Bolsonaro's Brazil The World's Latest Dysfunctional Democracy - OpEd

January 14, 2019

By Chandrahas Choudhury*

Many people around the world saw in the New Year in a foreign country. Among them, it appears, were over 200 million Brazilians. Jair Bolsonaro, the former army captain and firebrand far-right politician who won the Brazilian presidential election in October, took charge on Jan. 1 and immediately made it clear that the country in which he fought his campaign was a thing of the past.

His inauguration, he declared, marked “a day in which people have rid themselves of socialism, of inverted values, of statism, and political correctness.” If this seemed a lot to have achieved in a single day, one might reflect that this was actually Bolsonaro at his most restrained. In the week leading up to the face-off with his second-round rival, Fernando Haddad of the left-wing Workers’ Party (which held power in Brazil from 2002 to 2016), Bolsonaro was seen in a video promising his followers “a cleansing never before seen in the history of Brazil.”

Have we heard this kind of language before? Sadly, we have. Three of the world’s four largest democracies — the US, India and Brazil — are now helmed by politicians (unsurprisingly, all men) who believe that, even in a democracy, there is only one truth: Theirs.

They effectively want to bend democracy in their own countries toward the goal that communist states sought for their societies at the height of global communism 70 years ago: A polity in which there is no difference between the party and the state. But, since it is a foundational truth of democracy that governments with different ideologies must come and go, this puts them at odds not just with the opposition but with the very concept of democracy itself. Although they come to office by legitimate means, having won an election, everything they do from that point on makes them dysfunctional democrats, as they transform and polarize their societies into two (or three) just as dismal factions: A giant, cultish support base and an angry or jittery resistance, with some non-aligned members or political moderates caught in the crossfire.

More:
http://www.eurasiareview.com/14012019-bolsonaros-brazil-the-worlds-latest-dysfunctional-democracy-oped/