Philippines now has around 210,000 infections and 3,300 deaths. Compared to the US or Brazil, that might not sound like much. But surrounding the Philippines are countries that have dealt much more successfully with the pandemic: Thailand (58 deaths), Vietnam (30 deaths), Taiwan (7 deaths). Meanwhile, because of a strict lockdown that didn’t effectively contain the virus, the economy has crashed, and the country has  its first recession in 29 years.

Like Trump, Duterte has blamed everyone but himself for the country’s failings, even unleashing a recent tirade against professionals. But Duterte’s insult politics is no longer working. As Walden Bello, a sociologist and a former member of the Philippines parliament,  at Foreign Policy In Focus, “The hundreds of thousands blinded by his gangster charisma in the last 4 years have had the scales fall from their eyes and are now asking themselves how they could possibly have fallen in love with a person whose only skill was mass murder.”

In the Philippines, presidents serve one six-year term, and Duterte is four years into his. He may well attempt to hold on for two more years. He might even pull a Vladimir Putin and change the constitution so that he can run again. A group of Duterte supporters  a press conference to call for a “revolutionary government” and a new constitution. Another possibility, in the wake of recent bombings in southern Philippines, might be a  of martial law to fight Abu Sayyaf, which is linked to the Islamic State group.

But the combination of the pandemic, the economic crash and a pro-China foreign policy may turn the population against Duterte so dramatically that he might view resignation as the only way out.

Democracy in the Balance

Plenty of autocrats still look pretty comfortable in their positions. Putin — or forces loyal to him — just engineered the poisoning of one of his chief rivals, Alexei Navalny. Xi Jinping has just about turned Chinese politics into a one-man show. Viktor Orban has consolidated his grip on power in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has suppressed or co-opted the opposition parties in Turkey, and Bashar al-Assad has seemingly weathered the civil war in Syria.

Even Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, despite an atrocious record on both the pandemic and the economy, has somehow managed to regain some popularity, with his approval rating  his disapproval rating recently for the first time since April.

The US presidential elections might tip the balance one way or the other. Although America still represents a democratic ideal for some around the world, that’s not the reason why the November elections matter. Donald Trump has so undermined democratic norms and institutions that democrats around the world are aghast that he hasn’t had to pay a political price. He escaped impeachment. His party still stands behind him. Plenty of his associates have gone to jail, but he has not (yet) been taken down by the courts.

That leaves the court of public opinion. If voters return President Trump to office for a second term, it sends a strong signal that there are no penalties for ruining a democracy. Trump operates according to his own Pottery Barn rule: He broke a democracy and he believes that he now owns it. If voters agree, it will gladden the hearts of ruling autocrats and authoritarians-to-be all over the world.

Voting out Trump may not simply resuscitate American democracy. It may send a hopeful message to all those who oppose the Trump-like leaders in their lands. Those leaders may have broken democracy, but we the people still own it.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Could COVID-19 Bring Down Autocrats? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Will the Coronavirus Crisis Bring Down Hungary’s Failing Democracy?

READ MORE

On March 24, after the health ministry confirmed 2,200 infections and 46 deaths in Brazil (these numbers have since ), Bolsonaro held a televised address and : “Our lives have to go on. Jobs must be kept … we must, yes, get back to normal.” In the speech, he blamed the media for spreading panic around a “fantasy” and a “trick” that he considers to be a “little flu or a bit of a cold,” in reference to COVID-19. 

Just days later in an unprecedented move, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram several messages posted on ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s official accounts. His posts contained fictitious and misleading information about the coronavirus as he called on citizens to take to the streets to protest against a lockdown.

Predictions for Brazil

���DZ����DzԲ�����’s anti-quarantine policy could put Brazilians at risk. His indifference to human suffering and the loss of lives is now more blatant than ever. Bolsonaro has made countless throughout his political career defending torture and violent dictators, as well as encouraging murderous security policies against poor people and minorities in Brazil. But now in the face of this pandemic, his irresponsible ideas transcend mere rhetoric and now threaten millions of lives.

A study by the Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London that without preventative measures against the coronavirus, more than 1 million people could die in Brazil. These estimates also predict that if the country adopts early quarantine measures throughout, then its number of deaths from COVID-19 could range from 44,000 to 529,000, depending on how prompt and rigid the lockdown is.

���DZ����DzԲ�����’s incompetency and inhumanity are leading to his isolation and growing unpopularity among voters. In a miscalculation, the president interpreted the pandemic as an opportunity to advance his narrow political interests in two ways.

First, the Brazilian economy is showing signs of a fast-approaching recession as projections indicate GDP growth of around 1% this year. Aware of the risk a recession poses to the popularity and longevity of his already fragile government, Bolsonaro wants to blame the upcoming economic troubles on authorities who have imposed local quarantines.

Second, with the inevitable spread of the coronavirus in Brazil, Bolsonaro will also attempt to shirk his national duties. He will transfer responsibility to local authorities as chaos overwhelms the underfunded and crippled public health system when the pandemic reaches its peak. Selfish political strategies should have no place in the fight against the deadly coronavirus, but Bolsonaro simply doesn’t know how to rise above his own egotistical frame of mind.

Brazil’s Weak Public Health System

Brazil’s preparedness to fight the pandemic is questionable. The number of beds in intensive care units (ICU) has decreased since 2009, and today the country has approximately 55,000 ICU beds. Yet only half of these are for public health use, and they are across the country. According to , in the best-case scenario when adopting early quarantine measures, Brazil would need 57,000 ICU beds, but in the event of a last-minute lockdown being enforced, that figure would skyrocket to 460,000.

Brazil’s public health system is already under pressure as other diseases have hit the country hard in recent years. According to the , Brazil is among the world’s top 30 high-burden countries regarding tuberculosis, a bacterial infection that makes victims more susceptible to complications from COVID-19.

To make matters worse, from 2015 to 2019 tropical diseases, such as dengue, Zika and chikungunya, have approximately 1.7 million people. In the first two months of 2020, some regions in Brazil experienced a 128% in dengue cases compared to the same period in 2019.

Both the coronavirus and Jair Bolsonaro are pushing Brazil to the edge of a cliff. In his 1842 short story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” American writer Edgar Allan Poe wrote about Prince Prospero who ignores the existence of a deadly plague in his kingdom and organizes a masquerade ball in his castle for the noble class. During the party, he confronts a mysterious masked individual dressed in a red robe and asks the death-like figure, “Who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery?” Prospero dies immediately.

Like the fate of Poe’s prince, Bolsonaro will find his own political demise inescapable if he belatedly attempts to tackle COVID-19. Brazilians are fighting not only a virus, but also the leadership style of a president who ignores his duty to confront a public health crisis. The only good news in all of this is how the coronavirus is waking Brazilians up to the undeniable political reality that Bolsonaro deserves to be impeached.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Politics Behind the Coronavirus in Brazil appeared first on 51�Թ�.

COVID-19: Will We Learn the Lessons?

READ MORE

On the other hand, the incompetent response of some right-wing leaders — Donald Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil — may well set back the far right in certain countries. Moreover, the scale of the threat has put on the table the kind of large-scale transformative policies that hitherto circulated only on the margins.

So, which way will the novel coronavirus, known as COVID-19, ultimately push the political pendulum?

From Denial to Weaponization

Imagine if Hillary Clinton were in the White House today. The far right, led by the head of the anti-Hillary forces, Donald Trump, would have immediately used the “China virus” to demand that the Clinton administration close all borders and ban all immigrants and refugees. Under ordinary conditions, in other words, the far right would have had a field day in the United States using the coronavirus threat to advance its xenophobic agenda in the face of a liberal, cautious Washington consensus.

But with President Trump in the Oval Office rather than sitting on the sidelines lobbing the pundit’s equivalent of Molotov cocktails, the far right started out in denial. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in China at the end of December 2019, after all, it was far away and it was not infecting Americans. Even when the pathogen was detected for the first time in the US on January 21 — in a young man returning to Washington state from China — right-wing pundits continued to downplay the risk for weeks on end.

