Institute of Latin American Studies

Chapter Title: Populism in Brazil

Book Title: Brazil: Essays on History and Politics

Book Author(s): Leslie Bethell
Published by: University of London Press; Institute of Latin American Studies

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv51309x.10

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 6. Populism in Brazil*

A
t a conference ‘To define populism’ held at the London School of
Economics in 1967, 50 years ago, the distinguished American political
scientist Richard Hofstadter, author of The American Political Tradition
[1948], The Age of Reform [1955] (on populism in the United States during
the Progressive Era) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics [1964],
gave a paper entitled ‘Everyone is talking about populism, but no-one can
define it’. There have been hundreds books, articles and lectures on populism
since then – by historians, political scientists, sociologists, even economists
as well as journalists and political commentators. Almost all of them open
with a declaration that there is no agreed definition of populism, not least
because populism has had different connotations at different times over the
past 100 years and in many different parts of the world, notably in the United
States, Latin America and Europe. In the study of both political history and
contemporary politics, populism has been, and continues to be, an elusive
concept notoriously difficult to define.
Populism is perhaps best and most simply understood as a political
phenomenon encompassing those movements and parties, often but not
always with ‘charismatic’ leaders, which aspire to power, reach power (usually,
though not always, through elections), exercise power and retain power by
claiming some kind of direct or quasi-direct, unmediated relationship and
identification with ‘the people’, especially those sections of the population
previously excluded from politics, which are mobilised, often for the first
time, against the established structures of power (political, economic, social,
intellectual and cultural), dominated by the ‘elite’. Populist discourse or rhetoric
is built, simplistically, around a fundamental antagonism, what the Ecuadorean
sociologist Carlos de la Torre refers to as ‘a Manichean confrontation’,
between the ‘people’, loosely defined, and the ‘elite’, equally loosely defined.
Populism is a political practice, a political strategy, a political language, not a
political ideology like liberalism or socialism, even nationalism. Ideologically,
populism has always been eclectic, vague, confused – and not to be taken too

* This essay is a revised version of ‘Populism, neo-populism and the Left in Brazil: from
Getúlio to Lula’, in C. Arnson and C. de la Torre (eds.), Latin American Populism of the
Twenty-First Century (Washington D.C.: Wilson Center Press/Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2013) ch. 7, pp. 179–20.

Leslie Bethell, ‘Poulism in Brazil’, in Brazil: Essays on History and Politics (London: Institute
of Latin American Studies, 2018), pp. 175–94.

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176 BRAZIL: ESSAYS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS

seriously, despite the heroic efforts of post-Marxist intellectuals, notably the

late Argentine political scientist Ernesto Laclau and his wife (now widow) the
Belgian political scientist Chantal Mouffe.1
In Latin America,2 for the so-called ‘classical populists’ or first generation
populists, from the 1930s to the 1960s, a period which witnessed rapid
economic and social change and the beginnings of mass politics, it was the new,
and newly enfranchised, urban working class and public sector white-collar
urban lower middle class that were available for political mobilisation. (The
mass of the rural poor were largely ignored since they had no vote or their votes
were delivered to local landowners and political bosses.) Elected or otherwise,
populist leaders were invariably authoritarian and at best ambivalent toward
such liberal democratic institutions as existed. At the same time, they fostered
political inclusion (though not empowerment), and delivered some measure
of social justice through a (mostly limited) distribution of wealth and welfare
provision to their social base.
Only Chile and Argentina (before the Second World War) had Socialist
parties which achieved a measure of electoral success. The Latin American
Communist parties, except for one brief period between the end of the Second
World War and the beginning of the Cold War, were small, isolated, illegal –
and heavily repressed. Thus, the political space occupied in western Europe by
parties of the Communist and Socialist/Social Democratic Left – and in the
United States by New Deal Democrats – was occupied in Latin America by
populist politicians and parties. They were, however, at best modestly reformist,
rather than committed to social, much less socialist, transformation. They were
mostly hostile to the traditional parties of the Left, and the Left was hostile to
them – the non-Communist Left at least. Latin American Communist parties
were often ambivalent towards populism.
The so-called ‘neo-populists’ emerged from the late 1980s, after many
political scientists and sociologists had announced the end of populism in
Latin America. Taking advantage of the persistence of extreme poverty and
inequality – indeed their worsening during the 1980s and 1990s – and the ‘third
1 See E. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977); E. Laclau and C. Mouffe,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985); E. Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso,
2005); E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, ‘Populism. What’s in a Name?’, in F. Panizza (ed.), Populism
and the Mirror of Democracy (London: Verso, 2005); I. Errejon and C. Mouffe, Construir
Pueblo. Hegemonia y radicalizacion de la democracia (2015) (Eng. trans. Podemos. In the Name
of the People (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2016).
2 On populism in Latin America, see M.L. Conniff (ed.), Populism in Latin America
(Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1999); C. de la Torre and E. Peruzzotti, El
retorno del pueblo, El populismo y nuevas democracias en America Latina (Quito: Flacso, 2008);
C. de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010);
C. de la Torre and C.J. Arnson (eds.), Latin American Populism in the Twentieth Century
(Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2013).

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 POPULISM 177

wave’ of democratisation, they were able to mobilise the previously politically

unorganised and excluded low income and ill-educated marginal sectors of
the population, both the new urban poor, resulting from unprecedented
rural-urban migration since the 1950s, and the rural poor, including in many
countries the indigenous populations, thus significantly extending the social
base of ‘classical’ populism. Bypassing established political parties which had
proved ineffective in articulating or responding to the economic and social
demands of the ’people’ they created new social and political movements and
successfully contested democratic elections.
In power, ‘neo-populist’ parties and politicians have been, like the ‘classical’
populists, for the most part authoritarian, impatient with democratic
constitutional and institutional constraints on the ‘will of the people’. Their
opponents were ‘enemies of the people’. The ‘neo-populists of the Right’,
like, for example, Carlos Menem in Argentina and Alberto Fujimori in Peru,
opportunistically used popular discontents to reach power, but then failed
to challenge entrenched elites. They implemented ‘neo-liberal’ agendas that
did little to improve the condition of the poor who had elected them. The
‘neo-populists of the Left’, for example, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Rafael
Correa in Ecuador and Evo Morales in Bolivia, adopted radical anti-poverty
programmes and other social policies to effect a significant distribution of
wealth. While for the most part, like the ‘classical’ populists, the ‘neo-populists
of the Left’ have been generally opposed to, and opposed by, the traditional
parties of the Left, which were even weaker now than in the middle decades
of the 20th century, some describe themselves as ‘21st century socialists’. In
some cases they fostered radical experiments in direct, participatory forms of
democracy – but at the cost, it could be argued, of weakening, even destroying,
liberal representative democracy. And they invariably pursued ‘irresponsible’
macro-economic policies. In The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin America
(1991) Rudiger Dornbusch and Sebastian Edwards famously defined economic
populism as ‘the short-term pursuit of growth and income distribution at the
cost of inflation and large fiscal deficits’.
In the historical literature on ‘classical’ populism in Latin America, Getúlio
Vargas, president of Brazil 1930–45 and 1951–4, is always given a prominent
place alongside, for example, Juan Perón in Argentina, José Maria Velasco
Ibarra in Ecuador, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Colombia and even, unhelpfully,
Lázaro Cardenas in Mexico. But was Vargas a populist? And, if so, when?
And were there not other Brazilian politicians, at both the national and the
sub-national level, equally or even more deserving of the epithet ‘populist’?
Fernando Collor de Mello, president of Brazil 1990–2, is usually included in
the category of ‘neo-populists of the Right’. The extent to which Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva, leader of Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers’ Party) founded

