6. Populism in Brazil*

At 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 the first administration within a framework of ‘responsible’, orthodox macroeconomic 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), 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 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

* 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.

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).

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.

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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).