Opinion: Brazil’s Presidential Election – the Center Cannot Hold

Opinion, by Michael Royster

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The first round in the presidential election will occur this Sunday, October 7th. All thirteen official candidates are still out on the hustings, but eleven of those thirteen know their battle has been lost — they will not make it to the second round on October 28th.

There are only two candidates with realistic hopes of joining in the winner-takes-all sweepstakes.

Unsurprisingly, these are the only two candidates with a solid “base” of enthusiasts who support them, unwaveringly and uncritically. Perhaps surprisingly, these two also have the largest percentages of voters saying “Anybody but him!”

Both have made their appeal to the political extremes of their supporting base. Each throws (figurative) red meat to his slavering sympathizers—one side calls it freshly cut, the other calls it carrion.

The center did not hold — stretching our metaphor, the center was vegan, and died of inanition, defined by Merriam Webster as “the absence or loss of social, moral, or intellectual vitality or vigor.”

The Brazilian political center has, over the past decade, been steadily biodegrading itself into a slough of corrupt office-holders, who care nothing about voters or the country, but only about themselves, their immediate families, and their cohorts.

Back in 2013, millions of Brazilian protesters rallied to the cry of “You don’t represent us!” In the five years that followed, replete with political upheavals (e.g. impeachment, Lava-Jato scandals and the military occupation of Rio de Janeiro), no one in the center ever seemed to get the memorandum.

Reforms aplenty were proposed, but did not prosper. Political reform, tax reform, social security reform: all died aborning, notwithstanding their importance to Brazil’s future. Labor law reform did happen; however, most of the country’s working population dislikes it.

Jair Bolsonaro has been sitting in Brasilia as a federal congressman for 27 years, but portrays himself as an outsider! He’s right: he was never part of any center-right coalitions because of his far-right fringe position.

Fernando Haddad, after serving as Lula’s Minister of Education for seven years, was the mayor of São Paulo from 2012 to 2016, but portrays himself as an outsider! He, too, is right: he lost his bid for re-election in 2016 and has been invisible ever since.

Both have selected outsiders as their vice-presidential running mates. Bolsonaro, enamored of military solutions to problems, chose an outspoken retired major general with no political pedigree. Haddad opted for a young state deputy who, like him, lost bids to become mayor of a large city.

Both candidates have recently called for new constitutional conventions. Both claim (correctly) that the 1988 constitution is superannuated at age thirty, after having suffered 99 surgical interventions (okay, amendments), none of which cured the underlying institutional disease.

The Curmudgeon has, in past columns, diagnosed the problem — the 1988 Constitution instituted a parliamentary system of government but disguised it as presidential.  Using fair means and foul, the Brazilian political center flourished under what Prof. Sérgio Abranches dubbed “coalition presidentialism” some 25 years ago. Sadly, the inherent birth defect has made its end ineluctable.