On February 24, for instance, Rush Limbaugh  that “the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” He would say  that the greater threat to the country was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party more generally. Just as becoming president didn’t make Trump more presidential in conduct, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom clearly didn’t make Limbaugh any more professional in conduct.

The breakdown of concern among Americans has followed the political contours of the country.  writes in The Atlantic this week:

“A flurry of new national polls released this week reveals that while anxiety about the disease is rising on both sides of the partisan divide, Democrats consistently express much more concern about it than Republicans do, and they are much more likely to say they have changed their personal behavior as a result. A similar gap separates people who live in large metropolitan centers, which have become the foundation of the Democratic electoral coalition, from those who live in the small towns and rural areas that are the modern bedrock of the GOP.”

As the Trump administration finally switched into its own incompetent version of engagement, some sections of the far right zoomed well past the denial phase. Those of a survivalist and apocalyptic bent are already halfway to their bunkers, with Alex Jones of Infowars infamy trying to  by raising the prices on his prepper products. It’s part of a more general wave of profiteering that encompasses Amazon price-gougers and traffickers of inside  like North Carolina Senator Richard Burr in the Senate.

Neo-Nazis and sovereignists, meanwhile, are  at the failures of the federal state to handle the crisis. They are anticipating the realization of their cherished dream: the collapse of the liberal order. Still, other extremists in the QAnon camp  that Trump will use the virus as a pretext to arrest members of a global liberal pedophile ring (like Trump, they simply double down when their assertions are proven wrong, as in the Comet Pizza debacle).

Then there’s the blame game. Jerry Falwell Jr.  North Korea as the culprit behind the coronavirus. California Republican Joanne Wright, like many of her tribe,  that China manufactured the disease but added the twist that Bill Gates financed the plot. And it wouldn’t be a wacky right-wing conspiracy if  somehow weren’t implicated as well.

Chinese and Asians more generally have faced a  in attacks and discrimination. With the appearance of each new hotspot — ,  — targeted xenophobia has been sure to follow. Soon, thanks to Trump, it will be Americans in the crosshairs.

As far as the American far right’s anti-immigrant agenda, the Trump administration is already carrying that water. Trump closed the border with Mexico. He  that all undocumented migrants trying to get into this country will be summarily turned back.

Even the migrant workers who are seasonally granted H2-A visas to work on American farms are  to cross the border. Farm owners pushed back against a ban, forcing the administration to accept workers previously granted such visas. But the absence of new workers will still leave US  dangerously understaffed.

Borderline Issue

For decades, Europe has been at war with itself over borders — both its internal borders and its borders with the rest of the world. The coronavirus has taken that war to a new level.

The overwhelming obsession of the far right in Europe has been to reduce or eliminate immigration from points east and south. Some political parties, like Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland, even support “remigration” — namely, forcing established immigrants to leave the country.

The coronavirus offers the far right yet another arrow in its quiver. “We are fighting a two-front war. One front is called migration and the other one belongs to the coronavirus,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has . “There is a logical connection between the two as both spread with movement.”

In Italy, far-right leader Matteo Salvini has used the pandemic to push his “closed ports” policy. In February, even as the outbreak was gathering steam in his country, Salvini  that “allowing the migrants to land from Africa, where the presence of the virus was confirmed, is irresponsible.” At the time, there was only one reported case on the whole continent, in Egypt.

In Germany, the identitarian movement  proclaiming “Defend Our Borders” on the Brandenburg Gate, once a potent symbol of the erased border between eastern and western Germany. Throughout Europe, far-right parties  their “great replacement” narrative — that immigrants are poised to overwhelm majority populations — to incorporate the coronavirus. The threat that outsiders supposedly pose to the health of nations has long been a singular obsession of fascists.

It wasn’t just the threat from outside Europe. In 1995, seven European nations created the Schengen Area, which abolished their internal border controls and visa requirements. Eventually becoming subject to European Union law, the area expanded to include 26 states. Practically from the beginning, the far right has taken aim at Schengen as an unacceptable abridgment of sovereignty. It has argued that Schengen makes control of immigrants more difficult (as with  into Italy in 2011) and compromised anti-terrorist policing (in the wake of a  from Germany to Italy in 2016). Still, Schengen survived.

What the far right wasn’t able to do, the coronavirus managed in a matter of weeks. Some members reestablished internal border controls without the EU Commission, as required by the Schengen Border Code. These moves prompted the EU to  last week that all internal borders will be closed for 30 days. The next step for the far right, and its more mainstream conservative allies, is to try to make this temporary change permanent.

Separating the Competent…

For some illiberal leaders, the coronavirus is like a golden ticket. It allows them to sweep away what remains of the rule of law in their countries. Consider Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extraordinary moves to hang onto power. Up until recently, things weren’t looking so good for him. He was supposed to go on trial this week for corruption. The last election provided a narrow victory to his opposition, and the head of the Blue and White alliance, Benny Gantz, was given first shot at forming a government.

But the coronavirus, a death sentence for so many people, has been a lifeline for Netanyahu. As part of a more general lockdown, the prime minister froze the judiciary. And that just happened to put his own trial on hold. Meanwhile, the speaker of the Knesset, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party,  and closed down parliament rather than allow a vote to elect his successor, who would likely have been from the Blue and White alliance.

Because of new rules that limit public gathering, it’s impossible for people to come out on the streets to protest any of this. It goes further, as Gershom Gorenberg  in The Washington Post. Even as the government was freezing the justice system,

“Netanyahu himself announced that the government would use electronic means to track the locations of citizens in an effort to enforce self-isolation. That quickly turned out to mean giving the Shin Bet security service the power to locate people via their cellphones. That measure, an extreme infringement on civil rights, should be vetted by a Knesset committee. Instead, Netanyahu enacted it under emergency regulations.”

Think of it as a stealth coup. Plus the transformation of Israel into a police state. Or, put another way, Israelis are now going to understand a little more of what Palestinians have known for a long time.

Viktor Orban has done something similar in Hungary. He has put a new law in front of parliament that would give his government extraordinary power to detain pretty much anyone, as Kim Lane Scheppele  on the Hungarian Spectrum website:

“Anyone who publicizes false or distorted facts that interfere with the “successful protection” of the public — or that alarm or agitate that public — could be punished by up to five years in prison. And anyone who interferes with the operation of a quarantine or isolation order could also face a prison sentence of up to five years, a punishment that increases to eight years if anyone dies as a result.”

The first set of controls is aimed at what remains of an independent press in Hungary. The second could incarcerate anyone who objects to anything the Orban government does.

As if that’s not enough, the prime minister could, according to the proposal, “suspend the enforcement of certain laws, depart from statutory regulations, and implement additional extraordinary measures by degree.” These would be permanent changes in Hungarian law.

Many sectors of Hungarian civil society have  this proposed “enabling act.” And parliament failed to pass the bill on the first attempt this week. But it’s likely that Orban will , relying on his party’s comfortable majority in parliament to get it through.

…From the Incompetent

Donald Trump’s dangerously ill-informed response to the coronavirus — including such basic failures as providing test kits and other basic resources to hospitals — has incredibly not spelled his political demise. According to a , 50% of Americans think he’s done a good job versus only 45% who give him poor marks. His approval rating has even increased a couple points. That might change as the casualties rise, particularly if the US president attempts to end the policies of social isolation early, as he has . Or it might not, if the virus disproportionately affects blue urban areas.

For all his incompetence, Trump hasn’t been so stupid as to miss the  to push through parts of his cherished economic agenda, like further tax cuts. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is  for new emergency powers to detain people indefinitely without trial. The Trump administration is clearly looking to Israel and Hungary as examples.

Other incompetent leaders, however, may not survive politically. Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro has largely followed the same script as Trump by downplaying the risk of the pandemic. On March 15, despite having been in close contact with several members of his administration who had already contracted the disease, Bolsonaro joined a demonstration of his supporters where he touched a . The Brazilian president has claimed that his tests have come back negative. He also  that the crisis is little more than a media conspiracy.

