Unfortunately, we in Brazil have a bad habit of caring little about what happens in Latin America. In the Brazilian political field, Latin America is generally related to the danger of Chavista “Venezuelanization” or the waves of leftist governments that, from time to time, seem to be present in the region.
Under the threat of autocratic populism, embodied in President Jair Bolsonaro and his attacks on institutions, especially the Federal Supreme Court (STF), leading commentators cite the examples of Russia, Vladimir Putin, Hungary, Viktor Orbán, Turkey , by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, but not about Naiyb Bukele, in El Salvador. In May 2021, the popular Salvadoran president removed at once, with the support of Parliament, five Supreme Court justices and the Attorney General, establishing broad control over the country’s judiciary.
There are several important points of intersection between the Brazilian and Latin American contexts. I discuss only one here, in relation to the results of the first round of the last elections in Brazil, held on October 2nd. On the occasion, voters went to the polls to choose a president, 27 governors, 513 congressmen, 27 senators and hundreds of representatives in state parliaments. The presidency and 12 governorships were left to be decided in a second round, on the 30th of the same month.
The common point is the emergence and consolidation of new actors in the political arena, replacing those with a more traditional profile. It is worth remembering that the second round of the 2021 Peruvian elections was contested by two candidates from outside the establishment: Keiko Fujimori and Pedro Castillo, who ended up winning without ever having been elected to any other administrative position in Peruvian politics.
In Chile, again last year, two non-traditional politicians also contested the second round: Gabriel Boric and José Antonio Kast. Boric, from a party created in 2017, won with 55% of the vote. Candidate Yasna Campillay, supported by the traditional PDC (Partido Demócrata Cristiano), PPD (Partido por la Democracia) and PS (Partido Socialista), won only 11% of the votes in the first round. The PDC, PPD and PS constituted the famous “concertación”, which governed Chile between 1990 and 2010.
In Colombia, in 2022, the final clash was between Gustavo Petro and Rodolfo Hernández, from the peculiar Liga de Gobernantes Anticorrupción. Petro, called “the first leftist president in Colombian history”, and his vice president Francia Márquez, a black activist, feminist and environmental advocate, won with just over 50% of the vote. Nayib Bukele himself was elected president of El Salvador in 2019, breaking 30 years of domination by traditional parties in the country (Arena and FMLN).
Now, what does all this have to do with the Brazilian situation?
It is worth noting that Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in the 2018 presidential elections broke the domination of the PT (Workers’ Party) and the PSDB (Brazilian Social Democracy Party), which have been running for president in Brazil since 1994.
Despite having been a federal deputy since 1991, Bolsonaro has always been a minority politician, a defender of the military regime and torture, and who appears in the larger scene of Brazilian politics with an anti-system and reactionary platform, “to change everything that is there”. After a catastrophic performance during the Covid-19 pandemic, which caused the death of almost 700,000 Brazilians, Bolsonaro reached the second round having received more than 50 million votes on October 2nd.
It is also necessary to understand what happens in the Brazilian National Congress. Among the ten most voted federal deputies in the country, there are none from the PT or PSDB, but there are figures like Nikolas Ferreira, a far-right youtuber who will make his first term in the House having received almost 1.5 million votes in Minas Gerais. .
There is also Guilherme Boulos, another who will serve his first term, having received just over a million votes in São Paulo. Boulos is, in fact, a new exponent of the Brazilian left, coming from a small party that a few years ago received votes only in some liberal neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro (PSOL).
If we look at it from a historical point of view, we see that, between the 2010 and 2022 elections, Guilherme Boulos’ PSOL grew 366% in the National Congress, having gone from three seats to 14. Meanwhile, the PSDB fell by more than 75%, from 54 seats to just 13 elected in this year’s elections. The PL (Liberal Party), led by Jair Bolsonaro for the election, elected 99 deputies, an increase of 141% compared to 2010.
I believe that a good explanation for what happens can be found in the latest Latinobarómetro 2021 report, which interviewed citizens from 17 Latin American countries between October 26 and December 15, 2020, with more than 19,000 interviews carried out in person and another 1,200 via the internet. .
The report points to enormous discontent with traditional political elites and outdated parties that, since the democratic transition, have been unable to deal with the region’s chronic problems such as inequality, corruption and violence. In this context, the consequences for democracy are clear, with a 14 percentage point drop in support for Latin American democratic regimes between 2010 and 2020.
With this, at least three issues can be highlighted as points to be necessarily reflected from what has been exposed here. First, it is clear that it is not enough to defeat anti-democratic platforms in Brazil or in the region as a whole. It is also necessary to make institutions work for the people (and not just for the elites). Today, at least in the Brazilian context, we defend institutions that have shown themselves incapable of universally contemplating the basic rights of citizens in the country, and we do this only because we have no better choice.
Second, it is important to understand what many authors understand as changes in political culture that occur in parallel with changes in communication infrastructure. Digital media, for better or worse, have brought new forms of participation and new formats of political information, which put pressure on traditional parties in the face of new actors more apt to the dynamics of the internet.
Finally, greater Brazilian attention to Latin America becomes essential, in order to build more effective cooperation instances for common political problems and as a fruitful way of understanding oneself.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