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178 BRAZIL: ESSAYS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS

in 1980, president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, and potential candidate for
re-election in 2018, can be regarded as a ‘neo-populist of the Left’ is the final
question to be addressed in this essay.

I
Getúlio Vargas first came to power in Brazil in 1930. Landowner, lawyer and
governor of Rio Grande do Sul, aged 48, Vargas was the defeated ‘opposition’
candidate in the presidential elections in March (in which only ten per cent of
the adult population voted). An armed rebellion six months later, led by dissident
members of the political oligarchy and disaffected junior army officers, triggered
a golpe [military coup] by senior army generals and the transfer of power to
Vargas in November. Although there was a certain amount of popular discontent
at the time, particularly as the first effects of the world depression began to be
felt, and some enthusiasm for regime change in the Federal District (Rio de
Janeiro) at least, popular forces played only a minor role in the ‘Revolution’ of
1930. What Louis Couty, a French resident in Rio de Janeiro, had famously
written almost 50 years earlier remained essentially true: ‘O Brasil não tem povo’
[Brazil has no people], that is to say, no popular forces that could be effectively
mobilised for political ends.3 At this stage in his career Vargas saw little potential
in popular political mobilisation. O povo [the people] were political spectators,
not political actors.
Vargas was head of a provisional government until July 1934. Under a new
Constitution he was then elected president by Congress for a fixed four-year
term (although from November 1935 he governed under a state of siege).
During this period he first advanced and then destroyed the political careers of
the first two politicians in Brazil who might be called ‘populist’: Pedro Ernesto
Baptista and José Américo de Almeida.
A distinguished medical doctor and political protégé of Vargas, Pedro
Ernesto Baptista became prefeito (mayor) of the Federal District by indirect
election in April 1935, but immediately began to appeal directly to the urban
poor with populist rhetoric and a program of poverty alleviation, health and
education reform and state ownership of basic utilities. He was sympathetic
to the Aliança Nacional Libertadora (ANL), a popular front organisation
supported by the Partido Comunista Brasileira (PCB), illegal, apart from a few
months, since its foundation in 1922. Pedro Ernesto became a victim of the
repression that followed an attempted communist putsch in Natal, Recife and
Rio de Janeiro in November 1935 (see Essay 7). In April 1936 he was removed
from office and sentenced to three years in jail. He was released in September

3 Quoted in J.M. de Carvalho, Os bestializados: o Rio de Janeiro e a república que não foi (São
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987), p. 10.

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 POPULISM 179

1937, but was now in poor health. He died of cancer aged 58 in August 1942.
Huge crowds occupied the streets for his funeral.4
José Américo de Almeida, a well-known writer (author of the classic
novel of the north-east, A bagaçeira, 1928) and one of the leaders of the
‘Revolution’ of 1930, became in 1937 the ‘official candidate’ in the presidential
elections scheduled for January 1938. During the election campaign, he
attacked the opposition candidate Armando Sales as conservative and elitist,
the representative of the paulista [from the state of São Paulo] plutocracy
and foreign capital. He presented himself as the candidate of the poor and
forgotten, denouncing the conditions under which most Brazilians lived and
promising to break up the large landed estates, extend social welfare provision
and distribute wealth [a política dos pobres]. Like Pedro Ernesto, José Américo
was eventually accused of having communist sympathies, and he had already
been forced to withdraw his candidacy when the elections were in any case
aborted by the golpe of November 1937 which established Vargas as dictator
under the Estado Novo (1937–45).5
An important feature of the Estado Novo was the creation of a new
relationship between the state and organised labour – both for workers in
the manufacturing industry and white-collar public employees, heavily
concentrated in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. By 1945 a quarter of Brazil’s
urban labour force – half a million workers – was unionised. Repression was
replaced by co-optation. On the one hand, unions lacked autonomy and were
subordinate to the state; workers were not permitted to engage in political
activity, nor to strike. On the other hand, unions were legally recognised,
union leaders had some (limited) political influence, and wage increases and
social welfare benefits (pensions, medical care, etc.) were extended to increasing
numbers of industrial workers, civil servants and their dependents. As pressure
for political ‘democratisation’ increased towards the end of the Second World
War the Estado Novo moved from co-optation to mobilisation. Trabalhismo
[from trabalho, labour] was invented by a regime that began to recognise the
future political potential of organised labour. State propaganda increasingly
emphasised the economic and social gains made by workers under the Estado
Novo and projected Vargas as ‘o pai dos pobres’ [the father of the poor].6 There
was nothing in his past, or indeed in his personality, to suggest that Vargas

4 M.L. Conniff, Urban Politics in Brazil: The Rise of Populism 1925–1945 (Pittsburgh, PA:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981) is, above all, a study of the political career of Dr Pedro
Ernesto.
5 There is no scholarly study of J. Américo de Almeida. But see A. Camargo et al., O golpe
silencioso: as orígens da república corporativa (Rio de Janeiro: Rio Fundo Editora, 1989).
6 See the classic work by A. de Castro Gomes, A invenção do trabalhismo (São Paulo: Edições
Vértice/IUPERJ, 1988).

