Jair Bolsonaro and the culture of corruption

In the presidential election of October 2018, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro was portrayed by his supporters in the guise of various superheroes, especially the strong man who will singlehandedly save Brazil from chaos and decline, not least from the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT, which governed Brazil from 2003-2016).

Bolsonaro’s victory signalled the abandonment by Brazilians of the established political parties. Bolsonaro had recently switched to a tiny party, the Social Liberal Party (PSL), and presented himself as a political outsider and anti-establishment politician, a politician free from corruption who would restore law and order and bring the country back to the conservative values that once prevailed.

What can we expect from the new government? The new administration has got off to a bumpy start, that has raised concerns about the disorganization of the government. Bolsonaro’s family and administration already face several investigations for corruption.

Bolsonaro’s secretary general has been dismissed over allegations of fraud involving public election campaign funds. This has discredited Bolsonaro’s anticorruption crusade. Will Jair Bolsonaro be able to deliver on his promises of a new, radical kind of policy, not least in confronting Brazil’s culture of corruption? "Faça o Brasil grande outra vez" – make Brazil great again, as the supporters chanted during the election?

Corruption by numbers

So who is Jair Bolsonaro?

It caused some surprise when it became clear, one month ahead of the election, that this relatively unknown, national-conservative candidate who openly supports Brazil’s former military dictatorship and whose running mate for vice-president has announced several times that the army is ready to take over and restore order, was probably going to win.

Throughout Bolsonaro’s 27 years in Congress and throughout the elections he insulted the country’s Afro-Brazilian population, its indigenous population, LGBT people, the poor in general and also women at a time when Brazil has the dubious title of being one of the countries in the world with the highest rate of femicide, the gender-motivated killing of women.

Many have said that Bolsonaro’s election was the result of the Brazilian people’s deep disillusionment with corrupt politicians, but the election results also need to be understood in the broader context of recent developments in Brazil. This is where this long read starts, by looking back at the last few years and then ahead to try and decide what to expect.

In recent years, Brazilians have had many reasons to feel disillusioned with their politicians, not least because the judicial system has been strengthened and proved itself capable not only of investigating corruption, but also of sentencing politicians and the corporate elite for their kickback schemes, money-laundering activities and so on. This has especially been the case since the Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) scandal broke in 2014.

This far-reaching investigation has implicated politicians in all the major political parties. According to the Brazilian Federal Public Ministry, more than 200 people have been convicted by October 2018.

The new evidence presented in April 2017 alone contained 98 charges against currently active politicians, including eight ministers, 39 members of Congress and 24 senators. In the government led by President Michel Temer (2016-2018), three ministers resigned because of corruption accusations just one month into office. More such cases were to come and many were raised against President Temer himself, who spent much of his candidacy using his political powers to avoid a trial. As soon as he stepped down in December 2018, he was indicted on four charges of large-scale corruption and money-laundering.

Temer was Brazil’s most unpopular president since democracy was reinstated in 1985 and approval ratings have been published, his being a mere 5%. He tried to steer Brazil out of the economic crisis by means of very harsh austerity measures, which did not improve his low popularity rating. These measures included a twenty-year freeze on social spending and were criticized by the United Nations for being the most socially regressive austerity package in the world. Temer’s approval rating peaked at 14% – and that was at the very beginning of his two and a half years in office.

According tothe Annual Report on Latin America for 2018 produced by the OECD Development Centre, three out of every four Brazilians have little or no confidence in their national governments. This is reflected in the low approval rating for both Temer’s government and President Dilma Rousseff before she was removed from office.

On March 21, 2019, Temer was imprisoned as part of the Lava Jato investigations on charges of corruption and money laundering schemes, involving more than half a billion dollars in bribes. Bolsonaros response when asked about the imprisonment was that “justice is for everyone and each individual must answer for his own actions”.

The imprisonment was quickly overshadowed by headlines about the people in Bolsonaro’s own government who protected Temer during his presidency. This includes the Minister of Agriculture, Tereza Cristina, and Osmar Terra, the Minister of Citizenship, who in congress voted against investigations of Temer to proceed to the Supreme Court.

Years of political turmoil

It is not only corruption scandals that have left people disillusioned, despite corruption existing at all levels of the political system in Brazil. Since colonial times the political elite in Brazil has used its political power for its own gain and enjoyed a great deal of impunity. There is a saying in Brazil: “rouba, mas faz”, meaning that although a politician might be putting money into his own pocket, as long as he gets the job done voters are pragmatic about it as long as they do see some results that benefit themselves as well. This is one of the reasons why politicians are re-elected despite corruption charges and investigations against them.

A good example might be former President Lula, who, according to election polls, would have won the 2018 election had he been allowed to run, rather than being in prison on corruption charges. In the national Congress before the elections, politicians of all the major parties faced allegations of corruption, money-laundering, abuse of power and other criminal activities: 30 senators (out of 81) and 130 members of Congress (out of 513). These were the very same politicians who impeached Dilma Rousseff, claiming that this in itself would end corruption. Here it is important to remember that Rousseff was not accused of corruption in the impeachment case against her but of alleged mismanagement of the federal budget.