Last week, millions of people  at their windows in the big cities to bang pots and pans in a demand for Bolsonaro to step down. Even some of his conservative backers are outraged and have turned against him. After declaring in a December column in the conservative Estado de São Paulo that Bolsonaro is “unbeatable” in the next election, political commentator Eliane Cantanhede  more recently, “I think he’s fatally wounded for the election [in 2022] … If the election was held today there is a big chance Bolsonaro would be defeated.”

COVID-19 affects people differently depending on their underlying conditions. The same holds true for politicians. The fittest will survive, while the politically weak will be weeded out.

Time for Transformation

A nuclear apocalypse is hypothetical. The worst effects of climate change are in the future. Neither nuclear disarmament nor radical cuts in carbon emissions have been on the table because of the unfortunate tendency of politicians to minimize the risks and ignore the already considerable short-term impacts.

The coronavirus crisis is not abstract. It’s happening right now. Country after country has imposed quarantines, dramatically changing how people live, work and interact. Governments are considering massive bailouts to save the economy and bolster medical systems. But those are just quick fixes.

“We changed the way we live, work and travel to counter this pandemic, why can we not do the same to counter the climate emergency?”  Lorenzo Marsili on Al Jazeera. “Why should we go back to a deadly status quo now that we know it is within our power to transform the way we live and organise our economy and society?”

When the quarantines end, as they inevitably will, the world will experience the  in carbon emissions that happened after the end of the 2009 financial crisis. So, the economic response to this pandemic must incorporate features of the Green New Deal, or we will be jumping out of a frying pan and into a literal fire.

COVID-19 is a near-death experience for the human race. Just as individuals often react to such experiences by transforming their lives, the current crisis should force a reevaluation of the status quo. Anything less will be just a temporary stay of execution.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Politics of the Coronavirus appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Modi’s clever campaign strategy diverted the voters’ focus toward his larger-than-life personality while playing dangerously with growing nationalist and populist sentiments among the Hindu majority. He projected an image of strong-man leadership that even non-militant Hindus are ready to admire. This has permitted him to reinforce his political power both in the national government and across a majority of states. Like Donald Trump in the US and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Modi has a keen sense of how to exploit the contemporary mechanics of democracy by turning an election into a popularity contest that typically rewards powerful personalities.

Like Emmanuel Macron in France, who came out of nowhere in 2017 to profit from the self-annihilating tendencies of the two dominant parties that had controlled the state for nearly 60 years, Modi can also thank the continuing ineptitude of the traditionally dominant Congress party leaders for paving his way to electoral victory and now an easy consolidation of his power over the world’s largest democracy.

Modi has thus avoided the plight traditionally forecast in a democracy for political leaders who fail to produce strong economic results. Most observers believe they will be punished by the electors. Indeed, many pundits predicted Modi’s defeat in this year’s election for that very reason. But Modi managed to compensate for the failures of a flagging economy by imposing his personality and stoking the belief that, through sheer will and personal strength, he could set India on the right track.

Milan Vaishnav, the author of the Foreign Policy article, delves into the complexity of Modi’s performance, his decisions and the current trends. He finally aligns with the traditional wisdom in predicting a backlash as soon as Indians realize that the economy is in the doldrums and Modi lacks a magic wand.

Modi has managed to square the circle by simultaneously adopting a manifestly liberal economic approach that contrasts with the socialist tradition established by the Congress party, while also playing to his Hindutva base that sees the national identity closely linked to the Hindu religion and has consistently shown that it is “highly suspicious of liberalizing economic reform.” Vaishnav warns that, while “setting its economic agenda, the [ruling Bharatiya Janata Party] has to be careful not to alienate the Hindu nationalist base that has powered its electoral triumphs.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:

Alienate:

Create a bad impression by revealing a truth that, so long as it remains concealed or effectively disguised, will ensure the loyalty of those who would object to that truth

Contextual Note

Narendra Modi is hardly unique in adopting a strategy designed for a solid base of voters who are not necessarily representative of the nation and whose interests do not necessarily coincide with the economic interests of the nation as a whole. Donald Trump applied this strategy in the US to win the presidential election in 2016.

The secret to success lies in deciding which segments of the population the candidate accepts to alienate. If Modi’s minority Hindutva base in India — or the nationalist and racist base of Trump in the US — is powerful enough to provide the energy for a successful campaign, alienating an identifiable minority that most voters don’t care enough about can be a winning strategy. In an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape, politicians can count on the passive sense of nationalism felt by the undefined and politically unmotivated mass of voters concerned primarily by their own survival and prosperity.

With both Modi and Trump, the effort to appease the base, to ensure that it will not be alienated becomes a major strategic goal. Modi can thus play on the Hindu majority’s hostility toward a Muslim minority and even initiate dangerous geopolitical actions such as removing Kashmir’s autonomy. He can do this because he knows it will galvanize a base that may find his other policies, such as his embrace of free trade, objectionable.

Unlike the top-down Congress, Modi’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), draws its force and energy from grassroots groups, one of which “has regularly lobbied the government to limit foreign trade, curb foreign direct investment, and abandon the privatization of the public sector.” That hasn’t stopped Modi from pushing all of those policies to please his urban middle-class constituency, a group that feels little sympathy with his base and vociferously applauds what it sees as his liberalizing reforms.

In the same way, Trump has never missed an opportunity to highlight his sympathy with the racist sentiments of his base of lower-middle-class white voters while promoting an economic policy that clearly favors the rich and a foreign policy that, in theory, appears to be less aggressive toward other nations and races.

In the article, Vaishnav remarks that Modi’s contradictory behavior produces policy initiatives that give him “an air of indecision and equivocating.” Vaishnav assumes that, at some point, there will be a backlash on one side or the other. He may be forgetting that some strong politicians have an uncanny way of making equivocation prosper, often for quite a long time.

Historical note

Modi, Trump, Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and, to some extent (at least in the short term), Boris Johnson in the UK reflect a somewhat surprising trend that has worrying similarities with the situation in Europe between the two world wars. Strong-arm leaders — who carefully study whom to avoid alienating while having no bones about humiliating and marginalizing particular minorities — rise to power not by converting the nation to their extremist views, but by exploiting the passive complicity of a not very galvanized and often disparate majority, impatient with the stagnancy bred by bureaucracy and willing to bet on the bold decision-making of politicians who vaunt their strength and cultivate their narcissism. Aided by the power of electronic media, voters easily confuse blatant narcissism with charisma.

Such leaders often come to power as a result of a vague sentiment of disgust the population feels toward what is perceived as the corruption of the existing ruling class. Typically, these rising leaders claim to eliminate corruption, to “,” as Trump repeatedly insisted.

According to Vaishnav, Modi defeated his rivals in 2014 because of Indians’ perception that “the Congress party had mismanaged the economy, fallen into paralysis, and faced one major corruption scandal after another.” Brazil has seen the banal, minor and fundamentally ambiguous corruption of Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’ Party government replaced first by Michel Temer’s far more aggressively corrupt government after her impeachment in 2016 and then by Bolsonaro, elected in 2018, whose close association with the criminal class, including death squads, neatly accompanies his own taste for.

In reality, corruption can be seen as an inevitable feature of any political system that puts money at the center of its value system, which of course is the working principle of any capitalist economy. It’s just a question of where corruption lurks, what laws and customs it hides behind and how well it disguises itself. Where money rules, corruption becomes an everyday work tool.

Earlier this year, Forbes assessed Modi’s progress in and concluded: “Modi’s government has been fighting corruption in the wrong places, among the country’s poor. And it has left corruption thriving in the high places, among the country’s rich.” That represents a trend among strong-arm leaders who absolutely need to buy off the most powerful interest groups in their nation just to stay in power. They may even boast about the patriotism of supporting the rich and powerful. The easiest victims of anti-corruption reforms are the poor, many of whom have no choice but to find shortcuts for survival, among which are favors, dodges and subterfuges that can be designated as corruption.

