The Gavel and the Dagger

The upcoming election in Brazil has, in a focused moment of short duration, been denigrated from smooth sailing unto a coronation of the man whose first name already resembles the post-junta era into an upset of tumultuous, and eerily tragic proportions. First, and putting the gavel down on the hopes of and the two years that can be described (if not fully confirmed) as a quasi-legal, constitutional war against the Partido dos Trabalhadores camp, Lula of Brazil - surnames are superfluous - will remain in custody throughout the duration of what might have been his third and fourth terms, his candidacy rejected. With this decision, the aspirations of the PT of even reaching the second round are crushed, if not obliterated. The decision, as the Brazilians may have said it, is never final. Just as certain as the assumption that everything is fucked is that nothing is forever. Though, as that metaphor may suggest in its not-so-sublime eidelon of horror, is that bad times are here to stay, and maybe for too long for recovery. The sweet days heralded in 2002, at any rate, are now definitively in the past, its lions caged, humiliated and made ridiculous, by their sins as much as any effort.

So quickly, from sublime greatness and promise of renewal, to mediocrity fitted to no other name.

Second, the man dreaded and already marked - if not crowned - as the "alternative" as well as "alternative winner", hard-right darling and "Brazilian Trump" (fathom that, stacked with all your cultural prejudices) Captain Jair Bolsonaro has met upon a slimmer, less weighty, somehow less expected but possibly more final, more odious constriction when savaged by a sudden plunge of a sharp object in a less verbal and more unquestionably deadly case of electoral violence. In press releases, and not contradicting the well-known and fast-pulsating consequences of abdominal bladed violence, the great "alternative" has lost two fifths of his blood volume. What cannot be expected is that this gentle slump in electoral ethics will be followed by a corresponding one in the polls - at least, not for the intended target. Short of death, not to be ruled out but less likely (arguably less desirable) by the minute, and permanent brain damage (arguably less discernable) a peak for the rebel challenging a system is more likely. And in a gesture of some grace, under cause for grief if not under pressure, the candidate conceded that one can only expect the worst from a campaign so divisive, with rhetoric which may at best be described as colourful bouncing across the political field. With manyfold of tragic cases in recent memory, all that may be said is that in Brazil, no one is safe and only death (a)certain(s).

The emergence of the third of the BRICS economies, staggering now but previously jumping, clawing at roaring pace which dwarfed its historical (and, as of yet, perhaps more tragic) companion and near-nuclear partner South Africa has been marked with a division, which can only be summed up with the increasingly popular slogan, "polarisation". As the pace into the future are faced with new challenges, so the alternative pop up in the marketplace of ideas. Just as any marketplace, unwanted products are bound to be as thriving as people who think differently than your good self. Here, we are discussing the purchase of a head of a country of over 200 million, the ninth largest economy in the world. There are no opt-outs, save for exile. To let it depend upon the decision of a judiciary may (at least to a generally parliamentary-minded Swede) seem arbitrary. By the strong wrist that wielded a harmful object, much too close to playing canasta with the future of the growing Latin American power hub and its designated, in any outcome, economic and ideological - if not linguistic or cultural - nucleus.

The judge architects of this election, rigid shapers of its starting field. Now they, the less populist-friendly system they represent, the safeguardians of democracy, may soon be its victim.

So, how did we get here? In brief terms, the narrative seems to resemble a familiar one in Europe, particularly if one is careful to emphasise the history as east of the Iron Curtain. After many decades of repressive dictatorship which left many players still at the table traumatised and deprived of their fundamental rights way into their adults years (when did you last time consider the current Chancellor of Germany first cast her vote in a democratic election at age 36?). After its final collapse and the long-awaited and universally celebrated - even before Fukuyama's screeched-down but almost as universally accepted prophecy - arrival of democracy and an era of good feelings. After a two good decades party politics dominated by the emerging blue PSDB (or "toucan") and red PT (sometimes the "black cat") camps and two charismatic, heavy-hearted, committed leaders of wide-ranging popularity - Cardoso for the foremost and Lula for a strong and, until recently, still viable second - the shifting lines and personal ambitions, as well as shallowing waters of corruption now reaching, as they ever have, into the halls of power even when vacated and accustomed to new tenants, gradual to boiling distrust and uproar followed. Dilma, in a vote I considered ascertained enough to put my money on, defeated toucan veteran Serra and carried the PT banner into a new era of either Lula-ism beyond Lula, always a scary prospect even when the supposed power behind the throne is not a man of pure authoritarian ambition (as in the easy-forgone member of the BRICS club) or of party politics gone truly factional an impersonal, always unlikely even in a fairly stable presidential system such as the United States, confirmed in some sense in the last presidential election when, in the words of the great writer of history Victor Davis Hanson, the prospects and dreams projected by Obama proved not "transferrable to a 69-year old multi-millionare white woman engaged in scandal like Hillary Clinton". Damning words, but who will rise to negate them, or explore the mystical force which went to work in 2016 but not that night in Grant Park?

