Abstract
This chapter sets out to reconstruct the period 2013–2018 in Brazilian politics from two perspectives: the longer perspective of the rise of the “new rights,” and the shorter one the institutional environment that has collapsed since 2013. To do so, it begins by properly distinguishing terms that are usually amalgamated: “June 2013,” “new rights,” “Bolsonaro,” “Bolsonarismo.” This starting point should enable the reconstruction of Bolsonaro’s presidential candidacy from 2015 onward in new terms and an innovative description of the acute crisis of pemedebismo in the period 2015–2018. The conjunction allows us to shed a new light on how Bolsonaro’s anti-system candidacy managed to be the great beneficiary of a much broader movement, circumventing mechanisms of control and power well established over two decades.
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Notes
- 1.
Carla de Paiva Bezerra, Ideologia e governabilidade: As políticas participativas nos governos do PT. São Paulo: FFLCH-USP, 2020. Thesis (Doctorate in Political Science).
- 2.
There are many interesting and very different attempts to systematize the interpretations of the June events, and it is possible to mention here: Bruno Cava, “O 18 de brumário brasileiro” (Bruno Cava and Márcio Pereira (Eds.), A terra treme: Leituras do Brasil de 2013 a 2016. São Paulo: Annablume, 2016), pp. 11–73; Pedro Luiz Lima and Mateus Hajime Fiori Sawamura, “O ovo da serpente? Fundamentos e variações da crítica ao componente conservador das ‘Jornadas de junho’ de 2013,” Leviathan, São Paulo, n. 13, pp. 91–119, 2016; Jonas Medeiros, “Junho de 2013 no Brasil e movimentos sociais em rede pelo mundo” (In: Felipe Gonçalves Silva e José Rodrigo Rodriguez (Eds.), Manual de sociologia jurídica. 2. ed. (São Paulo: Saraiva, 2017), pp. 443–62; João Vitor Silva Miranda, “O conflito de interpretações nas esquerdas a respeito das manifestações de Junho de 2013,” Revice, Belo Horizonte, v. 2, n. 2, pp. 422–35, Aug.–Dec. 2017; Mateus Hajime Fiori Sawamura, “‘Junho fascista’ e ‘Junho autonomista’: Permeabilidades entre sentidos, saldos e interpretações de Junho de 2013,” Idealogando, Recife, v. 2, n. 1, pp. 5–17, 2018; Alexandre Mendes, Vertigens de junho: Os levantes de 2013 e a insistência de uma nova percepção (Rio de Janeiro: Autografia, 2018); and Olivia Cristina Pérez, “Sistematização crítica das interpretações acadêmicas brasileiras sobre as Jornadas de Junho de 2013,” Revista Izquierdas, Santiago, n. 50, pp. 1–16, Jun. 2021.
- 3.
Regarding the “new lefts,” it is worth consulting works such as Jonas Medeiros, Adriano Januário, and Rúrion Melo (Eds.), Ocupar e resistir: Movimentos de ocupação de escolas pelo Brasil (2015–2016) (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2019); Jonas Medeiros, “Do ‘feminismo popular’ ao ‘feminismo periférico’: Mudanças estruturais em contrapúblicos da Zona Leste de São Paulo,” Revista Novos Rumos Sociológicos, v. 7, n. 11, Jan.–Jul. 2019; Jonas Medeiros and Fabíola Fanti, “Recent Changes in the Brazilian Feminist Movement: The Emergence of New Collective Actors.” In: Juan Pablo Ferrero, Ana Natalucci and Luciana Tatagiba (Eds.), Socio-Political Dynamics within the Crisis of the Left: Argentina and Brazil. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, pp. 221–42; Antonia J. M. Campos, Jonas Medeiros and Márcio Moretto, Escolas de Luta (São Paulo: Veneta, 2016); Bianca Tavolari et al., “As ocupações de escolas públicas em São Paulo (2015-2016): Disputas entre o direito à manifestação e o direito de posse.” In: Débora Ungaretti et al. (Eds.), Propriedades em transformação: Abordagens multidisciplinares sobre a propriedade no Brasil. São Paulo: Blucher, 2018, pp. 289–312; Antonio Sérgio Guimarães, Racismo e anti-racismo no Brasil, São Paulo: Editora 34; FUSP; Fundação Ford, 2005; Márcia Lima, “Raça e desigualdades no Brasil: Reflexões de uma agenda de pesquisa.” In: Mauricio Fiore e Miriam Dolhnikoff (Eds.), Mosaico de olhares: Pesquisa e futuro no cinquentenário do Cebrap. São Paulo: Sesc, 2021; Paulo César Ramos, Gramática negra contra a violência de Estado: Da discriminação racial ao genocídio negro (1978-2018). São Paulo: FFLCH-USP, 2021. Diss. (PhD in Sociology); and James N. Green et al., História do Movimento LGBT no Brasil (São Paulo: Alameda, 2018).