In brief, strong political leaders now seek to alienate those they don’t need and protect from alienation those they depend on both for their financing and the energy required to mobilize for their election campaigns. Though Modi leads a nation with a population that is several times the world’s largest democracy, he is just one in a growing cast of talented performers skilled in the art of selective alienation.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book,, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Is Narendra Modi’s Consensus Unraveling? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

But the scale is unprecedented this year, and the secret is out. For the first time, the international community has borne witness to this ongoing assault on the rainforest. We have been inundated with images: smoldering forests; dying animals; a Pataxó woman , denouncing the fires set to her community’s protected land, with mountains ablaze behind her; and a Mura man to give every drop of his blood to protect his tribe’s forests, their home. 

Whether witnessing the horror or resolve in the face of ruin, the world can’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of tragedy and loss.

The world community has long sought interconnection — through trade, thought and culture — but our understanding of the links between our actions and their environmental impacts has lagged far behind. Our planet is essentially a closed system, one that doesn’t recognize, see or feel the political boundaries we have artificially set upon it. And our planet is incurring the devastating consequences of these human-imposed boundaries.

Why Is This Happening?

It’s not surprising that we’re focused on the fires. Yet if we want to change the future, we have to look beyond the smoke to understand why this is happening.  

On one level, there seem to be to the acceleration of these rainforest-clearing fires. Forests are being burned to make way for oil and mineral production, for cattle grazing, for oil palm plantations and soybean farms. But on a more fundamental level, there’s a common cause. It’s all about money — how to make money from the land. The people who set the fires all believe they can make more money by torching the trees than by leaving them standing.

The tragedy is that they’re largely right, and that’s especially true now. In 2018, China responded to America’s tariffs on Chinese goods with a on American soybeans. With American soy now priced out of the market, China began seeking new sources, and Brazil had an opportunity to fill the gap. Brazil just unseated the US as the world’s largest soybean .

The problem got worse when Brazil slashed its environmental protection budget in April 2019. The lack of monitoring and enforcement meant that landowners, squatters and speculators could burn with impunity. Even if Brazil reverses that terrible decision, we can be sure that tens of thousands of fires will be set next year. For now, as things stand, it makes economic sense.

What Should Be Done?

The only way to stop the fires is by changing the economics. We need to make the forest more valuable as it is. If an intact forest provides more economic benefit than an open field, then it won’t be burned. The people who live in and around the forest, no less than the government in Brasilia, will protect it.

The simplest way to do that is to pay Brazil to protect this worldwide resource and to withhold payments if it fails. This would be a good deal for the rest of the world. The Brazilian Amazon 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. When it goes up in smoke, it carbon into the atmosphere that hastens climate change. The rest of the world should be willing to pay for what’s essentially a global resource.

This simple idea probably won’t work, however. The fires aren’t set by the Brazilian government, but by thousands of individuals hoping to make money by farming and ranching. The forest is vast and hard to monitor. Fires, once set, are hard to put out. Even if the government led by President Jair Bolsonaro agrees to a deal and tries to carry it out in good faith, fire-setters know they will probably get away with it. The economics are still in their favor.

There is a better way: make the forest more valuable. The Amazon forest is full of products the rest of us need: honey, essential oils, natural colors. Coffee, cacao and açai berries can be farmed in a clear-cut plantation, but they and could command higher prices if grown in the forest. And there are valuable goods we are not even aware of yet. Many Western medicines originate from rainforests, including of anti-cancer . But than 1% of rainforest plants used by traditional healers have been tested in Western labs. The economic value of the rainforest has barely been tapped.

None of this will happen by itself. Honey, cacao and the rest grow in a lot of places. To stop the fires, we need the forest-grown versions to compete successfully with the cheaper, simpler, plantation-grown kind. They probably can’t compete on price. True, the big trees fix nitrogen in the soil so understory shrubs like coffee and cacao don’t need fertilizer; because they’re grown in shade, less water evaporates so they don’t need irrigation; and the plants aren’t stressed, so they live longer than the plantation kind. But most of the time they take longer to mature, and yields per hectare are lower. Net plantation costs are lower.

On the other hand, the difference in quality between forest-grown and plantation-grown goods can be enormous. Aroma Ecuador, a company created by an Ecuadorian NGO that markets locally-sourced chocolates like fine wines, has developed a to describe the differences in taste among chocolates. Cacao beans from San Jose del Tambo produce earthy chocolate, with notes of moss and Thai basil. Cacao from Los Rios tastes like jasmine, with a hint of coffee.

Terroir is as vital to chocolate as it is to wine, and the same can be said of honey, berries and other products. But most of the chocolate we eat today –– even the good stuff –– is raised, sold and processed in bulk. Many of us have developed a taste for single-malt whiskey and appelation contrôlée wine. Developing a market for fine Amazon forest products would help them sell at the premium they need to offset higher costs.

Can It Be Done?

This sounds like work, but it might be easier than we think. Many of America’s largest cities have adopted goals to greenhouse gas emissions by 80%. American homeowners will install 2.5 GW of solar panels on their homes in 2019, and the total installed capacity is in the next five years. Most people are buying washing machines and refrigerators that use than the old ones they replace. If people are willing to spend thousands of dollars to protect their climate, many would be willing to splurge on a better bar of chocolate. Better chocolate, coffee and honey can be cheap thrills and still turn the tide.

This solution can’t be imposed from above. Rainforest communities know their forests, culture and capabilities. Each village will have to develop its own plan for planting, harvesting and processing. It will require changing the centuries-old status quo.

But the Pataxó woman and the Mura man we saw on television meant what they said: They don’t want their forests to burn. They want them to stand, for themselves and their children’s children. When they protect their forests, they do it for themselves and all of us everywhere. They just need our help. After all, we all share our one and only planet.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Putting Out the Fires in the Amazon appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In all three cases, these leaders escalated their nationally destructive policies this summer in ways that have alienated even their erstwhile supporters. Once again, they have demonstrated that they have no interest in making America, Britain or Brazil great again. They are only interested in doing as much damage as they can before they are ultimately dragged out of office.  

Johnson Tries a Coup

Boris Johnson is a bumbling blowhard with but one current obsession: Brexit. He has promised to sever the UK’s relationship with the European Union by October 31 even if it means doing so without a deal that would mitigate the pain of separation. 

The Halloween deadline is grimly appropriate. A no-deal Brexit would make for a blood-curdling horror film. Just slap a Ghostface mask on the British prime minister, give him a knife to cut the umbilicus with Europe and voila: Scream 5.

Johnson’s latest tactic to get what he wants is to suspend Parliament for five weeks this fall to limit debate on alternatives to his doomsday option. He hopes to make it impossible for parliament to pass even emergency legislation banning a no-deal Brexit. Believe it or not, the British system allows for such maneuvers — so Queen Elizabeth had to give her blessing to the suspension. 

When Trump engages in anti-democratic activities, the Republican Party, by and large, indulges him. Not so in the UK, where even Conservatives are up in arms over Johnson’s silent coup. After the prime minister’s announcement of the suspension, the government’s whip in the House of Lords resigned, as did the head of the Scottish Conservative Party. Former Conservative Prime Minister John Major, meanwhile, has pilloried Johnson and  a legal challenge to the suspension.

This week, Johnson lost his one-vote majority in Parliament when Conservative member Philip Lee  to the Liberal Democrats even as the prime minister was addressing the chamber. 

Most parliamentary members, including quite a few Conservatives, oppose a no-deal exit. No matter: Johnson is following Trump’s script by remaking the Conservative Party in his own image,  anyone who doesn’t follow his hard line. After losing a vote that will allow Parliament to introduce legislation to delay Brexit, Johnson  21 dissidents, including a number of former ministers and one grandson of Winston Churchill. 

Now Johnson is talking about holding a snap election in mid-October. The Conservatives are comfortably outpolling Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. However, if all the remain — those who want the UK to stay in the EU — forces , they could eke out a victory. But Johnson could also promise an election for October 14 and then, surprise,  until after Halloween, making Brexit a fait accompli. 

Johnson , “Brexit means Brexit and we are going to make a titanic success of it.” Determined to do the wrong thing even though he knows it’s wrong, Johnson is steering the United Kingdom straight into an iceberg. Nigel Farage is his chief navigator, and the rest of the country is clustered on the bow, bracing for impact. 

