Democracy Bedevils Brazil’s President Bolsonaro

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has had a rough debut. Congress recently scotched his decree to relax gun controls, limited his discretionary spending powers and claimed vetting rights over public regulators. Over the howls of the Bible-slinging right-wingers who voted him into office, the Supreme Court made homophobia a crime. The retired army generals he recruited to watch his back have instead been walking back his campaign bluster against leading trade partner China and muting talk about invading Venezuela. “They're turning me into the Queen of England,” Bolsonaro complained.

Thanks to Bolsonaro's authoritarian exhortations, Brazil's renascent democracy was supposed to be in peril and a return to dictatorship imminent. Yet six crisis-filled months of mercurial populism have turned that fantasy on its head. Brazil's constitutional democracy looks fit to survive Bolsonaro; the question is, can Bolsonaro survive democracy?

To be sure, Bolsonaro remains unbowed. Brazil's strong presidential system lets him set the policy agenda, regale cronies with pork and patronage, and keep congress on its back foot by firing off executive decrees. Indeed, only one elected president since Brazil's return to democracy 34 years ago issued more decrees this early in his term, and he was forced to resign in disgrace. (Given the willfulness in Brasilia, that record may not stand.) Congress has shown it can push back; it just overturned his proposed gun bill. But don't call Bolsonaro a figurehead just yet. “My pen is mightier than yours,” he told lower house Speaker Rodrigo Maia.

Such imperiousness, naturally, has fed the public funk over the state of Brazil's constitutional democracy. The latest scandal over hacked phone conversations, pointing to improper confabulation between a former graft-busting judge and the lead prosecutor in Brazil's Carwash corruption scandal, has amplified the conceit that elite interests have their thumbs on the scale of justice. And now comes Netflix with a disturbing documentary that suggests Bolsonaro's rise was the endgame of an oligarchic cabal that took democracy to the edge.

Yet that misses the mark. More than a nostalgia for autocracy, Bolsonaro's penchant for decrees belies a political disability. He spent 28 years on congress's back bench, wooing favored constituencies by championing small-bore bills, most of which languished in committee. He has brought the same modus operandi to Brazil's highest office, flogging pet causes—open carry, home schooling and abolishing speed traps—as if they were national priorities. “His is a typical lower tier lawmaker's agenda,” said Getulio Vargas Foundation political Octavio Amorim Neto. “It's what Bolsonaro knows how to do well and it spares him from squandering political capital on unpopular measures.”

The profligate pension system?  Brazil's regressive tax system? Foreign trade? The anticorruption bill? Let the wonks in Brasilia—Economy Minister Paulo Guedes, Agriculture Minister Tereza Cristina da Costa Dias and Justice Minister Sergio Moro—struggle with those electorally toxic items before the mutinous legislature and demanding international customers.

By eschewing politics, Bolsonaro left the traditionally reactive congress plenty of room for maneuver. Lawmakers are stepping up and across the aisle as never before. Thanks to that unlikely turn of events, Brazil's crucial agenda of economic and bureaucratic reform has decoupled from the presidential palace, and many of the initiatives now stand a fair chance of becoming law.

Consider that Maia, one of Bolsonaro's harshest critics, has seized the banner of pension reform, which is expected to clear its first major committee vote this week and a floor vote before the full legislature later this month. Maia is also reportedly spearheading a tax reform proposal. “Congress has its own agenda now,” said Amorim.

Another incongruous advance: on June 28, after 20 years of talks, Brazilian negotiators led the way to a landmark deal  between the South American trade bloc Mercosur and the European Union. It was a victory for the closet multilateralists in a government that has decried globalism as cultural Marxism.

Optimists glimpse a new if still tentative model of governance in the works, one that political analyst Fernando Schuler, of the Sao Paulo business school Insper, calls “co-responsibility” between a strong president and an empowered legislature. The problem, said Schuler, is that this model doesn't exist. “We're somewhere in the middle,” he said.

Bastard parliamentarianism has its limitations in a legislature with 30 parties and a political system handicapped for a central leader. “Congress's new protagonism fills a void, but reforms and policymaking depend on a president rolling up his sleeves, whipping congressional votes and getting laws passed,” said Amorim.

The danger is not one of a “country speeding toward an authoritarian past,” as the lugubrious narrator puts it in Netflix's “The Edge of Democracy.” In many ways the country's civic spirit and institutions have never been so resilient. The larger problem is compassless politics, which corrodes consensus and encourages populist outsiders and adventurers.

Latin America's largest democracy is safe. It's Brazil's politics that needs some urgent work.  

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mac Margolis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He was a reporter for Newsweek and is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”

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