- 4.
A common characteristic of the new rights and new lefts was, for example, the participation of both in processes that became known as “political renewal movements.” That was common in the period 2015–20, a moment of acute crisis of pemedebismo that is also the vanishing point of this chapter. It was the period in which the political system lost control of politics, trying to regain it through different strategies from the beginning of Dilma Rousseff’s second term, of which the most prominent was the impeachment of the president herself. At the same time, forces of renewal that could not find institutional channels for the innovations they wanted to bring in, organized themselves on the margins of the political system, but always seeking ways to integrate into it without losing their original identities and impulses. As far as I know, there is a lack of in-depth evaluations of those experiences. An interesting starting point for addressing the problem can be found in Gabriel Vieira de Moura, A interação entre os Movimentos de Renovação Política e os partidos na dinâmica eleitoral de 2018. Brasília: IPOL-UnB, 2019 (Master in Political Science).
- 5.
In what follows, I will not, however, propose a reconstruction of the official 2018 election campaign as such, in its development and results. The campaign itself occupies a secondary role in my exposition (as does the 2014 campaign, by the way), since my fundamental interest lies in reconstructing the processes that led up to it. A history of the structuring of the rules and the unfolding of the 2018 campaign, along with an analysis of its outcomes, can be found in Jairo Nicolau, O Brasil dobrou à direita, op. cit.
- 6.
In the plural, in the sense used here, “new rights” is distinct, for example, from what Adriano Codato, Bruno Bolognesi, and Karolina Mattos Roeder (“A nova direita brasileira: Uma análise da dinâmica partidária e eleitoral no campo conservador,” in: Sebastião Velasco e Cruz, André Kaysel and Gustavo Codas (Eds.), Direita, volver!: O retorno da direita e o ciclo político brasileiro, São Paulo: Fundação Perseu Abramo, 2015) called a “new right” (and contrasted, in the framework proposed by the article, with an “old right”) in the sense of a new partisan and institutional right, which is not the case of the “new rights” as considered here, that is, as anti-system forces that converge, at a given moment, toward an extra-institutional opposition.
- 7.
In the words of two prosecutors of the Lava Jato task force in Curitiba, Deltan Dallagnol and Roberson Pozzobon, in a book chapter dated December 2018: “It must be recognized that without the firm, impartial and independent posture of Justices such as Teori Zavascki and Luiz Edson Fachin, there would be no Lava Jato” (“Ações e reações no esforço contra a corrupção no Brasil.” In: Maria Cristina Pinotti (Ed.). Corrupção: Lava Jato e Mãos Limpas. São Paulo: Portfolio-Penguin, 2019, p. 164). That, a little over 3 years after such statement, in March 2022, Dallagnol has tweeted that the “Supreme Court has turned into a madhouse” because it has changed its position regarding the legality of the operation only reinforces the pendulum that characterized this relationship in the period.
- 8.
As can be reconstructed by reading volumes such as Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2017); Martin Moore, Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age (London: Oneworld Publications, 2018); or Anne Nelson, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).
- 9.
“Monetary policy transmission mechanisms” is, of course, a precarious metaphor for global negotiations in which Brazil is, at best, a spectator. Still, as far as I know, we have no reconstruction for the Brazilian case remotely similar to the one carried out by Adam Tooze in his extraordinary book Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018).
- 10.