What motivated her impeachment was a loss of confidence in her economic policies. After her narrow win in the 2014 election, her relations with the right-wing parties in Congress became deadlocked and her ability to govern was reduced. These parties now made up the majority in Congress. Secondly, in light of the Lava Jato scandal, top politicians were worried that she would allow investigations against them that would be the end of their candidacy. One of Temer’s ministers, the planning minister Romero Jucá, was caught on tape discussing this. He said: “We have to change the government to be able to stop this bleeding”.

The centrist socialdemocratic party PSDB that had lost four consecutive elections to Lulas Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) did not accept its narrow defeat in the 2014 election. As a result it set in motion the drafting of an impeachment request and submitted it to the head of Congress, Eduardo Cunha, who had the power to start the process. And that was exactly what he did.Cunha was from Temer’s party, the MDB. That same year he was removed from office because of corruption and obstruction of justice and thereby lost his immunity. He waslater tried and convicted of corruption, money-laundering and illegally placing money in offshore accounts, and was sentenced to more than fifteen years in prison. The impeachment process paved the way for Michel Temer, Dilma’s vice-president, to become president in 2016.

Temer was ready to form a new government and helped orchestrate her government’s collapse. His controversial seizure of power without an election caused massive protests against his presidency. Temer ignored the criticism and the demands for an election. The government’s political platform was much more conservative and economically liberal than the government he had served as vice-president. With his new government, an all-white-male cabinet, Brazilian politics took a clear right-wing turn.

The 2018 election

In view of the political turmoil since 2014, many Brazilians felt that, even with a field of fourteen candidates for president, they lacked a candidate to vote for. They wanted change.

As the elections officially kicked off in mid-August 2018, none of the polls indicated that Bolsonaro would win. His popularity increased one month before the first round when he was stabbed during a campaign stop in the town of Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais on 6 September 2018.

A little over a week after the attack Lula officially pulled out of the race and was replaced by the much less well known Fernando Haddad. After this change of opponent, Bolsonaro’s victory began looking very likely.

What also stood out during this election was Bolsonaro’s use of social media to run a very effective campaign. His strategic use of “SoMe” was new in Brazil where until this election TV airtime was seen as by far the most important platform for promoting political messages. He promoted himself via his YouTube channel, used social media, especially WhatsApp, the most popular messaging platform in Brazil, to communicate his messages and appeared at rallies and electoral meetings.

In fact, he deliberately circumvented many of the mainstream media platforms, which he continuously discredits. He refused to participate in the political debates on TV, and as the election race intensified he also stopped giving interviews to the press. Many of his radical claims and his lack of concrete proposals for how to bring prosperity to Brazil and save it from chaos and decline therefore went unchallenged.

Combined with Bolsonaro and his supporters’ harsh rhetoric, not least against the PT and other opponents, or ‘enemies’ as Bolsonaro likes to call them, a hostile political climate was cultivated that left little room for discussion and criticism.

In the end it seems that many of those who voted for Bolsonaro did not vote so much for him and his controversial remarks about women, the poor, people of colour, indigenous people, LGBT people etc., but because they wanted change and did NOT want the PT back in power. Likewise, many voted for the PT not because they wanted the PT back in power, but because they did not want Bolsonaro.

A shrinking middle class and declining living standards

Interestingly, this right-wing turn in Brazil is driven by the lower middle classes that the PT’s governments helped create. They took to the streets in favour of Rousseff’s impeachment and later in support of Bolsonaro. The PT led Brazil through a decade of massive socio-economic change, where millions of Brazilians experienced real improvements in their living conditions. The middle classes became the largest social class for the first time in Brazil’s history, and inequality was seen as decreasing. Indeed, Brazil became the sixth largest economy in the world. But in 2014, it became clear that the economy was in recession, with no new growth cycle clearly in sight. Now Brazil’s economy has shrunk to be the ninth largest economy in the world, the middle classes are shrinking, and extreme poverty is again on the rise.

The PT's failure to deliver on a wide range of parameters during their fourth term in office and the revelations of its corrupt political practices while in government led many middle-class voters to turn their back on the PT. The lack of any apology during the election for wrongdoing probably did not provide any consolation either. Because the economic crisis has hit many households hard, leading to them experiencing a decline in living standards, they have welcomed the right-wing turn in Brazilian politics. This can also be coupled with changing sentiments in the population regarding the promotion of conservative values and opposition to human rights, which has pushed people who voted for the PT in the past towards Bolsonaro’s party, the PSL. The PT is still the largest party in Congress, however, with 54 members, with Bolsonaro’s party not far behind with 52 deputies.

What should we expect from the new government?