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180 BRAZIL: ESSAYS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS

could become a charismatic populist political leader, but the ground was being
prepared for a dramatic change of direction in 1945.
In the presidential and congressional elections finally scheduled for the end
of 1945 all literate men and women over 18 had the right to vote; the vote
was obligatory; and the electorate had expanded from less than 10 per cent (in
1930) to more than 30 per cent of the adult population (see Essay 5). It is not
clear whether Vargas, who had been president continuously since 1930 but
never directly elected, intended or hoped to offer himself for election in 1945.
He controlled the state apparatus. He could count on considerable political
support from the non-export-orientated sectors of the rural oligarchy and
from industrialists, but also, he now believed, with justifiable confidence, from
the urban lower middle class, especially in the public sector, and, above all,
organised labour. Vargas founded the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (PTB) and
urged Brazilian workers to join it.7 The two ‘conservative’ parties established in
1945 nominated candidates for the presidency, the Partido Social Democrático
(PSD) an army general, the União Democrática Nacional (UDN) an air force
brigadier, but the PTB did not. Vargas, however, encouraged public debate of
the idea of a third candidate, a ‘civilian candidate of the people’. João Batista
Luzardo, who had reason to know, later argued that ‘Vargas had only one third
candidate in mind: himself ’.
The six months from May to October 1945 witnessed an unprecedented
level of political mobilisation in Brazil’s major cities orchestrated in part by
the Communist party (PCB), which was now legal, but more particularly by a
new political movement Queremismo, formed around the slogan ‘Queremos
Getúlio’ [We want Getúlio]. Behind the movement were the propaganda
machine of the Estado Novo, government ministers, leading officials of the
Ministry of Labour and the social welfare institutions, government approved
union leaders (the so-called pelegos), national and state leaders of the PTB,
and some ‘progressive’ businessmen – the ‘fascist gang’, as the British embassy
liked to call them. Mass demonstrations on a scale never seen before in Brazil
were organised in Rio de Janeiro during August, September and October.8
It is scarcely credible, as is sometimes claimed, that Vargas knew nothing of

7 There is a rich literature on the PTB and populism. See, in particular, Lucília de Almeida
Neves, PTB: do getulismo ao reformismo (1945–1964) (São Paulo: Marco Zero, 1983); Maria
Celina D’Araújo, Sindicatos, carisma e poder. O PTB de 1945–1965 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora
FGV, 1996); and Jorge Ferreira, O imaginário trabalhista: getulismo, PTB e cultura política
popular 1945–1964 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2005).
8 See Leslie Bethell, ‘Brazil’, in Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough (eds.), Latin America
between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), pp. 33–65. Also John French, ‘The populist gamble of Getúlio
Vargas in 1945: political and ideological transitions in Brazil’, in David Rock (ed.), Latin
America in the 1940s: War and Post War Transitions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1994).

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 POPULISM 181

the Queremista movement. Did he actually promote or merely tolerate it?

Certainly he did nothing to stop it. Was Vargas’s nomination as presidential
candidate – and subsequent electoral victory – the aim? Or were they (was he)
preparing the ground for a populist coup?
In the end, Vargas did not become a candidate, whatever the temptation. To
ensure that the elections scheduled for December were not aborted, as in 1937,
the military removed him from power in October 1945. In the presidential
elections, the late, and somewhat reluctant, support offered by Vargas was
crucial for the victory of the former Minister of War, General Dutra, the
candidate of the PSD and the PTB. In the congressional elections (in which
candidates were allowed to run in more than one state), Vargas was elected
senator in Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo and federal deputy in the Federal
District and six other states, accumulating a total of 1.3 million votes. Over
one fifth of the Brazilian electorate voted for him. He chose to serve as senator
for his home state, Rio Grande do Sul.
Under the post-war Liberal Republic (1945–64), there were regular
elections for president and Congress, state governor and state assembly, mayor
and municipal council and the electorate grew from 7.5 million in 1945 to
18.2 million, half of the adult population, in 1962. Since voting continued to
be obligatory, the turn out in elections was high (see Essay 5). New possibilities
were opened up for populist politicians, especially since the principal, virtually
the only, party of the Left, the PCB, was once again illegal from May 1947.
In February 1949, in an interview with the journalist Samuel Wainer in
O Jornal, Vargas was reported as looking ahead to the presidential election of
October 1950 and saying: ‘Yes, I will return, but not as a political leader, as
leader of the masses’. The PTB had electoral strength in Rio de Janeiro and
Rio Grande do Sul, but this was not enough to win the presidency. Together
with Governor Ademar de Barros, who had, as we shall see, built up a powerful
political machine in the state of São Paulo (which accounted for 20 per cent
of the electorate), Vargas formed a Frente Popular [Popular Front] against the
PSD and UND and the ‘elite’ and won the election with 48 per cent of the
vote in a three-way contest, no less than a quarter of his votes coming from
São Paulo. But he had in the end campaigned for the most part above parties
and he owed his victory to his direct, personal appeal to unionised workers and
the people in general (at least those who had the vote) based on his record as
president/dictator under the Estado Novo and his project for further economic
development and social reform.
The Vargas administration (1951–4) was all-party and essentially
conservative. The decision to create a state company, Petrobras, with a
monopoly over oil reserves and their extraction, however, and the nationalist
campaign launched under the slogan ‘O petroleo é nosso’ [The oil is ours] to

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182 BRAZIL: ESSAYS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS

guarantee its passage through Congress, generated possibly the greatest level
of urban popular mobilisation seen thus far in Brazil. In the second half of his
mandate Vargas attempted to strengthen his links to organised labour with the
appointment of João (Jango) Goulart as Minister of Labour. Goulart, a young
(34-year-old) rancher and politician from Rio Grande do Sul, had been since
1952 national president of the PTB and personally close to Vargas. He had
the reputation, largely unwarranted, of being a radical trabalhista, an admirer
of Perón in Argentina, and in favour of establishing a república sindicalista [a
republic based on labour unions] in Brazil.
In February 1954 Vargas implemented a 100 per cent increase in the
minimum wage, together with improvements in social welfare provision and
pensions, and announced that he would extend existing labour legislation to
rural workers, ending his speech with this provocative statement: ‘You [the
workers of Brazil] constitute a majority. Today you are with the government.
Tomorrow you will be the government’. The pressure mounted, however, for
his resignation. It was alleged by his enemies that he had dictatorial ambitions.
Under the Constitution of 1946 he could not be re-elected in 1955, but they
recalled the political events of November 1937 and October 1945. To avoid
being removed from office by the military a second time, Vargas committed
suicide on 24 August, and by this act ensured that getulismo would remain a
powerful force in Brazilian politics long after his death.
Whatever the element of personal tragedy, Vargas’s suicide was, and was
intended to be, a political bombshell. Vargas left a carta-testamento [final
testament in the form of a letter], one of the most famous documents in
Brazilian history. He had always been, he said, ‘a slave of the people’. He had
returned to power in 1950–1 ‘nos braços do povo’ [in the arms of the people]
and had sought to defend the people and particularly the very poor against the
powerful interests, domestic and foreign, impeding his efforts to govern the
country in the national interest and the interests of the people. Now, old and
tired, he was ‘serenely’ taking the first step on the road to eternity, ‘leaving life
to enter History’.9 If ever there was a populist document, this was it. Vargas’s
letter, which was immediately broadcast on national radio and published in all
the newspapers, had an enormous popular impact. Hundreds of thousands of
Brazilians went onto the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte,
Recife and other cities. There were scenes of extreme emotion (and some
violence). In Rio huge crowds accompanied Vargas’s body to Santos Dumont
airport for transportation to Rio Grande do Sul and burial at São Borja.