André Singer, O lulismo em crise, op. cit., p. 119.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 120.
- 12.
As, for example, the use of the Ibope poll of June 20, 2013, in which “the desire for change in the political environment came first, having been mentioned by 65% of those present” (ibid., p. 125).
- 13.
Ibid., p. 119.
- 14.
A Datafolha poll from December 19, 2015, gave Bolsonaro between 5% and 6% of voting intention for president. That level remained more or less unchanged in the polls until April 27, 2017, when the same institute showed that Bolsonaro’s voting intention had leapt, reaching between 11% and 16% at that point, depending on the scenario. On November 30 of the same year 2017, a new Datafolha poll showed Bolsonaro between 17% and 22% of voting intention. That plateau was maintained until the official beginning of the electoral campaign, in August 2018, when Datafolha registered between 19% and 22% of voting intention for Bolsonaro. What needs to be explained, therefore, is not 2015, not even 2016, but 2017, when the support base that would carry Bolsonaro until the official start of the 2018 election campaign was consolidated. That is what I will try to do in this chapter.
- 15.
As shown by Arthur Trindade M. Costa, when considering this base as a whole, not counting family and friendship circles, this amounts to 3.7% of the electorate, according to data from the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). “As eleições e o sindicalismo policial,” Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública 2020, Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, Brasília, n. 14, 2020, p. 206. I will return to this point below.
- 16.
On this, see Ricardo Mariano and Dirceu André Gerardi, “Apoio evangélico a Bolsonaro: Antipetismo e sacralização da direita” (in particular pp. 334 ff.) and Ronaldo de Almeida, “Players evangélicos na crise brasileira (2013–2018)” (in particular pp. 227 ff.), both in: José Luis Pérez Guadalupe e Brenda Carranza (Eds.), Novo ativismo político no Brasil: Os evangélicos do século XXI. Rio de Janeiro: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2020. It is of no lesser importance in this context that Bolsonaro married, in 2007, Michelle de Paula Firmo Reinaldo, an active member of the Attitude Baptist Church, as pointed out in the article by Mariano and Gerardi (p. 345). For a continuous and systematic monitoring of the presence and electoral relevance of evangelical denominations since the 2014 elections in Brazil, see the work done by the Instituto de Estudos da Religião (ISER), as for example in: Christina Vital da Cunha and Ana Carolina Evangelista, “Electoral Strategies in 2018,” SUR, n. 29, 2019; and Christina Vital da Cunha, Paulo Victor Leite Lopes and Janayna Lui, Religião e política: Medos sociais, extremismo religioso e as eleições 2014 (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Heinrich Böll; Instituto de Estudos da Religião, 2017).
- 17.
Besides the evidence already presented, see also Camila Rocha, Esther Solano and Jonas Medeiros, The Bolsonaro Paradox: The Public Sphere and Right-Wing Counterpublicity in Contemporary Brazil (Berlin: Springer, 2021), especially Chapter 4. I will return to these arguments below.
- 18.
Singer writes, for example, that Dilma Rousseff “reacted by gathering all 27 governors and 26 mayors of capital cities on the afternoon of 24 [June 2013]. As if it were possible to find a formula that would satisfy all tastes, she prepared a nauseating menu, foreshadowing the erratic phase ahead” (O lulismo em crise, op. cit., p. 125). At the same time, he writes, on the next page, that “June anticipated the debate of the 2014 presidential election and would be the prologue of the impeachment crisis” (ibid., p. 126). For the author, the whole interpretation of June is focused on the political system and only gains its meaning in view of the movements of and within official politics. That is, a type of interpretation that covers up the anti-system impulse that characterizes June, as if all its meaning were only understandable in view of the electoral and partisan dispute. That, in turn, corresponds exactly to the preferential option for pemedebismo made throughout the PT governments from 2003 to 2016.
- 19.
André Singer, Os sentidos do lulismo, op. cit.
- 20.
Ibid., “Poking jaguars with a short stick: o ensaio desenvolvimentista no primeiro mandato de Dilma Rousseff (2011–2014),” Novos Estudos Cebrap, São Paulo, no. 102, pp. 42–71, July 2015. Resumed in his O lulismo em crise, op. cit., under the version “Poking jaguars with short bases.”
