Brazilian populism: good for politicians, bad for the poor

The first political leader to capitalise on the preservation of the political mind-set inherited from the countryside was Getúlio Vargas, a prosperous caudillo (rural oligarch). In 1937, he masterminded a coup that installed the Estado Novo (New State), a populist dictatorship where he assumed the role of paternal ruler who directly appealed to the popular masses as their supreme ruler and benefactor. As Joseph Page points out:

Upon assuming the presidency after the revolution of 1930, he set about creating a relationship of dependency not only between government and private enterprise ... but also between government and labor. This relationship turned out to be a mirror image of the traditional tie between haves and have-nots in rural Brazil.

Peasants who moved to the cities encountered a social structure quite different from the one to which they were accustomed. They have to live in amorphous slums and, as Brazil industrialized, to toil in impersonal workplaces. Thus it was easy for Vargas to substitute the government as the authority figure that would take care of the needs of employees, just as the landlord had done in the countryside.

Curiously, Vargas was a lawyer and landowner who began his political career with the support of other rural oligarchs from his native Rio Grande do Sul. But he was wise enough to perceive that the urbanisation process would dramatically reduce the power of landowners. Originally, however, as the political philosopher and former Brazilian ambassador J.O. de Meira Penna explains:

Vargas was linked mostly to the landlords of his own state, whose interests he continued defending even after he had turned into a populist rabble-rouser. Just after the 1930 "revolution", one of his young followers, Lindolfo Collor, suggested the introduction of a new labor law ... Vargas accepted Collor's ideas with misgivings: "Let's hope this little German will not cause us too much trouble"... But then he understood that the new labor and social welfare laws were copied from the Italian fascist Carta del Lavoro, keeping labor unions strictly under the thumb of the Ministry of Labor in his own government. Thus, the proletarian masses could eventually be mobilized to his advantage ...

Vargas constructed around himself the image of a paternal ruler modelled on the pater familias. He posed as the great "father" of the working classes, expecting absolute loyalty from them to such an extent that, from 1937 to 1945, laws were little more than a tool for the imposition of his personal will. In fact, Vargas was virtually free to instruct public authorities to kill, arrest, and torture anyone he wished.

After visiting the country in 1938, a famous political scientist, Karl Loewenstein, wrote that the greatest asset of the Brazilian dictatorship was the dictator himself, who, as he put it, carried the regime "on his shoulders":

The dictatorship is personalistic in character. In that, it is altogether different from the European totalitarian pattern. No government party protects it, and no coercive ideology supports it. The regime rests on no visible props, except the army; it is based on the popularity of one man alone.

Even since, some of the most successful Brazilian politicians have been proud "disciples" of Vargas. They admire the former dictator for his "progressive" policies of national-statism and welfare-state labourism, which are also very appreciated by voters who wait expectantly for a "saviour" to inaugurate a "tropical paradise" in Brazil.

These voters rationalise: "Vargas was a dictator but for us he was good". Or, as one worker put it: "I never permitted anyone to say anything bad about Vargas ... I knew that he always gave us benefits, my work papers ... I thought, I am a worker, and he has given me so many benefits".

According to the Brazilian sociologist Maria Lucia Victor Barbosa, populism is strong in the country because many Brazilians "make a more emotional reading of the world", so that they are also keen to accept demagogical promises of "messianic nature". This undemocratic aspect of Brazilian society might explain the results of a survey conducted by the United Nations which found in 2004 that only 30.6 per cent of Brazilians regard themselves as democrats.

The survey may reflect nostalgic feelings for previous "benevolent" dictatorships. Its results could have been worse had those who answered favourably to the idea of democracy been asked to explain what they mean by it. Due to the nature of Brazilian society, many Brazilians associate democracy with majority will but not with the rule of law. Indeed, the whole process of "mass mobilisation" tends toward the personification of power, isolating the supposedly "democratic" power of demagogic-populist leaders from the rule of law.

As a result, under the current populist government of President Lula da Silva, corruption has reached unprecedented levels. The Lula administration is responsible for the biggest series of corruption scandals in the country's history. According to James Petras, a left-wing sociology professor and expert on Brazilian politics, "every sector of Lula's Workers' Party (PT) has been implicated in bribery, fraud, vote buying, theft of public funds, failure to report illicit campaign financing, and a host of other felonious behaviour".