The question many people are asking is whether Bolsonaro’s government will get Brazil out of its current economic crisis. Brazil is experiencing slow growth, mounting fiscal deficits and high unemployment. To tackle this the new government has promised to reform Brazil’s protectionist economy, to continue with privatizations and to pass a pension reform. It will continue with budget cuts to public spending, including social programmes, education, infrastructure, social movements and cultural production.

In fact, many of the policies of the Temer government are being continued by Bolsonaro’s government, even though throughout the election Bolsonaro demonised not only the PT, but also Temer’s government.

Bolsonaro’s government shares the previous administration’s anti-environmental stance, viewing environmental protection as being at odds with economic development. Bolsonaro has promised to allow mining and agricultural companies to expand their activities into previously protected areas of the country, such the Amazon Forest, and on to indigenous people’s land. In January he transferred the agency that deals with the protection of indigenous land rights (FUNAI) to the Ministry of Agriculture, sending a clear message that the agricultural and extractive industries now enjoyed the policy priority. FUNAI’s funding was cut by 40% by Temer’s government, as was that for the entire Ministry of the Environment, at a time when deforestation is on the rise.

During the elections, Bolsonaro made remarks about pulling Brazil out of many international agreements, such as the Paris Climate Agreement and international corporation such as the South American trade bloc, Mercosur. This has not happened, and it does not seem to be a priority, but Brazil’s new foreign minister is a climate sceptic, and Brazil has withdrawn from hosting COP25, the next United Nations climate conference.

Regarding public security, Bolsonaro has advocated more aggressive policing as the solution to the alarming rates of crime, violence and insecurity in Brazil. He wants to offer increased impunity to police officers when they kill civilians.(Bolsonaro has repeatedly said that police officers who kill criminals should be praised and not prosecuted), he wants to loosen the country’s gun control laws, and he wants to lower the age at which juveniles can be tried as adults. Many fear that this will most likely lead to an increase in the homicide rates of people killed by the police. The police already enjoy a great deal of impunity as such cases are rarely investigated, and the police are rarely held accountable. In the state of Rio de Janeiro the police killed more than 8000 people between 2006 and 2016.

Last year Temer deployed the military to improve public security in Rio De Janeiro, but with no result. A new report by the Center for Security and Citizenship Studies in Rio de Janeiro concludes that the intervention increased police brutality and should not be copied. In December 2018 the military were also deployed in the northern state of Roraima that borders Venezuela, being where more than 150,000 Venezuelans have entered Brazil.

Bolsonaro wants to increase such military interventions and has employed the military to help tackle a security crisis in the state of Ceara, where disputes that started among criminal factions in the state prisons paralyzed the state capital, Fortaleza, during much of January. The harsher public security measures are not just rhetoric.

Bolsonaro’s pro-military stance is reflected in his administration, where high-ranking military officers are appointed as ministers, influential positions in Bolsonaro's inner circle, and the number of senior positions has reached 45 according to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo. There has not been such a prominent military presence in government since Brazil returned to democratic rule in 1985.

Investigations of corruption by Bolsonaro’s family

So where does the Bolsonarian project stand, almost three months into its reign?

Many voters turned to the strong man because he promised to save Brazil from chaos and decline and bring an end to corruption. This also means that Bolsonaro needs to show results and deliver on his promises, otherwise his popularity will quickly decline.

It is therefore quite inconvenient for Bolsonaro that the Lava Jato investigations have reached his own family through his son, Flávio Bolsonaro, who was elected to the federal Senate in October 2018. He is being investigated for fraud and money-laundering. Money deposited into Bolsonaro’s wife’s account is also being highlighted in the investigation as suspicious.

To make matters worse, Flávio Bolsonaro tried to use the fact that he is now a member of the Senate to invoke his "foro privelegiado", the law that protects politicians from prosecution while in office, although the allegations were made before he took office. This is exactly the impunity of politicians that Bolsonaro has said he wished to remove in order to combat corruption. His request was considered by a judge but eventually refused.

In February a new corruption scandal started rolling that includes extensive fraud with public election campaign funds during the 2018 elections to Congress and the presidency. In other words, while Bolsonaro was talking about fighting corruption during the elections, his own party was running an illicit campaign. The scandal involves the Minister of Tourism and the Secretary General of the president, Gustavo Bebianno, who was president of Bolsonaro’s party, PSL, during the elections, and his campaign coordinator. On February 18, Bolsonaro sacked Bebianno.

Nearly three months into office, an opinion poll released on March 20 showed a decrease from 38,9 percent the previous month to 34 percent, rating Bolsonaro’s government as good or great. These are the lowest approval ratings of a government at this early stage of its administration since Brazil returned to direct presidential elections in 1989.

Another corruption investigation involving the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes, was opened in October. The Minister of Health, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, is being investigated for fraud and bribes during the time he was Secretary of Health in the city of Campo Grande (2005-2010). Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, Onyx Lorenzoni, has openly admitted taking bribes in the past.

If Bolsonaro’s voters thought they had elected a president who would free Brazil of corruption, these scandals and ongoing investigations signal that this is highly unlikely. The rouba appears to be continuing.