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Welcome to this Trending
Globally explainer
I'm sitting with
Professor Jim Green,
who knows more about Brazil
than practically anyone
else we could find.
And we're going to talk about
the Brazilian elections.
So Jim, the result's in.
Tell us about it.
Well, Jair Bolsonaro,
the far right candidate,
polled 55% of the votes--
57 million.
And Fernando Haddad representing
the left, the Workers Party
and other supporters, got 45%
of the votes-- about 47 million.
So Bolsonaro is the new
president of Brazil.
So why did the Workers
Party not do as well
as it'd done in the past,
particularly because Bolsonaro
has been quite
explicit on basically
what he wants to do
to leftists personally
and what he wants to
do with public policy.
You would think
that the people that
have benefited from Bolsa
Familia and other programs
would be motivated
to get out more.
So I think many
people who did benefit
were motivated to get out.
And they did vote.
And they voted clearly
in favor of Haddad.
He did very well
in the Northeast,
which has historically been
the most impoverished and most
disadvantaged part
of the country.
And he did extremely well there.
I think there are a lot of
factors which led people
to decide that Bolsonaro
was their savior, including
a strong discourse, a
campaign against corruption,
in which the Workers Party and
other parties were involved--
some people in those parties.
A fear that has been engendered
within the population
about violence and crime and his
simplistic solutions to them,
and a discrediting of the
traditional politicians--
although actually if one would
make that argument that they
threw all the bums out, they
actually didn't throw out
the Workers Party.
Because the Workers
Party, although lost seats
in the Senate and a few seats
in the Congress and the lower
house--
if you sum their
votes with those
of the party to
the left of them,
the Party of
Socialism and Liberty,
they actually have
about the same number
of people in the Congress.
Bolsonaro's party, which went
from one to 46 congresspeople,
represented only
10% of the Congress.
So he has a lot of work ahead to
sew together a working majority
to get his legislation passed.
So let's start there.
So there is a
presidential system.
Someone from a minor party, who
is very much a populist figure,
has now won the presidency.
But he doesn't become a kind of
congressional or parliamentary
majority.
There's no natural party
for him with enough seats
to get things through.
Is that right?
Right.
And so there are two ways in
which coalitions are built.
One is wheeling and dealing
within the Congress,
so that they can choose a
speaker of the house that
will represent in the
lower and the upper house--
a working majority,
theoretically-- and also
the way that the
president will hand out
ministries to allies
and other people
in other political parties.
And politicians are interested
in heading ministries,
because there's a lot of
plum jobs and appointments--
political appointments for
their advises, the people that
have worked with them.
So I'm not remembering
this very moment,
but there's tens of thousands
of political appointments
within the administration
that the president can affect
by choosing certain ministers,
who then will choose
the people in the lower
level of the higher
echelon of the bureaucracies.
Isn't this the very
definition of that corruption
that he was railing against?
He would have argued that
people took those positions
and used them to get
paybacks and put money
into their pockets.
In fact, the people
that he will most likely
be building his coalition
with are the very people
that have been under
investigation for corruption
in the centrist parties--
the political parties
in the center.
So we're probably going to
see several ministers, if not
more than a few ministers,
who are actually
under investigations
for corruption.
However, people in Congress
have investigative immunity.
So while they're
in Congress, they
can't be condemned for
crimes they've committed.
So there's actually a
reason why some people want
to run for office-- because
that kind of gives them
immunity from prosecution.
So there's a tremendous
irony here then.
Basically, the car wash
shakes loose corruption
in these mainstream parties.
The left party will, I
presume, stand on principle
and say we're not taking
part in this coalition.
And that creates a
set of incentives
for people, who are deeply
corrupt and publicly known
to be so, to
cooperate, so they can
get a job to protect
them from prosecution.
In addition to that, to
carry out the policies
and the programs
that they defend,
which will include several
things-- really implementing
a very open door policy
to foreign investment,
encouraging foreign
capital investment.
It will include privatization
of many state-owned industries
and government entities.
It will include opening
the Amazon to agribusiness
and deforestation.
I would assume he will withdraw
from the Paris Agreement.
I will assume he will try to
build close bilateral relations
with Trump, although
there will be
problems with tariffs and issues
about tariffs and trade there.
He will carry out his
promises to encourage
the sale of firearms to
anyone in the population
with no controls at all.
He will pass-- he will try
to pass a provision in which
police, who are involved
in any shootings,
have impunity from any
investigation about the cause
of their shooting, so that
they cannot be investigated.
And since there's already been
a strong tradition in Brazil
of many innocent people
presumed guilty for being black
and therefore shot by the
police before they can really
determine what is
really happening,
this will just
encourage the police
to feel that they can
shoot, at will, anyone
who looks allegedly suspicious.
It's a very serious
moment for Brazil.
Certainly sounds like it.
I mean, we worry here
about the overreach
of authority and police
targeting certain groups
in society.
But this just seems to be
a whole different scale.
It's going to be
much, much worse.
And in addition to
that, he's promised
to bring many military leaders
into the government as head
of ministries.
So there will be a
cabinet which will
have many generals in
them, which is something
that people really fought
against in the process
of democratization
after the military ruled
from 1964 to 1985.
So let's try and
puzzle this through.
Apart from sort of
the left not doing
well enough, except in this one
core strong hold, other reasons
behind this-- you said
earlier that the population
had been inculcated
with this fear of crime.