- 21.
I developed this critique of Singer in the aforementioned “Anexo” to Imobilismo em movimento, op. cit.
- 22.
It is so widespread and universally taken as an indisputable premise that the thesis of the “squeezed middle class” (or the “squeezed middle,” alternatively) is explanatory not only of the PT’s electoral failures between 2016 and 2020, but also of the very parliamentary coup that overthrew Dilma Rousseff in 2016, that it is virtually impossible to list all the studies that make use of it.
- 23.
Contrary to the hypothesis that there has been an effective reduction in inequality, see, for example, Pedro H. G. Ferreira de Souza, Uma história da desigualdade: A concentração de renda entre os ricos no Brasil, 1926–2013 (São Paulo: Hucitec; Anpocs, 2018). In favorable direction to the thesis of effective reduction of inequality between 2002 and 2015 – but with a different methodology, since it is referenced by the Gini index – see Ricardo Paes de Barros et al., “Sobre o declínio no grau de desigualdade ao longo do novo milênio” (São Paulo: Insper, 2021). Available at www.insper.edu.br/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/semin%C3%A1rio-Sobre-o-decl%C3%ADnio-no-grau-de-desigualdade-ao-longo-do-novo-mil%C3%AAnio.pdf. Accessed March 28, 2022.
- 24.
Regarding “antipetismo,” Jairo Nicolau came to the conclusion that it was not the main reason for Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018: “It seems to have been at most one of the reasons for the more highly educated voters to have voted for the PSL” (O Brasil dobrou à direita, op. cit., p. 86) With respect to “fake news,” the author found no conclusive evidence, although the very few existing studies and experiments suggest that they have not played a decisive role (p. 92). Only regarding the role of social media more broadly does an apparently positive correlation between the use of social media and voting for Bolsonaro in 2018 emerge, albeit the available data are not conclusive in regard to the question “Were social media fundamental to Bolsonaro’s victory?” (p. 97). Besides “antipetismo” and fake news, there are also those who add the stabbing suffered by Bolsonaro in the first round as decisive. It certainly was, but this effect can explain the result of the first round, not of the second.
- 25.
Regarding the reconstruction of the “new rights,” I follow the arguments and reconstructions present in: Camila Rocha, Menos Marx, mais Mises: o liberalismo e a nova direita no Brasil (São Paulo: Todavia, 2021); Camila Rocha, Esther Solano and Jonas Medeiros, The Bolsonaro Paradox, op. cit.; Camila Rocha and Jonas Medeiros, “Jair Bolsonaro and the Dominant Counterpublicity,” Brazilian Political Science Review, Rio de Janeiro, v. 15, n. 3, e0004, 2021.
- 26.
One example among many: “The ultraliberals, as well as the other frequenters of [far right ideologue and, until his death in January 2022, guru of Bolsonaro’s government] Olavo de Carvalho’s communities, did not find representation in the traditional public sphere, where the defense of the expansion of the free market logic was largely carried out by neoliberals aligned to a greater or lesser extent to the PSDB. Moreover, between 2005 and 2006, when the ultraliberal communities were created on Orkut, Brazilian ultraliberals did not consider themselves represented even in the circuits in which neoliberalism circulated” (Camila Rocha, Menos Marx, mais Mises, op. cit., p. 101).
- 27.
Regarding the notion of “counter-publics” as used here, I refer once again to the “Introduction” of Camila Rocha, Esther Solano and Jonas Medeiros, The Bolsonaro Paradox, op. cit.
- 28.
Paolo Gerbaudo, The Digital Party, op. cit.
- 29.
Camila Rocha, Menos Marx, mais Mises, op. cit., p. 93.
- 30.
For a reconstruction of this process, see once more: Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies, op. cit.; and Martin Moore, Democracy Hacked, op. cit.
- 31.
Available at cetic.br/en/tics/domiciles/2005/individuos/. Accessed April 19, 2022.
- 32.
Camila Rocha, Menos Marx, mais Mises, op. cit., p. 141.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 91.
- 34.
