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How Brazil’s democracy stepped back from the cliff (The Globe and Mail)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-how-brazils-democracy-stepped-back-from-the-cliff/

Oliver Stuenkel is a political analyst and a professor at the School of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo.

Jair Bolsonaro’s historic defeat in Brazil’s presidential elections yesterday marks the 15th straight opposition victory in Latin America. Over the past years, not a single democratic leader in the region has managed to get re-elected or pick his or her successor. Anti-incumbency sentiment across the region – mostly a product of rising poverty and inequality, low growth and insufficient public services – is so dominant that it explains part of why Mr. Bolsonaro became the first president in Brazilian history not to win re-election.

Yet regional dynamics and a very challenging macroeconomic environment do not tell the whole story of why Brazil’s opposition pulled off a remarkable victory. After all, Mr. Bolsonaro enjoyed, like all his predecessors, a massive incumbency advantage involving the ability to spend more than $17.5-billion to temporarily increase his approval ratings.

Indeed, what is likely to have made the difference was an unprecedented opposition strategy of building a very broad pro-democracy alliance. Very soon after Mr. Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, a growing number…

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Oliver Stuenkel

Oliver Della Costa Stuenkel é analista político, autor, palestrante e professor na Escola de Relações Internacionais da Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) em São Paulo. Ele também é pesquisador no Carnegie Endowment em Washington DC e no Instituto de Política Pública Global (GPPi) ​​em Berlim, e colunista do Estadão e da revista Americas Quarterly. Sua pesquisa concentra-se na geopolítica, nas potências emergentes, na política latino-americana e no papel do Brasil no mundo. Ele é o autor de vários livros sobre política internacional, como The BRICS and the Future of Global Order (Lexington) e Post-Western World: How emerging powers are remaking world order (Polity). Ele atualmente escreve um livro sobre a competição tecnológica entre a China e os Estados Unidos.

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