But is the fear of crime real?
Has it been increasing?
Is it something that
is a general concern?
So there is an increase
in violence and crime.
It's largely connected
to two factors-- the drug
trade, the cocaine
trade, and the dispute
between different
gangs to have control
of poor communities, which
are the places in which drugs
are stored and sold and
transported out of the country
or through the country.
There's also been
high unemployment
in the last two years
with a deep recession,
which has caused a lot of--
unemployment has
led a lot of people
to resort to crime
as a way to survive.
So yes, this is
a social problem.
And I think that the Workers
Party wasn't as effective
as it could have been
about offering solutions.
It really understands this is
a global problem that cannot be
solved just by setting the
army into the poor communities
or giving impunity to
officers who shoot to kill.
But they didn't
offer something that
was tangible and immediate
that people could hang onto,
I believe.
So middle class
and other people,
who have been
victims of crime, I
think saw these simple
solutions as the way
that the country could improve.
So it's a bit of a natural
experiment about to happen.
So advocates for continued
freedom over, let's say,
possession of firearms
in the United States
must be watching
this one closely,
because you have a
baseline amount of crime.
They're about to put
a huge number of guns
into circulation.
We'll see if the
crime rate goes down,
which is what many of those
people would hypothesize.
Right.
And also we have to
understand that there's
a huge arms industry in Brazil
and an international arms
industry, which is very
interested in seeing
the increase in
the sale of arms,
because it's a billion
dollar industry.
Wow.
Who even knew?
One last thing--
I was reading something
today about Costa Rica.
So Costa Rica is everyone's
favorite little social
democracy on the estimates.
But it turns out
in 2017, they had
a very, very contested and
polarizing set of elections.
And the piece that I
read highlighted the role
of evangelicals,
essentially creating
faith-based mini-parties that
blew up the party system,
stalled and needed
budget reform,
and nearly sent them
into bankruptcy.
We know that there's an
evangelical component
to the vote here, but I haven't
really heard it spoken about.
Last time, we
spoke very usefully
about the kind of the status
anxiety of middle class
and upper middle class
white Brazilians,
about maids, et cetera.
Can you say something
about how evangelicals have
changed Brazilian politics?
So until 30 years ago,
Brazil was the largest
Catholic country in the world.
I think it still is, but
the number of evangelicals
has grown to 24% to
25% of the population.
We see evangelicals--
it's a mixed bag.
It's both what we today,
in the United States,
we call them mainline
Christians, Protestants,
Baptists, Methodists,
Episcopalians,
Congregationalists, but also
the Pentecostal movement, which
is very much community-based.
It's neighborhood-based.
It's based with people who
basically can rent a hall
and open up a church.
And there are literally
hundreds of thousands
of these small churches.
Many of them offer real
spiritual responses
to people's needs and our social
networks and support networks--
and are very important
in poor neighborhoods
as a means of building
community and support.
Many of them are clearly money
making businesses, where people
take advantage of people's
desire for religiosity
and spirituality to get the
10% tithe and build business.
And the most egregious
example of this
is the Universal Church
of the Kingdom of God,
which is a multi-billion
dollar international enterprise
founded in Brazil
with megachurches.
They've even constructed
a alleged authentic copy
of the Solomon's
Temple in Sao Paulo.
And they have taken over the
second largest television
broadcasting company.
They endorsed Bolsonaro, and
throw their weight very heavily
behind him, in addition to many
other evangelical Christians.
And so these are people
very susceptible to issues
of LGBTQ rights.
And to answer their
previous question more fully
about why Bolsonaro won--
in part, this was due to a very
effective WhatsApp campaign.
WhatsApp is an
application that people
use to communicate
by telephone cheaply
or inexpensively or free.
And they were able to
send millions and millions
and millions of these fake
news about their opponent
to create tremendous
anxiety, especially
among religious people, who then
voted en masse for Bolsonaro.
So the dynamics of populism,
violence, polarization,
and fake news are not
unique to the United States?
Not at all.
In fact, Bolsonaro made
a point of attacking
the most important newspaper,
the Folha de Sao Paulo,
because they had report
reported on the fact
that it seems that a large
number of industrialists
illegally gave millions of
dollars to these companies
to pay for the generation
of the fake news.
And this is something that
will need to be investigated.
But he then launched
out against the press,
and in the same tone
of Donald Trump.
And it's no accident that
Donald Trump immediately called
him and congratulated him.
They'll try to build
a strong alliance.
Who'd have thought would
end up in this space?
I certainly didn't.
Did not see this coming.
Well, I saw it coming in the
last three years in the sense
that clearly the attempts
to end the effective ability
to impeach President
[INAUDIBLE] fake reasons
and trumped-up reasons that
are really not justifiable.
And the rise of the
conservative right,
the discrediting of
politicians as a whole,
and the international wave
of right-wing governments
in power, I think kind of made
this somewhat predictable.
So in a sense, we have
seen this one coming.
It's just that we're attuned to
the signals coming from places
like Western Europe.
But we are really dealing
with a truly global phenomena.
It's a global phenomenon.
We live in interesting times.
We do.
And let's hope that we can see
a quick return to democracy
in Brazil-- real democracy,
not the kind of democracy that
was going to be chipped
away at by Bolsonaro
and even the threat of
a military intervention.
Let's hope.
Thanks for that chat, Jim.
Thank you.
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