Attempts to organize the “new rights” in public demonstrations only resumed 7 years later, in 2014, with a call from the “Vem Pra Rua” (Come to the street) movement. For a chronology of these demonstrations from 2007 to 2015, see Luciana Tatagiba, Thiago Trindade and Ana Claudia Chaves Teixeira, “Protestos à direita no Brasil (2007-2015)” (In: Direita, volver!, op. cit.), pp. 197–212. The text includes in its chronology of events demonstrations in “June and July 2013” but, unlike all other entries, without naming an organization responsible for calling them or indicating a precise date, which seems to me to be a sufficient criterion for the legitimate exclusion of these two generic references from the chronology (p. 199).
- 35.
The Bolsonaro Paradox, op. cit., p. 6.
- 36.
In the words of Camila Rocha: “A characteristic of the new right is precisely its discomfort with, if not explicit repudiation of, the military dictatorship. Bolsonaro’s tributes to [the well known operative of the military dictatorship’s brutalities, colonel] Brilhante Ustra gave most of the people I interviewed the shivers in a way similar to what happened with people from the left.” Camila Rocha, Menos Marx, mais Mises, op. cit., p. 177.
- 37.
See, for example, Emilio Peluso Neder Meyer, Constitutional Erosion in Brazil: Progresses and Failures of a Constitutional Project (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). In the case of Lava Jato, one can follow the argument that culminates on p. 109 to understand the process. It should be noted, however, that Meyer’s book goes far beyond the specific case of Lava Jato, reaching processes of erosion of the 1988 Constitution since the 1990s. It constitutes, in my opinion, the most complete synthesis of the processes of erosion of democracy according to the constitutionalism perspective we have so far.
- 38.
“The most positive aspect was the high level of public opinion support for anti-corruption efforts. In 2015 and 2016, millions of Brazilians protested in the streets against corruption. In March 2016, more than three million Brazilians, in the largest mass demonstration since the re-democratization, occupied the streets to support Lava Jato and protest against widespread corruption” (“Sobre a operação Lava Jato.” In: Maria Cristina Pinotti (Org.), Corrupção: Lava Jato e Mãos Limpas, op. cit.).
- 39.
This is one of the great lessons of Arlie R. Hochschild’s extraordinary book, Strangers in their Own Land, op. cit. Hochschild’s book draws on a very large 2014 Pew poll, according to which the most politically engaged people saw the people of the “other party” not simply as misguided, but as so misguided that they threatened the well-being of the nation (p. 6). Another Pew poll from the same year showed that no fewer than 45 million people supported the Tea Party in the United States. From those polls, Hochschild concludes that the gap between political positions “has widened because the right has moved to the right, not because the left has moved to the left” (p. 7). Hochschild spent 5 years studying a far-right, Tea Party-linked community to try to understand the phenomenon. I will return to the Tea Party in the next section, in connection with Bolsonarismo’s digital party.
- 40.
Hence also, the urgency and centrality of research on processes of debate and dialogue in alternative public spheres, especially Bolsonarismo. It is essential to understand, for example, how majority positions are established in these counter-publics. It is a typical illusion of those who only participate in the traditional public sphere, for example, to think that the Bolsonarist public sphere does not discuss, debate, or have disagreements. It is true that, to recall the results of Chap. 3, the hyper-leader in digital parties always has the last word but, at the same time, the leader only remains a leader by not imposing a determined position from the top down, by being able to listen, by knowing how to retreat from a position or, on the contrary, radicalize it according to the digital interactions concerning each concrete issue. I do not know of any comprehensive synthesis of the many investigations already carried out, but in addition to the works I have already mentioned as references of the reconstruction I offer here and which I follow closely, such as those carried out in collaboration with researchers from Cebrap’s Law and Democracy Research Group (NDD/Cebrap), I consider it of great importance to follow the ethnographic and quantitative studies carried out by laboratories and research centers such as Netlab/UFRJ, FGV/DAPP, NEU and LED/FESPSP, ISER, GPOPAI/USP, InternetLab, as well as research such as that of Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, Leticia Cesarino, and João Cezar de Castro Rocha.
- 41.