9 See J.M. de Carvalho, ‘As duas mortes de Getúlio Vargas’, in Pontos e bordados (Belo
Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 1998). Modern biographies of Getúlio Vargas include B.
Fausto, Getúlio Vargas (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006) and Lira Neto, Getúlio (3
vols. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012–14).

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 POPULISM 183

At the sub-national level, both state and municipal, there are several examples
of populist politicians in Brazil during the Liberal Republic: for example, Leonel
Brizola (PTB), who was elected mayor of Porto Alegre in 1955, governor of
Rio Grande do Sul in 1958 and, with a huge popular vote, federal deputy for
Guanabara (the city of Rio de Janeiro) in 1962;10 Miguel Arraes (PST – Partido
Social Trabalhista), elected governor of Pernambuco in 1963; and in São Paulo,
Brazil’s most populous and economically developed state, Ademar de Barros
and Jânio Quadros, who in 1960 was elected president.11
Ademar de Barros, coffee fazendeiro and industrialist, who had governed
São Paulo during the Estado Novo, formed in July 1946 the Partido Social
Progressista (PSP) as a political vehicle for himself in a state where interestingly
(and significantly) all three major parties, PSD, UDN and PTB, were relatively
weak. Projecting a ‘man of the people’ populist image, with a powerful anti-
elite message to a mass lower class following, and spending on a massive scale,
Ademar became in January 1947 São Paulo’s first popularly elected governor.
Ademarismo was born.12 In office he made liberal use of public funds to
maintain his popular political base and was not ashamed to use the slogan ‘ele
rouba, mas faz’ [he steals, but he gets things done]. He helped elect Getúlio
president in 1950, as we have seen. But in 1954, in a second attempt to become
governor, Ademar lost narrowly to another populist, Jânio Quadros. In 1955
he ran for president, coming third with 26 per cent of the vote, but winning
in both São Paulo and the Federal District. In 1957 he was elected prefeito of
São Paulo city and, after failing in a second attempt to become president in
1960, was elected state governor again in 1962. Two years later, however, now
with the overwhelming support of the paulista middle-class, Ademar de Barros
provided civilian backing for the 1964 anti-populist golpe.

10 When the national capital was moved from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília in 1960 and Brasília
became the new Federal District, the city of Rio became the state of Guanabara. It was
merged with the state of Rio de Janeiro (and replaced Niterói as the state capital) in 1975.
11 G. Grin Debert, Ideologia e populism (São Paulo: T. A. Queiroz Editora, 1979) is a study
of four Brazilian ‘populists’: Adhemar de Barros, Miguel Arrães, Leonel Brizola and Carlos
Lacerda, governor of Guanabara 1960–5. M.L. Conniff, ‘Brazil’s Populist Republic and
beyond’, in M. L. Conniff (ed.), Populism in Latin America (Tuscaloosa AL: University of
Alabama Press, 1999) examines the politics of eight populists: Getúlio Vargas, Pedro Ernesto,
Adhemar de Barros, Jânio Quadros, Juscelino Kubitschek, Leonel Brizola, Miguel Arrães and
Fernando Collor de Mello, president 1990–2 (see below). If Juscelino Kubitschek, president
1956–61, is treated as a populist, we are in danger of further devaluing an already slippery
concept. On Brizola in this period, see A. Freire and J. Ferreira (eds.), A razão indignada.
Leonel Brizola em dois tempos (1961–64 e 1979–2004) (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira,
2016), Part I Leonel Brizola e o tempo do nacionalismo-revolucionário (1961–4).
12 See J.D. French, ‘Workers and the rise of Adhemarista populism in São Paulo, Brazil
1945–47’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 68 (1988), 2–43; and R. Sampaio, Adhemar
de Barros e o PSP (São Paulo: Global Editora, 1982).

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184 BRAZIL: ESSAYS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS

Jânio Quadros, a provincial matogrossense (from the state of Mato Grosso)

turned paulista outsider, began a meteoric political career when he stood for
vereador in the municipal council of São Paulo at the age of 30 in 1947. In
1950 he became a state deputy, with the most votes of any candidate. In March
1953, he won a famous victory against the candidate backed by all three major
parties to become prefeito of São Paulo, the first state capital to elect a mayor
by direct popular vote – after eight nominated mayors since 1945. Finally,
in October 1954, after only eight years in politics and 18 months as mayor,
Quadros was elected governor of the state, again without the formal support
of any of the three major parties, narrowly defeating Ademar de Barros, his
main rival for the popular vote. In these two elections Quadros, who never
had the full support of organised urban labour, successfully mobilised the poor
of the peripheries of the city of São Paulo and other major cities in the state
of São Paulo. Janismo was Brazil’s first taste of mass populism based on the
support of the urban poor for a charismatic politician with a strong ethical
(anti-corruption) as well as an anti-elite message.
In the presidential election of October 1960, Jânio Quadros became the
candidate of a Centre-Right coalition of five parties led by the conservative
UDN, his earlier radical populism apparently abandoned. His campaign
for president was remarkable, even by his own standards, for its ideological
confusion. A contradictory and enigmatic personality, Jânio was supported by
many empresários, especially those linked to foreign capital, and the urban
middle class, but also the 160 sindicatos [unions] affiliated to the Movimento
Renovação Sindical and the ‘people’ more generally to whom he offered
(for example, in his speech to a crowd of 100,000 in Recife in September)
nationalist-populist reformas de base [basic reforms], including the extension
of social legislation to rural workers. He won the election with 5.6 million
votes (48.3 per cent of the vote, slightly better than Vargas in 1950), more than
half provided by the state of São Paulo.
Jânio Quadros had built a political career, which had taken him from
municipal councilman in São Paulo to President of the Republic in 14 years, on
the margins of the party system, without an ideology or program or even much
of an organisation. He had a mandate for change, although apart from cleaning
up politics and administration it was not clear what kind of change. He had
raised great hopes for the future, but it was not clear what kind of future.
In the presidency, he was arrogant and authoritarian. He largely ignored the
rules of the political game and he believed he could govern without Congress
since ‘the people are with me’. He did not negotiate with, nor try to co-opt,
his opponents and even his allies were uncomfortable with his more ‘populist’
or ‘progressive’ policies which included anti-trust legislation, controls on the
remittances of profits abroad, agrarian reform, political reform to give illiterates