An invitation to violence... the promise of renewal stands strong, and stark, with the incoherent populist phenomenon, but alongside its equally incoherent promises are a lust, indeed a grab, for power as apparent as its disdain for its existing incarnations. But if he (so beloved by the Pentecostals, and not just of Brazil) can be named a Savonarola, the gnomes of Brasilia can rightly be called Borgias.

Brought down, but certainly not defeated. 

This - predictably, in some sense necessarily - did not happen, and combined with growing political resistance and abandonment of PT candidates, it was enough to indict her not long after her narrow re-election where she had already been christened the supposed establishment candidate by a broad range of established voces non populi, or senes not in the actual senate, and every living inhabitant of the office she aspired to occupy (always a bad sign) with a series of supposedly proven but by no means unusual or limited to the black cats currently enthroned accusations of record-level proportions. These accusations, now proven or accepted by the Supreme Court of the federation, are likely not ungrounded in substantial and, for the dreams and aspirations of the 2002 revolution, damning facts. They are however a reflection which - while acknowledging the right's being out of power for 16 years or indeed longer, if discounting not just Temer's apolitical or meta-political interregnum but also the preceding technocratic, fairly centrist Cardoso administration - does point the finger equally to the particular investment of the judiciary of investigating Socialist crimes against the state, while failing to uncover or properly manage the apparent and already-uncovered mismanagements of the tucanos in numerous state governments. For Bolsorano, in the very least, this may not be said, but such a verdict is not merely fresh, but also leaving a bitter vacuous taste of something far worse; a hint of bitter almond. If he is the alternative, not only to the argued betrayal of the Trabalhadores, which sins will be place in place of graft and the entrenchment of privation among the mobilised many? And will the machinery of extra-political bureaucrats, of which he may earn some clout but no more footing than the order just overthrown - rather than quietly, even shamefully abandoned, the great verb of the democratic ethos of consensus, another concept so shambolically trampled by the strongman vying so openly to pry her thighs - withstand his more foul and openly declared attempts to subvert the general, national and legal into the strictly personal, the Captain's whim?

Ejected, or self-evicted, from his master's table - but the rules of the court of the Trump are not those of the Tudors, and the old world is as ripe for taking as the new. The endorsement of the scion of national-populism in Brazil has not been as explicit, but nonetheless cloned a phenomenon deemed, to diminishing returns, as unelectable, unthinkable and undemocratic. It remains to be seen whether the wave of a "global national" movement will be redoubled in the elections to European Parliament in 2019, or whether it will be deemed arrested as in Le Pen's second place to Macron.

One certainly optimistic, if not unquestioned alternative is the "global movement" of anti-globalism, decisively democratic and populistic in its essence, yet with a clearly displayed nucleus of disdain - invective and in spirit - to the populus and to democratic institutions and practices (liberal democratic; in the Brazilian case the institutions which in supreme paradoxic heralded his rise) which lately has seen a formal endorsement by global and likewise Europhile pundit and agent provocateur (or rather agent of chaos) Steve Bannon of Bolsonaro's campaign. There are numerous ends, or rather paths, down this road: Either a bloc of generally amicable self-governing nation states, interlocked in mutual conflict successful in the spirit of mutural, haphazardly respectful cooperation (the rising tide of refugees would pose a main point of agreement) or eventual conflict; the twentieth century experienced anew rather than, as have been said of the new forces of the right, repealed? This is, it has to be said, not the object of this "new right", no more than the acquirement of Lebensraum for a steadily rising wave of domestic babes to mirror the changing political spectrum. (The domestic one, it should be said, will be hurtful enough, and spread far beyond the prospective boundaries of any Greater German, or Brazilian Reich.) The dynamic of the national-populist phenomenon, if it can be called such, turned against itself remains to be seen, but as the prospects of its evolvement into a synthesis of a post-liberal, post-nativist right (pick your term) seems unlikely to be peaceful and conciliatory, we - and in this case the great people of Brazil - may, with only a pugilist of mediocrity rising to catch it, be bracing for tough changes ahead.

Once so celebrated - but by everyone - now so humbled... Victims of the grapes of democracy, in their own right?

I have already mentioned that the greatest error of a Trump administration, now sordidly unaltered (though, in fairness, matched in this by many more admired, more cheered, including the scions of the Lula and Dilma soon to be more or less deserving martyrs) will be the failure to act on the great question of our time; certainly on this onset of our century. Will the great era of a post-political era, now thoroughly trashed and consigned to the dustbin as even its greatest foes yet sing their praise, and the still, if not more than ever, shaking boundaries of nuclear destruction and downfall keep sustaining pressure to the edge of civilisation's survival (now seemingly out of hands of any upcoming Brazilian junta) survive the destruction of the ecosystem which - even at the cusp of action in the rest of the world - may now be consigned to unalterable and devastating change on account of this man alone? All we know is that, as the Brazilians say, nothing is eternal, nothing is certainly fucked, and while the country has seen worse days, the world has certainly known better... and endured.