See Bruno Paes Manso, A república das milícias: Dos esquadrões da morte à era Bolsonaro (São Paulo: Todavia, 2020), especially pp. 272 ff. A focused exposition of the transition from dictatorship to democracy with regard to the field of public security can be found in Renato Sérgio de Lima and Arthur Trindade M. Costa, “A redemocratização e o campo da segurança pública brasileiro” (In: Sergio Adorno and Renato Sérgio de Lima (Eds.), Violência, polícia, justiça e punição: Desafios à segurança cidadã. São Paulo: Alameda, 2019), pp. 303–28.
- 42.
Renato Sérgio de Lima, “Eleições de policiais no Brasil e a força do ‘partido policial.’” In: Marco Aurélio Ruediger and Renato Sérgio de Lima (Eds.), Segurança pública após 1988: História de uma construção inacabada. Rio de Janeiro: fgv/dapp, 2021, p. 138.
- 43.
Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, “Política e fé entre os policiais militares, civis e federais do Brasil.” Available at forumseguranca.org.br/publicacoes_posts/politica-e-fe-entre-os-policiais-militares-civis-and-federais-do-brasil/. Accessed March 29, 2022.
- 44.
Add to this the following data gathered by Allan de Abreu (“A polícia toma o poder: Motins dentro das corporações, discurso justiceiro, benefícios legais e apoio de Bolsonaro fazem explodir o número de policiais civis e militares em cargos eletivos no Brasil,” piauí, 16 Dec. 2020. Available at piaui.folha.uol.com.br/policia-toma-o-poder/. Accessed March, 29, 2022): “In 2011, Brazil had 504 military or civil police officers in elective office: 1 senator, 12 federal deputies, 46 state deputies, 19 mayors and 426 city councilors. Nine years later, it has 880: two governors (Rondônia and Santa Catarina), 4 senators, 16 federal deputies, 90 state deputies, 50 mayors (including that of a capital city, Vitória) and 718 city councilors [...]. [In 2018], of the 8000 professionals linked to the security forces who launched themselves as candidates, 859, or 10.7%, were elected. A high percentage, in the assessment of Renato Sérgio de Lima, director of the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública [...].Of every ten police officers who ran for office in the 2010-2020 elections, eight were affiliated with right-wing or center-right parties, according to the Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública (Brazilian Public Security Yearbook).”
- 45.
For a succinct history of the political trajectory of the evangelical field in Brazil, see Joanildo Burity, “Itinerário histórico-político dos evangélicos no Brasil” (In: José Luis Pérez Guadalupe and Brenda Carranza, Eds., Novo ativismo político no Brasil, op. cit). The article’s final note is also of great interest for those who evaluate the evangelical issue as central to the understanding of the country’s political present and future: “We still don’t know, social scientists, as much as we seem to know about Brazilian evangelicals: their historiography is still very lacunar and largely conventional, with few forays into the social and cultural history of Brazilian Protestantism; stereotypical representations or those constructed by sectors of the evangelical field itself are assumed and reproduced in academic works and certainly by the secular media and political and cultural elites; extrapolations of doctrinal positions for the characterization of a supposed homogeneous ethos and hegemonic discourses for the characterization of a preexisting unified political project, which would only become more explicit today, discounting the instability of such project and its internal and external contestation; the bulk of academic production is contemporary, coinciding with the very evangelical-pentecostal emergence. These are indicators of our ignorance. It would not be surprising if this limited knowledge also confronted us with the relatively recent character of these developments, which are still far from having found their endpoint.”
- 46.
This explanatory hypothesis that we could call a “snowball” type of explanation, insofar as an initial electoral base leads to the next one, different from it, not only does not contradict but is even complementary to what Jairo Nicolau (O Brasil dobrou à direita, op. cit., p. 76) called the “conservative affinity hypothesis” to explain the evangelical vote for Bolsonaro in 2018, so decisive for his victory in that election.
- 47.
Fábio Lacerda, “Performances eleitorais de evangélicos no Brasil.” In: José Luis Pérez Guadalupe and Brenda Carranza, Eds. Novo ativismo político no Brasil, op. cit.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 267. Also Jairo Nicolau (O Brasil dobrou à direita, op. cit., p. 77) believes that a “factor that probably contributed to Bolsonaro’s excellent vote among evangelicals was the support he won from single leaders and the top of the hierarchy of various denominations.”