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 POPULISM 185

the vote, and an independent, anti-imperialist Third World foreign policy

which included restoring diplomatic relations with Soviet Union, establishing
commercial relations with East Germany and the Eastern bloc and, above all,
closer relations with post-revolutionary Cuba.
In August 1961, after only seven months in power, Jânio Quadros astonished
the country by resigning, apparently believing that he would return, like Getúlio
in January 1951 (or De Gaulle in France in December 1958), ‘nos braços do
povo’ [in the arms of the people]. The military and Congress moved quickly to
appoint an interim successor. And no popular support materialised. The povo
were apparently in shock, perplexed, to Jãnio’s disappointment ‘very passive’.
‘The people, where are the people?’, he is said to have exclaimed forlornly when
he arrived from Brasília at Cumbica airport in São Paulo, prepared for exile.13
Quadros was eventually succeeded as president in September by Vice-President
Joao Goulart.14
Whether João Goulart as president (1961–4) should be regarded as a
populist is debatable.15 He was a leading politician in the PTB, a protégé of
Getulio Vargas, as we have seen. At the time of Jânio’s renúncia [resignation] so
widespread was the concern on the Right, military and civil, about Goulart’s
supposed radical trabalhismo that before being allowed to take office he was
forced to accept a parliamentary system of government under which his powers
were severely reduced. After winning a plebiscite in January 1963 to restore
the presidential system, Goulart pursued an agenda for political and social
reform which was certainly more radical than that of Getúlio Vargas, but
which he regarded as moderate. His reformas de base included improvements
in the standard of living of non-unionised as well as unionised urban workers,
the extension of labour and social welfare legislation to rural workers, the
concession of the right to vote to illiterates and, most controversial, moderate
agrarian reform: the distribution of unproductive land with compensation in
government bonds.
Goulart’s principal political base was organised urban labour linked to
the PTB, together with the so-called ‘national bourgeoisie’ and nationalist
elements in the military. There was now the possibility of extending his base

13 For an excellent account of Quadros’ political career, though more journalistic than
academic, see R. Arnt, Jânio Quadros. O prometeu de Vila Maria (Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro
Publicações, 2004). See also V. Chaia, A liderança política de Jânio Quadros (1947–1990)
(São Paulo: Editora Humanidades, 1991).
14 Under the Liberal Republic presidents and vice-presidents were elected separately. Goulart
was twice elected vice-president, in 1955 with Juscelino Kubitschek and in 1960 with Jãnio
Quadros.
15 João Goulart is not included in either Guita Grin Debert’s study of four Brazilian populists
or Michael L.Conniff’s study of eight Brazilian populists. See above, n. 8. A recent biography
of Goulart based on extensive research is J. Ferreira, João Goulart: uma biografia (Rio de
Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2011).

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186 BRAZIL: ESSAYS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS

to include peasants and rural workers. He lacked, however, a strong base in

Congress. Without it the passage of basic reform legislation, especially that
needing a constitutional amendment and therefore a two-thirds majority, was
impossible. After the congressional elections of October 1962 the PTB had
become the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies (but with only 27 per
cent of the seats). With the support of the smaller parties of the Centre-Left/
Left (PDC-PSB-PTN-PRT-PST-MRT) and some reform-minded deputies in
the PSD (and even the UDN) Goulart could count on perhaps 40 per cent
of the deputies to support his reforms. The PSD and the UDN together had,
however, what amounted to a permanent veto on reform.
Aware of a growing civil and military conspiracy, backed by the United
States, to destabilise his government, Goulart persisted for more than a year
with an attempt to negotiate with the Centre-Right in Congress and move
a moderate reform agenda forward gradually by stages. Each time, however,
he was rebuffed by the conservative forces entrenched there. These failures
served to radicalise many of Goulart’s own supporters in Congress (and in his
government). The so-called nationalist-revolutionary ideológicos (as compared
with the more moderate and pragmatic fisiológicos) became the dominant
faction in the PTB. A key figure was Goulart’s brother-in-law Leonel Brizola,
populist federal deputy for Guanabara, who at the beginning of 1963 founded
and led the Frente de Mobilização Popular (FMP) and, in November, organised
‘Grupos de Onze Companheiros’ or ‘Comandos Nacionalistas’ to take the
struggle for reform, and reform more radical than that proposed by Goulart,
outside Congress where there was already, by Brazilian standards, an unusually
high degree of popular politicisation and mobilisation – against a background
of severe economic recession.16 The Comando Geral dos Trabalhadores (CGT),
formed in July 1962 and controlling three of the six national confederations of
labour which together accounted for 70 per cent of Brazil’s 1,800 sindicatos, had
already shown itself capable of organising general strikes with strong political
overtones. In November 1963 a Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores
Rurais (CONTAG) was created, affiliated with the CGT, and immediately
organised a strike of 200,000 Pernambuco sugar cane workers. The União
Nacional de Estudantes (UNE) was promoting a level of student militancy not
seen before in Brazil. A variety of New Left groups had appeared, influenced by
the Cuban Revolution and/or progressive Catholic doctrine.
Thus, for a variety of reasons and from a variety of sources, Goulart came
under increasing pressure throughout 1963 to mobilise urban and rural

16 In 1963 the Brazilian economy entered a period of recession after 20 years of almost
continuous growth since Brazil entered the Second World War in 1942. Growth in 1963 was
only 0.6 per cent. For the first time since the Second World War per capita income fell (by
2.3 per cent). Inflation was 75 per cent and was approaching an annual rate of almost 100
per cent by the first quarter of 1964.

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 POPULISM 187

workers in favour of more radical reforms than he wished or could possibly

deliver – pressure he could not ignore if he was to maintain, or rather recover,
his leadership of Brazil’s ‘popular classes’, his principal political ‘base’. On
Friday 13 March 1964 at a comício [open air mass meeting] in downtown
Rio de Janeiro he appeared on a platform with PTB ministers and the leaders
of the CGT, the UNE – and the Brazilian Communist party (PCB), before a
crowd of 150,000 – 250,000, many of them waving red flags. The dominant
discourse of the meeting was revolutionary (‘all power to the people’). Congress
was denounced as ‘arcáico’ (‘não mais correspondia as aspirações do povo’ [no
longer in tune with the aspirations of the people]) and radical constitutional
changes were promised either by means of a new Constituent Assembly or
a Popular Congress of workers, peasants and soldiers. Two days later, on 15
March, in his annual message to Congress, the president again emphasised the
need for agrarian reform, the extension of the right to vote to illiterates (and
to sergeants and enlisted men in the armed forces) – and regular plebiscites.
What Goulart had in mind has never been satisfactorily explained. Simply
to increase the pressure on Congress to pass basic reforms? Or to prepare the
ground for a golpe and a populist dictatorship of the Left, as the Right later
alleged? In the event, Goulart’s actions produced a decisive reaction from the
opposition, civilian and military, supported by the US government which
was kept informed about political developments in Brazil by a network of
CIA agents, politicians, businessmen and journalists who spoke to the US
ambassador Lincoln Gordon and by the generals close to the US military
attaché Vernon Walters. Goulart was removed from power by a military coup
two weeks later. The first list of over 100 people who were punished by losing
their political rights for ten years included Jânio Quadros and João Goulart,
key figures in the Goulart administration, and politicians and labour leaders
identified by the military as belonging to the populist-nationalist Left. During
the 21-year military dictatorship that followed (1964–85) populism (that
is to say, getulismo and trabalhismo in its various manifestations) would be
eliminated once and for all from Brazilian politics.17
All in all, politicians to whom the label ‘populist’ has been attached did
not meet with much success in Brazil in the period 1930–64 – at the national

