05/07/2019 Democracy Bedevils Brazil's Bolsonaro - Bloomberg

Politics & Policy

Democracy Bedevils Brazil’s President

Bolsonaro
His rocky first six months rebut fears of a return to authoritarianism.

By Mac Margolis
1 de julho de 2019 13:00 BRT

Somewhat deflated. Photographer: Cris Faga/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has had a rough debut. Congress recently scotched his
decree to relax gun controls, limited his discretionary spending powers and claimed vetting
rights over public regulators. Over the howls of the Bible-slinging right-wingers who voted
him into office, the Supreme Court made homophobia a crime. The retired army generals he
recruited to watch his back have instead been walking back his campaign bluster against
leading trade partner China and muting talk about invading Venezuela. “They’re turning me
into the Queen of England,” Bolsonaro complained.

Thanks to Bolsonaro’s authoritarian exhortations, Brazil’s renascent democracy was

supposed to be in peril and a return to dictatorship imminent. Yet six crisis-filled months of
mercurial populism have turned that fantasy on its head. Brazil’s constitutional democracy
looks fit to survive Bolsonaro; the question is, can Bolsonaro survive democracy?

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To be sure, Bolsonaro remains unbowed. Brazil’s strong presidential system lets him set the
policy agenda, regale cronies with pork and patronage, and keep congress on its back foot by
firing off executive decrees. Indeed, only one elected president since Brazil’s return to
democracy 34 years ago issued more decrees this early in his term, and he was forced to
resign in disgrace. (Given the willfulness in Brasilia, that record may not stand.) Congress has
shown it can push back; it just overturned his proposed gun bill. But don’t call Bolsonaro a
figurehead just yet. “My pen is mightier than yours,” he told lower house Speaker Rodrigo
Maia.

Such imperiousness, naturally, has fed the public funk over the state of Brazil’s constitutional
democracy. The latest scandal over hacked phone conversations, pointing to improper
confabulation between a former graft-busting judge and the lead prosecutor in Brazil’s
Carwash corruption scandal, has amplified the conceit that elite interests have their thumbs
on the scale of justice. And now comes Netflix with a disturbing documentary that suggests
Bolsonaro’s rise was the endgame of an oligarchic cabal that took democracy to the edge.

Yet that misses the mark. More than a nostalgia for autocracy, Bolsonaro’s penchant for
decrees belies a political disability. He spent 28 years on congress’s back bench, wooing
favored constituencies by championing small-bore bills, most of which languished in
committee. He has brought the same modus operandi to Brazil’s highest office, flogging pet
causes—open carry, home schooling and abolishing speed traps—as if they were national
priorities. “His is a typical lower tier lawmaker’s agenda,” said Getulio Vargas Foundation
political Octavio Amorim Neto. “It’s what Bolsonaro knows how to do well and it spares him
from squandering political capital on unpopular measures.”

The profligate pension system?  Brazil’s regressive tax system? Foreign trade? The
anticorruption bill? Let the wonks in Brasilia—Economy Minister Paulo Guedes, Agriculture
Minister Tereza Cristina da Costa Dias and Justice Minister Sergio Moro—struggle with those
electorally toxic items before the mutinous legislature and demanding international
customers.

By eschewing politics, Bolsonaro left the traditionally reactive congress plenty of room for
maneuver. Lawmakers are stepping up and across the aisle as never before. Thanks to that
unlikely turn of events, Brazil’s crucial agenda of economic and bureaucratic reform has
decoupled from the presidential palace, and many of the initiatives now stand a fair chance of
becoming law.

Consider that Maia, one of Bolsonaro’s harshest critics, has seized the banner of pension
reform, which is expected to clear its first major committee vote this week and a floor vote
before the full legislature later this month. Maia is also reportedly spearheading a tax reform
proposal. “Congress has its own agenda now,” said Amorim.

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Another incongruous advance: on June 28, after 20 years of talks, Brazilian negotiators led
the way to a landmark deal  between the South American trade bloc Mercosur and the
European Union. It was a victory for the closet multilateralists in a government that has
decried globalism as cultural Marxism.

Optimists glimpse a new if still tentative model of governance in the works, one that political
analyst Fernando Schuler, of the Sao Paulo business school Insper, calls “co-responsibility”
between a strong president and an empowered legislature. The problem, said Schuler, is that
this model doesn’t exist. “We’re somewhere in the middle,” he said.

Bastard parliamentarianism has its limitations in a legislature with 30 parties and a political
system handicapped for a central leader. “Congress’s new protagonism fills a void, but
reforms and policymaking depend on a president rolling up his sleeves, whipping
congressional votes and getting laws passed,” said Amorim.

The danger is not one of a “country speeding toward an authoritarian past,” as the lugubrious
narrator puts it in Netflix’s “The Edge of Democracy.” In many ways the country’s civic spirit
and institutions have never been so resilient. The larger problem is compassless politics,
which corrodes consensus and encourages populist outsiders and adventurers.

Latin America’s largest democracy is safe. It’s Brazil’s politics that needs some urgent work.  

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its
owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Mac Margolis at mmargolis14@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net

Mac Margolis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He was a reporter for
Newsweek and is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”

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