With a second referendum, wiser heads could wrest control of the helm and prevent disaster, but Johnson is doing everything he can to fast-track Brexit on the principle that it doesn’t matter where you’re going as long as you get there fast. 

Bolsonaro Fans the Flames

Idiocy loves company. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro styles himself as the Trump of the tropics. The comparison is apt. Some future poet, in describing the inferno of the present, will stuff Trump, Bolsonaro and Johnson feet first into the mouth of Satan in the ninth circle. Having stoked the fires of climate change, Bolsonaro will richly deserve such an afterlife.

As  points out, Bolsonaro as a candidate “promised to end fines for violations of environmental law, shrink the protected areas that account for half of the Brazilian Amazon and fight NGOs, for which he has a visceral hatred. In office, his government has gutted the environment ministry and Ibama, the quasi-autonomous environmental agency. Six of the ten senior posts in the ministry’s department of forests and sustainable development are vacant, according to its website. The government talks of “monetizing” the Amazon but sabotaged a $1.3bn European fund that aims to give value to the standing forest.”

As a result of ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s hands-off policy, deforestation in the Amazon has been out of control this year. Emboldened by their president’s actions, Brazilian farmers organized a “fire day” to clear land for planting. “We need to show the president that we want to work and the only way is to knock (the forest) down. And to form and clean our pastures, it is with fire,”  one of the organizers of the fire day. The number of fires in the Amazon nearly  over the same period last year. 

It’s not as if the world wasn’t warned. Time magazine put the burning Amazon on its cover exactly 30 . The  this time around is straight-forward. The Amazon is a huge carbon sink. Burn it up and global warming will accelerate. There will also be irreversible loss of biodiversity. And the upside? More soybeans, which Brazil can sell to China because the latter is no longer buying the harvests of US farmers. 

Oh, and more profits into the pockets of ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s friends in the industries that are paving the paradise of the Amazon and putting up a parking lot.

Trump Trashes the Planet

Donald Trump is a moth that can’t stop itself from flying directly at the flame of fame (or, more accurately, the inferno of infamy). He could stay off Twitter, but instead his tweets piss off one group of voters after another. He could stay away from the press, but his lies, gaffes and personal attacks are amplified throughout the media universe. Arguably, this is a strategy to solidify the base and reinforce Trump’s reputation as an anti-establishment gadfly.

But there’s no political strategy behind his trade war with China and his impulsive threats last month to  on Chinese goods. The sectoral damage to his base worries his political advisers: say goodbye to the farm vote, a good chunk of blue-collar voters thrown out of work, and a bunch of average consumers angry at shelling out more money for their holiday gifts. 

Worse would be a more general economic recession brought on by this needless trade war, which would doom the president’s reelection chances. Yes,  for a “correction,” particularly because of Trump’s tax cuts and over-the-top spending. But if Trump played it safe, he could have probably postponed the recession until after the 2020 election. Instead, he’s doing everything he can to ensure that it makes landfall smack dab during the presidential race.

Trump isn’t just self-destructive. He continued over the last couple weeks to destroy US alliances, most recently by expressing interest in buying Greenland from Denmark. The land wasn’t on the market, as the Danish government reminded the president, which prompted Trump to cancel his trip to the country. 

Greenland? Really?! Perhaps Trump was making an indirect acknowledgment of the effects of climate change, attempting a land grab up north to secure a spot for Ivanka and Jared’s summer palace.

Meanwhile, Trump is powering full speed ahead toward climate apocalypse. The administration’s latest move is to remove restrictions on methane emissions, a more potent contributor to global warming than carbon dioxide. The effort is designed to reduce costs for oil and gas companies. But guess what? Even some of the top energy companies are opposed to Trump’s move.

“Last year we announced our support for the direct regulation of methane emissions for new and existing oil and gas facilities,” Exxon Mobil spokesperson Scott Silvestri . “That hasn’t changed. We will continue to urge the EPA to retain the main features of the existing methane rule.” After all, Exxon, BP and others are trying to position natural gas as part of the solution to climate change, and the Trump administration is busy undermining this argument.

The methane restrictions that Trump is trying to unravel date back to the Obama administration. But the current administration wants to tear up much older agreements as well. The Clinton administration protected Alaska’s Tongass National Forest from logging and mining. But Trump wants to open up this 16.7 million-acre sanctuary to the usual suspects in the extractive industries. This is no small land parcel. It  half the world’s temperate rainforest.  

Bolsonaro, at least, is only interested in trashing a rainforest (albeit a large one). Johnson is content to trash a country (albeit a rich one). Trump, with that ego of his, aspires to trash an entire planet. Yes, all three will eventually flame out. But not before they’ve scorched the earth clean.

An environmentalist told journalist Alan Weisman before the 2016 elections that she was considering voting for Trump. “The way I see it,” she , “it’s either four more years on life support with Hillary, or letting this maniac tear the house down. Maybe then we can pick up the pieces and finally start rebuilding.”

The philosophy of “things have to get worse before they get better” has sometimes worked out in the past. But that’s the past. 

Unless we stop him, we’ll be rooting around in the post-Trump ashes in vain for the pieces. The house will be gone. And there will be nothing we can salvage to rebuild it.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Trump, Boris and Bolsonaro Are Burning Down the House appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro followed through with his promise to turn the entire nation into a movie set for a remake of , where the good guys and the bad guys will be able to shoot it out to see who prevails, thanks to which the distinction between good and bad will be forever lost. — as his fans on the extreme right like to call him — signed a on May 7 that “would grant millions of citizens the right to carry loaded weapons in public.”

Here is today’s 3D definition:��

Loaded:

1: Concerning firearms: containing one or more bullets for the purpose of killing or causing injury

2: Applied to people: drunk, after having consumed an excessive amount of alcohol

3: Ready to strike, with or without provocation, or just for the fun of it

4: Extremely rich and, therefore, likely to act irresponsibly thanks to the power money confers

Contextual note��

Brazil hasn’t yet capitulated to ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s plan to turn the nation into the dog-shoot-dog republic. On May 10, a supreme court judge backed an opposition party’s complaint that the order is unconstitutional. Bolsonaro has five days to justify its compliance with the constitution. True to his nature — that of a populist despot equally obsessed by applying the law as severely as possible and flouting — the president plays it both ways. He first admitted that if the decree were shown to be unconstitutional, it would cease to exist. Then, hours later, he : “We are not retreating in front of those that since forever have said they are security experts.”

To justify liberating the sale and ownership of weapons and allowing a virtually unlimited supply of ammunition (5,000 cartridges per year), Bolsonaro refers to the Manichean ethical view familiar to adepts of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in the US. “The life of a good citizen has no price,” Bolsonaro proudly asserts. And he knows who the “good citizens” are. Their skin tends to be pale and they generally own property that must be defended. ABC News quotes Robert Muggah, the research director of the Igarape Institute. As a result of this law, he “a dramatic increase in the circulation of firearms in northern, northeastern and midwest Brazil,” regions where currently raging are many disputes “between landowners and indigenous communities.”

The fact that ��the law of vengeance may put people at risk doesn’t seem to faze Bolsonaro. So long as the propertied class is sufficiently armed, the peasant, indigenous and criminal classes can be fended off.

But the real contradiction in the president’s claim to be protecting “the life of a good citizen” lies in the extensive evidence that exists of the Bolsonaro family’s . His ability to distinguish the “good” from the “bad” may thus appear somewhat suspect.

Historical note

Like Donald Trump in the US, Bolsonaro to the religious right to win the election in October 2018. A Catholic married to an Evangelical, Bolsonaro appealed to the two dominant religious groups for support. “[H]e filled his stump speeches with religious rhetoric and made dozens of campaign videos meant to appeal to religious Christians,” writer Catherine Osborn in Foreign Policy. The principal difference between Brazil and the US appears to be that Brazilian Christians are ready to judge Bolsonaro on results — notably his promise to end corruption — and appear ready to withdraw their support if he fails. They may have retained from their Biblical readings: “By their fruits you shall know them” (). In contrast, Evangelicals and the religious right in general have shown themselves to be to President Trump’s moral and political failures. They appear to be with him till doomsday.