17 Octavio Ianni’s well-known study of the 1964 golpe was entitled O colapso do populism no
Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1968; Eng. trans., Crisis in Brazil, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1970). An early, influential study of populist politics in the
period 1945–64, especially the role of the PTB (and the illegal PCB), as manipulators of the
workers, corrupt and authoritarian, was Francisco Weffort, O populismo no Brasil (São Paulo:
Paz e Terra, 1978). D. Aarão Reis Filho, ‘O colapso do colapso do populismo ou a propósito
de uma herança maldita’, in J. Ferreira (ed.), O populismo e sua história: debate e crítica (Rio
de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2001) provides a critique of both Ianni and Weffort and a
defence of the social reformism of the PTB (and the PCB) and the economic and political
benefits delivered to Brazilian workers by ‘populist’ politicians.

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188 BRAZIL: ESSAYS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS

level at least. Getúlio Vargas, who only adopted a populist strategy after he had
already been in power for almost 15 years, was forced by the military within a
few months to leave office in October 1945 and, after his re-election in 1950,
was driven to suicide in August 1954. Ademar de Barros lost as many elections
as he won in São Paulo and never reached the presidency. His nemesis Jânio
Quadros was elected president but resigned after only seven months in power
in August 1961. Finally, João Goulart survived as president for two and a half
years but was overthrown by the military immediately after adopting a populist
discourse and strategy in March 1964.

II
The beginning of the process of democratisation in Brazil in the early 1980s and
the transition to civilian rule in 1985, after 21 years of military dictatorship,
brought the return to state and municipal politics of many of the old ‘populists’:
for example, Leonel Brizola of the Partido Democrático Brasileiro (PDT),
successor to the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (PTB), was elected governor of
the state of Rio de Janeiro in the first relatively free elections permitted by the
military in 1982 (and again in 1990)18 and former president Jânio Quadros was
elected mayor of São Paulo in 1985.
The presidential election in November 1989 was the first direct presidential
election since 1960, the first ever presidential election based on universal
suffrage (see Essay 5). The Brazilian electorate now numbered 82 million,
including illiterates and 16–17 year olds – compared with only 15 million
in 1960. The election was won by a politician usually bracketed with Latin
America’s ‘neo-populists of the Right’: Fernando Collor de Mello.19 Collor won
the first round of the election with 30.5 per cent of the valid vote, and the
second round with 53 per cent (35.1 million votes).
Fernando Collor de Mello, the grandson of Lindolfo Collor, Vargas’s first
labour minister, was the 37-year-old governor of the north-eastern state of
Alagoas, the second smallest and second poorest state in Brazil. A member of
a traditional oligarchical family with interests in the media, he was virtually
unknown outside Alagoas and he had none of the more important parties
behind him. The Partido da Reconstrução Nacional (PRN) was created only
months before the election. His programme was rudimentary to say the least,
but at hundreds of rallies throughout Brazil and on television he made populist

18 See Freire and Ferreira (eds.), A Razão Indignada, Part II Leonel Brizola e o tempo do
trabalhismo democrático (1979–2004).
19 On the Collor de Mello phenomenon, see M.S. Conti, Notícias do Planalto: A imprensa e
Fernando Collor (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1999) and M.A. Villa, Collor Presidente.
Trinta meses de turbulências, reformas, intrigas e corrupção (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record,
2016).

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 POPULISM 189

speeches denouncing corruption in public and private life (which is ironic in

view of what was to come) and attacking the ‘traditional’ politicians representing
the Brazilian ‘elite’. Collor received the strong support of the population with
the lowest income and education: 49 per cent of voters with a family income
of up to one monthly minimum salary, 55 per cent of voters with a low level
of education and 49 per cent of the inhabitants of small towns (up to 20,000
inhabitants).20 With no credible candidate of its own and fearing a victory for
the Left, especially its bête noir on the populist-nationalist Left, Leonel Brizola,
the political and economic elite in general supported Collor de Mello.
Collor de Mello’s base in Congress, however, was weak. Even after the
November 1990 elections the PRN together with some allies on the Right had
only 30 per cent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 40 per cent in
the Senate. Collor introduced a series of ‘neo-liberal’ economic reforms, but
two stabilisation plans failed miserably. Carlos Menem in Argentina, elected
in 1989, and Alberto Fujimori in Peru, elected in 1990, each governed for
ten years, but Collor lasted only two and a half. In 1992 he was engulfed in a
corruption scandal involving extortion, kickbacks for favours, bribery, electoral
fraud and tax evasion. The popular demonstrations in the big cities demanding
his removal from office represented the most significant mass political
mobilisation in Brazil since the movement for direct presidential elections
[diretas já] in 1983–4 at the end of the military dictatorship. Collor de Mello
was successfully impeached by Congress under the Constitution of 1988 and
removed for office, provisionally in September 1992, definitively in December.
The candidate Collor had defeated in the second round of the 1989
presidential election was Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, leader of a new party of the
Left, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers’ Party), founded in February
1980 towards the end of the military dictatorship and, uniquely in Brazilian
political history, built from below (see Essay 7). Its main base was the industrial
working class in São Paulo, together with progressive sections of the urban
middle class and the progressive wing of the Catholic church. Lula himself,
born into poverty in rural Pernambuco and moving to São Paulo as a child, was
a former metal worker, leader of the metalworkers’ union of São Bernardo do
Campos in the metropolitan region of São Paulo. Lula had narrowly defeated
Leonel Brizola in the first round before losing to Collor de Mello in the
second round. He then lost to Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the first round
of the presidential elections of 1994 and 1998. In these three elections Lula
did not seek the support of the poorest and least educated Brazilians, heavily
concentrated in the north and north-east. Their votes went for the most part

20 S.P. Mainwaring, Sistemas partidários em novas democracias: O caso do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro:
Editora FGV, 2001), p. 44.

