Abstract
This introductory chapter presents an overview of the main political and social events in Brazil starting with the June 2013 uprisings and leading up to the victory of Jair Bolsonaro in the presidential election of 2018. It frames the Brazilian case within the global cycle of protests of the 2011–2013 period and the subsequent rise of far-right movements as responses to the crisis of the traditional party systems based on the neoliberal consensus of the 1990s and 2000s
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Notes
- 1.
Marcos Nobre. Imobilismo em movimento: Da redemocratização ao governo Dilma. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2013.
- 2.
Cristovam Buarque and Fernando Henrique Cardoso. “A luta de PT e PSDB é política, não ideológica.” PSDB, 29 Nov. 2004. Available at www.psdb.org.br/acompanhe/noticias/a-luta-de-pt-e-psdb-e-politica-nao-ideologica. Accessed April 2, 2022. For a broad, well-informed and historically deep reconstruction of such a pact in Brazilian politics, see Perry Anderson. Brazil Apart: 1964–2019. London: Verso, 2019.
- 3.
According to the New Poverty Map of FGV Social, in 2021, some 30% of the population had a household per capita income lower than 497 reais (almost US$ 100) a month, that is to say, less than half of the minimum wage (1212 reais that year, some US$ 240). According to this new set of data, poverty “has never been higher in Brazil than in 2021, since the beginning of the historical series in 2012, constituting a lost decade. The year of 2021 is the maximum poverty point of these annual series for a variety of sample collections, income concepts, indicators and poverty lines tested”
(https://cps.fgv.br/en/NewPovertyMap; accessed July 1, 2022).
Globally, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the per capita household earnings hit the lowest level since 2012, and, in 2021, “the average earnings of those 1% of the population who earn more was 38.4 times higher than the average earnings of those 50% who earn less”
(https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/en/agencia-news/2184-news-agency/news/34119-in-2021-per-capita-household-earnings-hit-lowest-level-since-2012; accessed July 1, 2022).
According to FGV Social, the “share of Brazilians who did not have money to feed themselves or their families at some point in the last 12 months rose from 30% in 2019 to 36% in 2021, reaching a new record in the series started in 2006 [when it was of 20%, MN]. For the first time since then, Brazilian food insecurity has surpassed the world average. Comparing a set of the same 120 countries with Brazil, before and during the pandemic, food insecurity rose 4.48 percentage points more here (increase four times higher in Brazil), suggesting relative ineffectiveness of national actions”
(https://cps.fgv.br/en/HungerInThePandemic; accessed July 1, 2022).
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Nobre, M. (2022). Introduction. In: Limits of Democracy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16392-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16392-0_1
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