The key to ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s electoral success lay not just in the way the judicial system prevented the candidate who was the most popular and most likely to win — former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — from running, but by his repeated intent of engaging whatever tactics are necessary, however violent and undemocratic, to reduce the criminality that affected so many people’s lives. As Al Jazeera , Bolsonaro��is someone “who swept to power in a highly divisive October election on a law-and-order platform that included easing restrictions on guns.” He calls his executive order “another step towards freedom and individual rights in our nation”. Once again, this echoes the far-right ideology of the US that sees gun ownership as an inalienable right.

But, in yet another parallel with the US, Ilona Szabo de Carvalho, executive director of the Igarape Institute, quoted by Al Jazeera, points out that: “Nowhere in our constitution is it stated that we have a right to guns, it says we have a right to public security.”

This would actually be a correct reading of the US constitution’s second amendment, which specifically authorizes the creation of state militias to ensure “public security.” Alas, the original formulation, to differentiate the population under the authority of state governments from the federal government, referred to this authorization of the states to organize their system of policing as the “right of the people,” which has now come to mean even in the eyes of the courts, the right of individuals to equip themselves to enforce the law by violent means.

At some point this week, we will have a better idea of Brazil’s capacity to avoid such misreadings of the law.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Jair Bolsonaro Wants Brazilians to Carry Weapons appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In January every year, Davos in Switzerland hosts an assembly of the most high-powered decision-makers in the economic and political world. They converge among the purity of snowy landscapes with a twofold intent: To occupy their place on the international chessboard — as observers know, it’s all really a game — and to tune up their instruments to make the coming year’s economic symphony sound a little less cacophonic to those rare members of the public believed to have a musically-trained ear: the media. Once the instruments are tuned, everyone can go back home and play in the key they prefer.

This year, the World Economic Forum has been graced by the presence of the newly-elected president of Brazil and aspiring dictator, Jair Bolsonaro, who in Davos, as , “painted himself as a global statesman seeking ‘a world of peace, liberty and democracy.’” He “committed to changing our history,” without explaining how. Given his extreme right-wing ideology, if he were to succeed it would most likely be in the direction of fascism.

Brian Winter, a political analyst, tweeted what he heard one say after listening to ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s rhetoric: “Disaster. I wanted to like him but he said nothing. Why did he even come?”

Here is today’s 3D definition:��

Nothing:

What politicians strive to say most of the time but with the skill that makes it sound as if it just may be something

Contextual note

Emulating US President Donald Trump, Bolsonaro spoke to his sophisticated international audience as if they were the average ignorant Brazilian voters that make up his base, whose knowledge of the world came mainly through television, with little sense of history and none of economics. Bolsonaro : “We represent a turning point in the eyes of the Brazilian people — a turning point in which ideological bias will no longer take place.” This was presumably on the assumption that the elite capitalists in Davos don’t consider ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s blatant identification with extreme and outdated as an ideology.

He continued with, “Our motto is ‘God above all things.’” If taken literally, this might make any thoughtful listener think that he may be recommending something resembling sharia banking, since even in the West — until only a few centuries ago — the Christian God had a very Islamic habit of castigating those who charged interest or were solely motivated by profit. The crowd at Davos learned long ago to leave God out of their balance sheets and economic planning. That may explain why the sympathizer cited by Winter concluded that Bolsonaro had said “nothing.”��

The New York Times summed it up: “Mr. Bolsonaro is in many ways the very antithesis of a ’Davos Man,’” who always knows how to sound serious and appear to be saying something of great significance and weight.

The nothingness of ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s discourse might have passed without comment if it had not been aggravated by the news that his son and presumably the president himself — who claimed to be “clean” and promised to do away with corruption and crime — had for some time entertained “with members of a Rio de Janeiro death squad called the Escritório do Crime (The Crime Bureau).”

Historical and cultural note

Politicians such as Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump, who have mastered the art of hyperreality, succeed in getting elected by persuading their public to forget the reality of history. They do so by encouraging them to imagine an unrealizable future built on distorted memories of a more tranquil past when things were ordered, relationships were stable because people knew their place, traditions were respected and, most importantly, ideas kept in line, which usually translates as slogans that replace articulated thought.

Strongarm populist political hyperreality typically plays on the idea of going beyond the inefficiency of democracy and getting things done without asking too many questions — as well as refusing to respond to those thinking people ask. If people are dissatisfied with the real world, build along simpler lines a less real but more sharply delineated world for them to believe in.

The hyperreal populists reduce to a simple contest of the strong versus the weak the subtle and often confusing power negotiation games that democracy inevitably generates as a response to the diversity of interests in the community. A democratic regime must respond to the complexity of reality with policies that hew as closely as possible to ethical principles — rules and laws — while balancing a plurality of points of view.

The dictators of democracies denounce such subtlety as “ideology” and a recipe for inefficiency. They fixate on both the visible and the invisible: One day it may be a physical wall and the next, the will of a god — or maybe the — with the understanding that their rise to power has given them a special access to the deity. The wall and the will: two absolute barriers to dialogue and exchange. In both cases, the result is the elimination of meaning or, in other words, the achievement of nothing.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, , in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news.]��

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Jair Bolsonaro Had “Nothing” to Say at Davos appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The eyes of the world are on Brazil. For a long list of reasons, an autocratic candidate is the frontrunner in the presidential election on October 28. Considered the “” politician in the democratic world, Jair Bolsonaro is at the top of all election polls, by WhatsApp chains, fake news and defamation.

On October 18, an by the renowned newspaper Folha de São Paulo exposed a scheme involving illegal funding for a virtual smear campaign against ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s election rival, Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party’s (PT). The scheme is based on spearheaded by the infamous Cambridge Analytica and was ��by Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who met ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s son in��.

���DZ����DzԲ�����’s as a congressman over the past 27 years does not affect the dedication of his supporters. Condemned for , his followers seem to dismiss his serious crimes as easily as they ignore his life-long . For decades, Bolsonaro has been vocal in his for the last Brazilian military dictatorship and . For him, the solution to poverty and crime is to get rid of (shanty towns) using automatic weapons, make because they “get pregnant” and fill up to the brim.

Brazil: A long romance with dictatorships

Democracy in Brazil is young and frail. The country became independent of Portugal in 1822, but was ruled by Peter I, the son of the king of Portugal, John VI. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to , and one of the few that did not implement reparative measures afterwards. Freed slaves had no other option than to continue their unpaid work as land reform was never on the cards.

Peter II, emperor of Brazil, was removed by a military coup orchestrated by Marshall Deodoro da Fonseca in 1889. The movement incited troops against the aristocratic enemy and was inflamed by an economic crisis after the promulgation of the “golden law” in 1888, which ended all forms of slavery in Brazil. The five-year military dictatorship was so bloody that it is known today as “.”

This was followed by military legislative rule for another four years. Both periods ended in economical and social bankruptcy, leading to revolts all over the country. This continued for under right-wing governments that were not concerned with growing poverty in the countryside. Rural areas still lived as they lived in imperial times, with most poor people working in conditions analogous to slavery.

President Washington Luís, a civilian, was removed by a military coup known as the . The stock market crash in 1929 escalated the internal economic crisis, and generals from three corners of the country took power in a coordinated move. The military junta elected Getúlio Vargas, a civilian co-conspirator. Vargas was more than his military counterparts, and he implemented workers’ policies and benefits that did not exist in Brazil until then. His constitution of 1937 was authoritarian and industrialist, and it mainly benefited large coastal urban centers rather than inland areas.

Inequality grew exponentially, and the impoverished flooded the cities. Favelas established during the old republic multiplied throughout Brazil, especially in Rio de Janeiro, the country’s capital at the time. Vargas was in charge for 15 years and ended his period with such approval that he was re-elected as president in 1951, this time by popular vote. He is still regarded as a in Brazil, despite the autocratic measures he took in his first term.