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190 BRAZIL: ESSAYS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS

to Collor and, to a lesser extent, Cardoso. Neither Lula nor the PT could be
accused of populism in this period.
Lula won the presidency in 2002, at the fourth attempt, primarily because
the PT moved to the political centre ground (see Essay 7). Lula’s Carta ao Povo
Brasileiro [Open Letter to the Brazilian People] (June 2002), while emphasising
the need for social policies to reduce poverty and inequality, dropped socialism,
confirmed the PT’s commitment to democracy and committed a future
PT government to orthodox economic policies. Lula received the support
of a major party of the Centre-Right, the Partido Liberal (PL), which was
offered the vice-presidency. It is true that for the first time the PT developed a
public relations/media campaign around the personal history and charismatic
personality of its leader, with a strong emotional appeal to Brazilians who had
not previously identified with the party (‘Lula, paz e amor’ [Lula, peace and
love]). But the poorest and least educated voters, especially in the north and
the north-east, were still not yet the party’s main target. It would be difficult to
argue that the PT in 2002 adopted a ‘populist’ electoral strategy and campaign.
In government Lula maintained the ‘responsible’ economic policies of the
previous Cardoso administrations (1995–2002), but was more committed to
poverty reduction and modest distribution of income through compensatory
social policies. At the same time, while encouraging some early experiments
with participatory democracy in states and municípios controlled by the PT,
most famously in Porto Alegre, Lula appeared committed to the consolidation
of Brazil’s existing democratic institutions, practices and culture: free and fair
elections for both the executive and legislative branches of government, federal,
state and municipal; separation of powers; an independent judiciary; and a
free press. Despite the mensalão corruption scandal, which undermined the
credibility of the PT as an ‘ethical’ party and severely dented his own popularity,
Lula was comfortably re-elected in October 2006.
In 2006, unlike 2002, Lula was elected overwhelmingly by the poor and
uneducated, mainly in the north and north-east. (In the more developed
municípios of the south and south-east, where the middle class, certainly the
professional middle class, had turned against him largely because of corruption
and his association with some of the worst elements in the old political
oligarchy, he actually lost the election.) Lula’s success was not, however, the
result of a typically polarising anti-elite, anti-globalisation, anti-American
populist discourse. Personal identification was, of course, an important factor:
Lula as ‘one of us’. But it can be largely explained as the political dividend of
four years of improved economic growth, higher levels of employment in the
formal sector, low inflation, regular increases in the minimum wage above the
rate of inflation, easier access to credit and, above all, the significant reduction
of extreme poverty resulting from the comprehensive, but modest and relatively

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 POPULISM 191

cheap, conditional cash transfer program, the bolsa família, from which 11.4
million households (35 million Brazilians, mostly in the north-east and north)
were benefitting (see Essay 7). It remained difficult therefore to describe Lula
as a ‘neo-populist of the Left’ – although he was remarkably tolerant towards
those politicians and governments in South America for whom this description
was more appropriate.
Why with its high levels of poverty and inequality, its low levels of education,
and the continued existence of second-class and even third-class citizens, had
Brazil been generally more resistant to neo-populism of the Left than many
other Latin American countries? The size and complexity of the country and,
in particular, its federal system, have been offered by way of explanation.
However, the United States, for example, has had a long and distinctive history
of populism, beginning with the People’s Party in the 1890s, then governor
Huey Long of Louisiana in the 1920s, Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s,
governor George Wallace of Alabama in the 1960s, Ross Perot in 1992, and
finally Bernie Sanders on the Left and Donald Trump on the Right in the
2016 presidential election. The conservative nature of the Brazilian people,
especially the poor, their tolerance of social injustice, their limited demands,
their resistance historically to political mobilisation, is also put forward as an
explanation. More immediately relevant for the period since the 1980s is the
fact that, despite the need for political reform, especially electoral reform, in the
interests of more effective governability, greater accountability and a reduction
in the disturbing level of political corruption, Brazil has had, for the first time
in its history, a reasonably well-functioning representative democracy and, not
least, a relatively strong and active civil society.
Furthermore, two of the three dominant political parties, the PT and the
PSDB, which had been the principal contestants in every presidential election
since 1994, are well-established social democratic parties, though the PSDB
had been gradually moving to the neo-liberal Centre-Right and the strength of
PT’s commitment to democratic practice is questioned by some. The biggest
party in Brazil (in number of federal deputies, senators, governors, state
deputies, mayors and local councillors) is the solidly centrist and clientelistic
PMDB (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro). It has not fielded a
candidate for the presidency since 1994, but it plays a decisive role in elections
– and in government. There are parties of the Centre-Right, like the PFL/
DEM, but no strong parties of the Right which clearly represent the ‘elite’, the
‘oligarchy’, and therefore provide an easy target for politicians with populist
tendencies. And US imperialism is not in Brazil the target for populists that,
for historic reasons, it is in many Spanish American republics.
The first two years of Lula’s second administration (2007–8) were notable
for a continuation of the moderate, ‘progressive’ social policies pursued during

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192 BRAZIL: ESSAYS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS

the first administration within a framework of ‘responsible’, orthodox macro-

economic policies and consolidated democratic institutions. In the first half
of 2009, however, with his popularity at an all-time high (70–75 per cent
approval), especially with the poorest sections of Brazilian society and the rapidly
expanding lower middle class (now almost 50 per cent of the population), his
principal political base, and at the same time growing international recognition
and admiration (‘the most popular politician on Earth’ as President Obama
called him), there was increasing evidence of Lula’s populist inclinations which,
if they had existed in the past, had been successfully constrained or repressed.
Former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso articulated the concerns of
many Brazilians when in November, in his monthly newspaper column, which
is widely syndicated throughout Brazil, he referred to what he regarded as Lula’s
increasingly undemocratic behavior, lack of respect for the constitution and
the law, and populist authoritarianism, which was in his view heading in the
direction of ‘subperonismo-lulismo’.21 Social scientists had already begun to
identify a new political phenomenon: lulismo.22
Lula was clearly tempted to try to amend the Constitution of 1988 in order
to run for a third term in 2010. Although almost certain to win if he did so,
and some popular demonstrations in favor of ‘mais quatro’ [four more years]
(sometimes using the slogan ‘Queremos [We want] Lula’, with its echoes of
Getúlio in 1945), Lula finally resisted the temptation. He confirmed his total
commitment to Brazil’s democratic institutions. He was popular, he liked to
say, but not populist.23 The election would be the first in which Lula was not a
candidate since the end of the military dictatorship 25 years earlier.
Lula, however, went to unprecedented lengths actively to transfer his
immense popularity to his personally chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff. As
it proved more difficult than expected – for Dilma, a 62-year-old technocrat
lacking charisma who had never before contested an election, was, it has to be
said, a very problematic candidate – Lula’s strategy and his discourse became
increasingly populist. Government expenditure was significantly increased
(to the level of fiscal irresponsibility, in the view of some economists) and,
with full media exposure, Dilma was linked on every possible occasion to
the PAC (Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento [Program of Accelerated
Economic Growth] for massive public investment, mainly in infrastructure),