- 49.
Camila Rocha, Menos Marx, mais Mises, op. cit., p. 162.
- 50.
Ibid., pp. 163–4.
- 51.
Ibid., pp. 169–70. In May 2022, Sachsida became Minister of Mines and Energy, replacing Admiral Bento Albuquerque.
- 52.
Ibid., p. 164.
- 53.
Ibid., pp. 169–70.
- 54.
Malu Gaspar, “O fiador: A trajetória e as polêmicas do economista Paulo Guedes, o ultraliberal que se casou por conveniência com Jair Bolsonaro,” piauí, n. 144, Sep. 2018.
- 55.
Camila Rocha, Menos Marx, mais Mises, op. cit., p. 168.
- 56.
Ibid., p. 167.
- 57.
Formação política do agronegócio. São Paulo: Elefante, 2021, p. 262.
- 58.
Ibid., pp. 263–4.
- 59.
The InternetLab/Social Knowledge Network survey, The vectors of political communication in messaging apps, op. cit. Showed that as of 2018 “72% avoided talking about politics in family groups to escape fights,” “71% of respondents claim to have changed their behavior on WhatsApp in some way since the 2018 election, policing themselves more about what they talk about in WhatsApp groups,” and “for 36% of Brazilians the content received by WhatsApp was at least partially important for their voting decision in the 2020 municipal elections.”
- 60.
As demonstrated in different ways by Francisco Brito Cruz in Novo jogo, velhas regras: democracia e direito na era da nova propaganda e das fake news (São Paulo: Letramento, 2020) and Patrícia Campos Mello. A máquina do ódio: Notas de uma repórter sobre fake news e violência digital (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020).
- 61.
Rose Marie Santini et al., “A militância forjada dos bots: A campanha municipal de 2016 como laboratório eleitoral,” Lumina, Juiz de Fora, v. 15, n. 1, pp. 124–42, 2021. In the same sense, but with an anticipatory character in relation to the results of the 2018 election, see the study Marco Aurélio Ruediger (Ed.), Robôs, redes sociais e política no Brasil: estudo sobre interferências ilegítimas no debate público na web, riscos à democracia e processo eleitoral de 2018 (Rio de Janeiro: FGV, DAPP, 2017).
- 62.
Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, “Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy,” op. cit. For the Brazilian case, see my Imobilismo em movimento, op. cit.
- 63.
Julian E. Zelizer, Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party. New York: Penguin, 2020, p. 125.
- 64.
As we saw in the previous section of this chapter with the help of Camila Rocha, all the energy of the “new rights” ended up being channeled into a political project opposed to the manifest objectives of most of those movements. The synthesis of this paradoxical result was expressed by one of the intellectual exponents of this generation, Martim Vasques da Cunha, in terms of an “ideological tragedy”: “Tragédia ideológica: O bolsolavismo foi o hospedeiro perfeito para as tendências totalitárias de uma geração,” piauí, n. 167, Aug. 2020.
- 65.
On the decisive role of party fragmentation in the logic of the PMDB, see Chap. 2. See also, from an institutionalist perspective, the centrality attributed to this factor in the proposed interpretation of the current crisis by Andréa Freitas and Glauco Peres da Silva, “Das manifestações de 2013 à eleição de 2018 no Brasil: Buscando uma abordagem institucional,” op. cit.
- 66.
On some of the consequences of this reform, see Chap. 5.
- 67.
In the Senate cross-examination to which he was submitted as one of the requirements for becoming a Justice of the Supreme Court in June 2013, Luís Roberto Barroso said that the mensalão represented “a point outside the curve.” In Barroso’s reasoning, the curve represents the operation of law under normal conditions. Each judicial sentence – each “point” – finds its place near a certain basic agreement – the “curve” – that represents a kind of “ideal sentence” bringing together similar cases.
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Nobre, M. (2022). From the “New Rights” to Bolsonaro’s Election in 2018. In: Limits of Democracy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16392-0_4
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