Brazil’s most recent dictatorship (1964-1985) was not the result of an economic crisis, although the economy was not doing well. Instead, it was concocted against a fabricated enemy: communists who wanted to transform Brazil into a . This was imported by American diplomatic personnel, fomented by Irish priests and the media, and funded by the US government through the as a means of blocking the nationalization of oil, which was announced by the 1961 presidential election winner, the left-wing .

The 1964 coup d’état was a bloody one: censorship of communication channels, arbitrary arrests, over 500 deaths in military custody, of several ethnicities killed, and countless other deaths among guerrillas, criminals and poorer people. It is claimed that mayors used military helicopters to dump “undesirables” in high seas to “clean the city,” as was happening in under Augusto Pinochet. In Brazil, there was arson in , police and . Most of the country’s intelligentsia went into , and artists were . Media organizations were severely . One of the most powerful Brazilian networks, Rede Globo, only recently for collaborating with and promoting the regime.

Oppression by decree

The tools that the last dictatorship used were called “institutional acts” or . These were constitutional amendments that could go over the rather progressive 1946 constitution without approval by congress or the senate. Some of the most decisive decisions to remove civil rights came from these acts, including the formalization of political repression, published in of 1968. The military dictatorship enforced 17 AIs between 1964 and 1969, which gave total powers to the state over the people’s public, political, religious and individual rights. In June 1964, the National Information Service (SNI) was created, investigative and repression forces all over the country and abroad. Although instituted as a crime repression organization, its tools were used mainly to persecute and kill dissidents and .

After becoming a democracy once again in 1985, a new, more constitution was promulgated in 1988, but all legal that gave ultimate power to the president of were preserved. In fact, there are some ways to the constitution, with or without the input of the legislative or the people. These loopholes were very seldom exploited and, when they were, the aim was to improve democratic decisions.

Amidst the that Brazil has faced since 2013 — when a students’ movement against saw hundreds of thousands protesting — extreme right-wing movements called out the communist threat of the Workers’ Party and hijacked the popular movement to suit . Ultraconservative writers and journalists joined the call, and liberal bloggers multiplied on social media.

In congress, a typifying criminal organizations was sanctioned, with the presidential veto on a dubious article that could interpret international charities as terrorist organizations. The Workers’ Party had given full investigative powers to the federal and civil police forces against , and scandals started to emerge. Mainstream media, mostly , suppressed scandals involving all other parties except PT. President Dilma Rousseff was re-elected in 2014 by a , but Brazilians also elected what was as “the most conservative legislative since 1964.” In 2016, rich entrepreneurs of São Paulo organized enormous for the impeachment of Rousseff, which were widely supported by who were concerned about wealth distribution and labor rights pushed forward by PT’s agenda.

In March 2016, the president signed an as part of an international agreement to host the Rio Olympics. Rousseff two articles that could compromise the activities of civil society movements, such as human rights groups and grassroots organizations. To ensure the law was not used to curtail political rights, the clearly typifies terrorism as acts perpetrated by “reasons of xenophobia, discrimination or prejudice of race, color, ethnicity and religion.”

In August that year, Rousseff was on flimsy charges, and negotiations for her unfair dismissal were and shown openly in the media. All members of the Workers’ Party were removed from of government. , the vice-president who took the position because of PT’s alliance with his party, the Brazilian Democratic Movement, immediately implemented a new economic plan called “A Bridge for the Future,” which was a compilation of measures. Unemployment rates went from in January 2015 to in September 2018. The Brazilian public, daily by scandals involving PT, still the crisis on the party’s policies, more than two years after its officials were removed from power.

On October 15, 2018, incumbent President Michel Temer signed , creating the Intelligence Taskforce (FTI) “to confront organized crime in Brazil, with the competences of investigating and sharing data, and producing intelligence reports, aiming at subsidizing the creation of public policies and governmental action to fight against criminal organizations affronting the Brazilian state and its institutions.” The taskforce, directly controlled by presidential orders, counts on the (ABIN), the democratized remnants of the SNI and other intelligence offices, the remnants of the SNI and financial investigation offices from the civil government. The FTI will act according to an action plan yet to be defined, created without legislative input but needing its approval. It could criminalize a political party, for example, that has been accused of being a criminal organization. This term has been applied by conservative media to most left-leaning parties in Brazil, especially the .

If this was not enough to make democrats uncomfortable, two bills were given urgency for voting at the legislative houses — both suggested by ultraconservative politicians. Law removes the second article of the anti-terrorism law and typifies terrorism as acts motivated by “ideological, political, social and criminal” reasons, which effectively gives decree 9,527 the of AI-5. Law , proposed by a senator, considers all acts of political protest and active dissidence to be terrorism, and it prescribes long reclusion sentences. The law defines sheltering, helping, talking and giving money to a terrorist as crimes that are as serious as terrorism itself.

Taken together, the decree and these two laws could end all forms of activism, public manifestations, social organizations and opposing political parties in Brazil.

One week the most crucial election in Brazil’s modern history, Jair Bolsonaro appeared in a video address to his supporters to affirm that he will purge members of the Workers’ Party and imprison whoever stays in the country. His supporters used the of the 1964 dictatorship: “Brazil: love it or leave it.”

and have removed thousands of accounts that pushed fake news for Bolsonaro. His controversial speech alerted and may have many of his moderate voters. show a strong swing toward Fernando Haddad, with the progressive candidate winning in the northeast and north regions. Southern Brazil, however, still shows an advantage for Bolsonaro.

With a legislative and more members of the Bancada BBB (Bullets, Beef and Bible) group in congress and the senate, an eventual Bolsonaro victory will give him autocratic powers. By now, Brazilians can only hope for people to have some sense on October 28 as they head to the polls. Voters hold all the power to avoid a worst-case scenario for Brazil.

*[Updated: October 30, 2018.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Is Brazil Headed for a Dictatorship? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Less than a month ago, the candidate leading in the polls in the Brazilian presidential election was a jailed ex-politician who technically couldn’t even run for office.

It gets even weirder. Brazilian voters have put corruption near the top of the list of their concerns this political season. Yet Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the country’s most popular politician, has been jailed on corruption charges. And because of a law that Lula himself��, politicians charged with crimes upheld by an appeals court can’t run again for eight years.

Weirder still, in a country where����of the population has any confidence at all in Donald Trump’s global leadership, the voters have rallied around a candidate who’s often tagged the Trump of the Tropics.

When Brazilians went to the polls on October 7, nearly half of them voted for this pro-Trump and anti-Lula candidate. Jair Bolsonaro is a free-market ideologue who frequently goes on homophobic, misogynist and racist��. He loves guns, torture and autocracy. Brazilians who fear a return to military rule refer to Bolsonaro as “The Thing.”

Bolsonaro nearly won the race in the first round, coming only a few percentage points from capturing the simple majority required to declare outright victory. It’s remotely possible that the opposition could pull together for the second round, scheduled for October 28, just as the French did to deprive Marine Le Pen of the presidency in 2017.

But I doubt it. Brazil is on the verge of being Trumped. And given the perilous state of the country’s economy — unemployment over 12%, extreme poverty��, widening gap between rich and poor — Bolsonaro will wreak even greater devastation in Brazil than his gringo inspiration has already done in the United States.

The Thing’s political success in Brazil demonstrates that the radical right is far from peaking in its global influence.

Elsewhere in the world, the right has certainly mobilized resentment against��. But that doesn’t explain the situation in Brazil. After all, ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s chief economic advisor, banker Paulo Guedes, adheres to the same University of Chicago philosophy that gave the world Augusto Pinochet’s brave new Chile in the 1970s. Thanks to Guedes, Bolsonaro has reversed his previously anti-liberal positions on economics. Now he����widespread privatization and cuts in government spending, while also����fewer taxes.

I’m not sure that ���DZ����DzԲ�����’s supporters, aside from the very wealthy ones, are paying much attention to his economic program. What Brazilians are disgusted with is the status quo, which is corrupt and economically unsustainable. They don’t just want reform. They want a Reformation.