21 F.H. Cardoso, ‘Para onde vamos?’, O Estado de São Paulo, 1 November 2009.
22 See A. Singer,’Raízes sociais e ideológicas do lulismo’, Novos Estudos CEBRAP (November
2009), 82–103. See also R. Ricci, Lulismo: da era dos movimentos sociais à ascensão da nova
classe média brasileira (Brasília: Fundação Astrojildo Pereira and Contraponto, 2010); A.
Singer, Os Sentidos de Lulismo (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012); A. Singer and I.
Loureiro (eds.), As Contradicoes do Lulismo. A que ponto chegamos? (São Paulo: Boitempo,
2016).
23 E.g. speeches reported in O Globo, 3 June, 6 June 2009.

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 POPULISM 193

to the government’s social programs, especially the bolsa família, conditional

cash transfers to the poorest sectors of society, and the ‘Minha casa, minha
vida’ housing policy, to the nationalist sentiments surrounding the discovery of
off-shore ‘pré-sal’ oil (Brazil’s ‘passport to the future’) – and most of all to the
president himself. Lula did everything in his power to make the 2010 election
a plebiscitary election: for or against him (and his chosen candidate); for or
against his record compared with that of his predecessor FHC; for or against
‘nosso projeto’ [our project]; ultimately, for or against the people [o povo]. The
election was not essentially about Dilma, nor the PT; it was about Lula and
his extraordinary empathy with the mass of the Brazilian people, especially the
poor in the north and north-east.
In a speech in Porto Alegre at the end of July 2010 that could hardly have
been more ‘populist’, Lula declared, to great applause, that a direita [the Right]
had devoted itself 24 hours a day to trying to hold back as forças democráticas
in Brazil. He had suffered eight years of ataques, provocações e infámies. But he
had made it clear to the elite, which he claimed had driven Getúlio to suicide
and forced Jânio Quadros and Joao Goulart to resign, that if they wanted to
confront him they would find him on the streets with o povo brasileiro. In
Joinville, Santa Catarina, in September he argued that a direita had failed in its
attempt to drive him out of power in 2005 (a reference to the mensalão crisis)
because he had the one ingrediente his predecessors did not have – vocês [you,
the people]. In October he boasted that he would always win on the street
because he had established uma relação real e direto com o povo. When things get
feia [ugly], he advised ‘Dilminha’, in November, vai para perto do povo; [when
you do not know what to do], pergunte ao povo; [in doubt], o povo é a solução;
[the people will never disappoint you].24
Dilma Rousseff, who had been entirely invented by Lula, won the election
in October in the second round – with broadly the popular support Lula had
in 2006. A Dilma presidency had been frequently referred to as ‘um terceiro
mandato de Lula’ [Lula’s third mandate]. Hugo Chávez was not alone in
comparing – in his case, favourably – Lula and Dilma to the Kirchners in
Argentina. There remained the strong suspicion that Lula was planning to
contest the 2014 presidential election as was permitted under the Constitution
of 1988 or, if as the incumbent Dilma insisted on standing for re-election,
perhaps the 2018 election (when he would be 73 years old). Either way, he
would return to power, like Getúlio in 1950, ‘nos braços do povo’ [in the arms
of the people].
In the event, Dilma was again the candidate of the PT in 2014 and was
re-elected president. Whatever plans for 2018 Lula might have had were
overshadowed by the impeachment of Dilma in August 2016 and her

24 O Globo, 30 July, 14 September, 4 October, 26 November 2010.

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194 BRAZIL: ESSAYS ON HISTORY AND POLITICS

replacement by vice-president Michel Temer of the PMDB and a government

of the Centre-Right (see Essay 5), the resulting decline in popular support
for the PT (as was clearly shown in the municipal elections in October 2016,
see Essay 7), and the several, ongoing investigations into his role in various
corruption scandals which threatened to make him ineligible to run for office
again.25 Lula nevertheless insisted that he would be the PT’s candidate for the
presidency in October 2018. Early opinion polls put him some distance ahead
in a crowded field with a potential 35 per cent of the vote in the first round.
The 2018 election, he believed, would be another confrontation between the
elite and the people. And he alone truly represented the people.26
The conditions for the success of populism in Brazil certainly existed: firstly,
the crisis of liberal representative democracy resulting from the impeachment
of President Dilma Rousseff, the corruption scandals which had brought not
only the PT but all the mainstream parties in Congress into disrepute, and
popular disenchantment with the political system and the entire political class
(see Essay 5); secondly, several years of economic crisis, with zero or minus rates
of growth, falling living standards, rising unemployment, severe cuts in public
services, and the persistence of poverty and extreme inequality (see Essay 7);
thirdly, increasing urban violence and citizen insecurity. A populist challenge
to the established political order was highly probable in the 2018 presidential
election. However, it was just as likely, perhaps more likely in view of Lula’s
expected ineligibility, to come from a populist politician of the Right as from a
populist politician of the Left.27

25 In July 2017 Lula was sentenced to nine years and four months in prison for money
laundering and passive corruption. On appeal in January 2018 the sentence was increased to
12 years and one month. The 2010 Lei da Ficha Limpa (Clean Record) prohibits candidates
with criminal records from running for public office for eight years.
26 On 7 April in a emotional hour-long speech delivered to his more militant supporters at
the headquarters of the Sindicato dos Metalúrgicos do ABC in São Bernardo do Campo,
immediately before handing himself over to the federal police to begin his term in prison,
Lula declared that he had devoted his life to defending the interests of vocês (you), os pobres
(the poor), os humildes (the humble), o povo (the people). And he would continue to do so.
Lula was, he said, referring to himself in the third person, no longer a human being. He was
an idea. (‘Eu não pararei porque eu não sou um ser humano. Eu sou uma ideia’.)
27 In opinion polls taken at the end of 2017, nine months before the elections during
which much could and undoubtedly would change, the only candidate among the early
presidential front runners posing any kind of threat to Lula was the populist, far-right Jair
Messias (sic) Bolsonaro of the tiny Social Christian Party (PSC). Sixty-three years old, a
former army captain, seven-term federal deputy for the state of Rio de Janeiro (with the
highest number of votes – almost half a million – and a huge following on social media),
Bolsonaro is a notorious apologist for Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–85).

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