Social Bases of the Transition to Democracy in Brazil

Abstract

The election of a civilian president in Brazil in 1985 was a landmark event in the democratic transition begun more than a decade earlier, when President Ernesto Geisel began to relax the repressive measures on which the authoritarian government had relied before then. The military's gradual retreat to the barracks was a response to the erosion of authoritarian legitimation which became evident in the rising levels of public opposition to the regime in the late 1970s.1 Union members, particularly in the Saio Paulo area, staged a wave of illegal strikes to protest government wage policy. As the government accepted IMF recommendations of recession-inducing policies in 1981, business sectors intensified their calls for democratization. Professional groups such as the Lawyers Guild, the National Academy of Science, and the Association of Journalists also played important roles in formulating proposals for an end to political repression and the redemocratization of the political process. Student strikes and the willingness of the Catholic church to give sanctuary to illegally striking workers helped create a charged political atmosphere not unlike that of 1964 in the final months before the coup. The most dramatic protests occurred in 1984, when the authoritarian regime was barely able to face down a national tide of demonstrations involving millions of citizens calling for direct presidential elections. It has been argued forcefully that the authoritarian regime had never been able to develop legitimacy among Brazilians. Support for the regime hinged instead on its economic performance and its ability to suppress political violence. By the early 1980s even this contingent support for the authoritarian regime was slipping away. Although redemocratization was discussed more and more openly, however, it remained unclear exactly what the alternative to rule under military sponsorship was to be. The catch-all phrase used in Brazil for the process of democratization, the abertura democrdtica or democratic opening, obscured exactly what democracy meant to various groups in Brazilian society. This lengthy and ambiguous period of transition to democracy offers an opportunity to examine the process by which dispositions toward democracy take root within civil society. In this article we will show that the mass political culture of Brazil has, during the course of the abertura democrdtica, not only become disaffected from the authoritarian regime, but has also developed two distinct patterns of democratic attachment that presage fundamental conflicts in the functioning of Brazilian democracy. The last decade has not simply seen one more swing of the cycle between authoritarian and democratic regimes. Rather, there is in Brazil an emerging democratic political culture that parallels the experience of Europe, in which advocacy of democratic institutions and of universal suffrage had distinctive class bases before becoming a consensual element of the national political culture. The history of conflict over the establishment of democracy in Europe suggests that the social and ideological bases of democracy were multidimensional. We find the same phenomenon in