Against the Globalists

In the 16th century, the Catholic Church aspired to control the world. Its influence spread well beyond Europe to the New World and, thanks to Jesuit missionaries, to Asia as well. Orthodox Christianity was well ensconced in Russia, and Islam controlled the Middle East and North Africa. But Rome was powerful, wealthy and corrupt enough to compete with these rivals. The pope commanded no armies, but he still claimed the allegiance of millions of people, including any number of kings and queens.

And then along came Martin Luther.

As a young monk and then a theologian, Luther absorbed the teachings of the Vatican. But he grew to despise what he saw as the corruptions of Catholicism, chiefly the sale of indulgences as a method of buying one’s way into heaven. His attacks on the Catholic order attracted a flock of like-minded protesters and reformers. And thus was born Protestant theology and the Reformation.

Luther challenged the globalists of his era, a political order based on a bogus and highly polarizing economic system (the sale of indulgences). He assailed the bureaucracy of this order, asserting instead that individuals could have a personal relationship with God without the mediation of the priests. He preferred the language of the people, rather than Latin, and translated the Bible into German.

Even before nationalism became a coherent ideology, Luther was asserting national prerogatives against the demands of the global (Catholic) order. He wasn’t a big fan of minorities either, considering the anti-Semitism of his treatise, “On the Jews and Their Lies.”

Luther also effectively deployed the technology of the era. The printing press, invented in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg around 1439, had become a tool of mass production by the early 16th century. Thanks to this new technology, Luther’s tracts and his German-language Bible spread rapidly around Europe, undermining the Holy See’s authority.

Protestantism has proved to be an enduring phenomenon. As a schism, it has itself broken into dozens of denominations. But Catholicism, too, has endured. It has instituted some reforms, like Vatican II, and has become even more globalized since Luther’s time.

The Populist Reformation follows the same pattern as Luther’s earlier revolution. It targets a global elite. It criticizes a corrupt economic order. It speaks in a national language that the average person can understand. It uses the latest technologies — social media — to spread its message. It is full of fire and fury. And with Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential elections, it has spread to the very nerve center of the global order.

If it continues to follow the earlier example, this Populist Reformation will establish a powerful rival “church” that survives past the next election cycle. It may force some changes in the global order, but that order will survive as well. Protestants and Catholics generated one war after another in Europe. The current era looks to be equally contentious.

Modern-Day Protestants

The modern-day Luthers are everywhere, railing against the globalists and tweeting their 95 theses around the world.

Eastern Europe is the����of this Reformation. Poland’s Law and Justice Party and Hungary’s Fidesz are in firm control of their countries. In the Czech Republic, Prime Minister Andrej Babis, a corrupt media mogul, is trying to Berlusconi his country into submission, with the help of former leftist and current Islamophobe President Milos Zeman. In Bulgaria, the far right-wing United Patriots coalition named six ministerial positions as a reward for helping Prime Minister Boyko Borisov form a government. In Bosnia, the ultra-nationalist Miroslav Dodik was just elected as the Serbian member of the country’s unwieldy three-person presidency.

Elsewhere in Europe, the right wing is also on the rise — in control in Austria, sharing power in Italy and racking up significant parliamentary numbers in Germany and Sweden. These insurgents are gearing up for the 2019 European Parliament elections in the hopes of securing a large enough minority to block legislation. “We are not fighting against Europe, but against the EU, which has become a totalitarian system,” the National Front’s Marine Le Pen��. In France, the National Front polls just a����behind President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling party.

On the borders of Europe, Turkey has been ruled for 15 years by a right-wing autocrat with an Islamist cast: Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has been in charge in Russia for nearly two decades. This oligarch masquerading as a president aspires to create a vast conservative network — corrupt, anti-liberal, nationalist, and anti-immigrant — with Moscow at its center.

In Asia, right-wing nationalist Shinzo Abe is����Japan’s longest serving prime minister. After winning his party’s presidency last month, Abe is expected to go after his long-sought prize: dismantling the country’s “peace constitution.”

Southeast Asia is full of right-wing militarists: in Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar. Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines has a predilection for extrajudicial murder and other authoritarian policies that place him firmly among right-wing populists. The surprise presidential victory of 92-year-old Mahathir Mohamad in Malaysia in May suggests that this former authoritarian leader has figured out how to����along populist lines. And, of course, Narendra Modi has been busy imposing his Hindu nationalism-inflected right-wing approach in India.

In Latin America, Bolsonaro is not alone. In Colombia, Ivan Duque won the presidential election in June. Like Bolsonaro, Duque����a neoliberal economic program of tax cuts and a pro-military approach to security. Daniel Ortega, though he started out as a leftist, has moved further and further toward right-wing clerical militarism in Nicaragua.

The wave of right-wing populism hasn’t completely covered the world. Mexico took a long-heralded turn to the left with the election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. South Korean progressive Moon Jae-in is charting a new course for his country after 10 years of conservative rule. Jacinda Ardern is doing great things in New Zealand, as is Katrín Jakobsdóttir in Iceland. More traditional conservative parties, like the Christian Democrats in Germany, are holding the line against the far right.

But globally speaking, that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the influence of the right-wing populists.

The Roots of Right-Wing Radicalism

Some of the countries that have shifted hard to the right have done pretty well economically in recent years, like Poland and the Czech Republic. But the populist parties that did well at the polls still managed to mobilize the resentment of those who didn’t benefit from that economic success. The task of appealing to the disgruntled is even easier in countries that haven’t recovered fully from the financial crisis of a decade ago.

The actual economic programs of the populists are largely immaterial. They might advocate some kind of welfare state. They might prefer, as in Brazil, the same kind of neoliberal nostrums that pass for orthodoxy among international financial institutions.

In general, however, the populists are interested in state capture: using the mechanisms of state power to enrich themselves and their circle of supporters. It’s crony capitalism raised to the nth degree.

Politically, the new right-wing populists are taking advantage of a widespread disgust for political elites. This disgust has been focused in particular on the corruption scandals that have engulfed so many countries. Because they’re focused on corruption, voters are willing to embrace candidates who are also members of the political elite and personally corrupt to boot — as long as these firebrands promise to “drain the swamp.”

But it’s perhaps hot-button cultural issues that provide the most direct method by which the right-wing populists can distinguish themselves from the competition.

Obviously this cultural populism takes different forms around the world. Duterte challenges the Catholic Church in the Philippines, while Ortega embraces it in Nicaragua. But a common denominator is nationalism. It’s not just an outward-facing nationalism against globalists and immigrations. These right-wing populists deliberately stoke the anger of majority populations who somehow feel left behind by a world of greater equality and diversity.

Martin Luther King Jr. once envisioned a Poor People’s Campaign that brought together a rainbow coalition of the dispossessed. Right-wing populists have discovered an equally powerful coalition: the Privileged People’s Campaign that brings together rich and poor on the basis of the color of their skin, not the content of their character. King emphasized the importance of dignity. The insurgent populists make a similar appeal but to the dignity of the dominant race, class, or gender.

The left is compromised on all three grounds. It remains committed to multiculturalism. Once in office, it has often proved just as corrupt (or, at least, status-quo-oriented) as any other political bloc. And left parties have pushed forward economic globalization as vigorously as the right, if not more so — the Democrats under Bill Clinton, Labour under Tony Blair, the French Socialists under François Mitterand, former communist parties in Eastern Europe and so on. No surprise, then, that “none of the above” has become so popular.

What’s remarkable about many of the new right-wing populists is how long they’ve managed to hold onto power through the ballot box. Putin, Erdogan, Ortega: They’ve all been in charge for more than a decade apiece. Viktor Orban has been the head of Hungary since 2010, Abe the head of Japan since 2012. Zeman has been the Czech president since 2013.

This Populist Reformation is no recent or temporary blip. Let that be a warning to the US electorate. Even if Donald Trump manages to lose his reelection bid, the populist fury that produced his improbable 2016 victory is not going away any time soon.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Why Is the Radical Right Still Winning? appeared first on 51�Թ�.