Wishing everyone a very Happy New Year!
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became president of Brazil again today.
Twenty years after first entering the presidency, twelve years after leaving it, and after a political journey that included corruption investigations, imprisonment, the annulment of his convictions and an extraordinary return to electoral politics, Lula has now begun his third term.
The inauguration itself completes one of the closest presidential transitions in Brazilian democratic history. Lula defeated Jair Bolsonaro in October by 50.90% to 49.10%, receiving just over 2.1 million more votes out of more than 118 million valid ballots. Bolsonaro never delivered the conventional concession that normally follows democratic defeat and left Brazil for Florida on Friday, meaning he was absent from today’s transfer of power.
Yet Lula became president anyway.
That may be the most important political fact.
When I wrote about Brazil after the election in November, I argued that democracy depends heavily on loser’s consent. That remains true, but perhaps the phrase needs qualification. A democracy benefits enormously when defeated politicians explicitly acknowledge legitimate results because concessions provide information to supporters that the contest is over. They lower uncertainty, reduce incentives for confrontation and reaffirm that political competition will continue through future elections.
But democratic institutions cannot ultimately depend on a losing politician feeling generous enough to concede.
If the defeated president possesses a personal veto over whether power transfers, the office never truly belonged to the institution.
It belonged to the person occupying it.
Brazil has now demonstrated the distinction.
Bolsonaro did not need to place the presidential sash on Lula for Lula to become president. He did not need to attend the inauguration. He did not need to congratulate Lula. His emotional acceptance of defeat was not a constitutional requirement.
The votes were counted.
Electoral institutions certified the result.
The courts recognised it.
Congress proceeded.
The incoming administration prepared.
The outgoing state bureaucracy transferred authority.
At noon today, constitutional time moved forward whether Bolsonaro wanted it to or not.
That is what institutionalisation looks like.
The personal ritual of concession is valuable because it lubricates the transfer.
The transfer itself has to operate without it.
This is a distinction between norms and rules. Healthy democracies need both, but they perform different functions. Rules establish the minimum behaviour institutions can compel. Norms create expectations that make those rules easier to operate.
A president is legally required to leave office when the term ends.
A president is normally expected to congratulate the successor and participate in the handover.
Breaking the second is corrosive.
Breaking the first would be constitutional rupture.
Bolsonaro appears to have chosen absence rather than direct confrontation.
That is not admirable democratic leadership.
It is still considerably better than attempting to remain in office through force.
This is why political analysis needs categories between exemplary behaviour and dictatorship. Democracies often survive through politicians doing the minimum required by institutions rather than behaving nobly.
The system should be designed accordingly.
A constitution built on the assumption that every leader will voluntarily place national interest above personal ambition is not much of a constitution.
Institutions exist partly because people cannot always be trusted to exercise restraint.
Brazil’s transfer therefore provides a useful contrast with Peru earlier this month. Pedro Castillo faced removal and attempted to dissolve the legislature threatening his position. The Peruvian state refused to follow him.
Bolsonaro lost an election after repeatedly attacking the reliability of the voting system, yet Brazil’s institutions continued processing the transition.
In both cases, the relevant democratic question was not whether the president behaved well.
It was whether institutions remained capable of functioning when the president did not.
This is perhaps a more realistic measure of institutional strength than expecting perfect political leadership.
Strong institutions should survive bad leaders.
If democracy works only when democrats occupy every important office, it is not particularly resilient.
Brazil’s institutions have certainly been tested. Bolsonaro spent years questioning electronic voting and repeatedly suggested that the electoral system could be manipulated. After his defeat, some supporters refused to accept the result. Protest camps appeared outside military installations, and some demonstrators openly demanded military intervention to prevent Lula taking office.
That last demand crosses an important democratic boundary.
Citizens have every right to oppose Lula.
They can protest his policies before he implements them. They can criticise his history, corruption controversies, economic programme or political alliances. They can campaign for Bolsonaro or another conservative candidate in the future.
They cannot democratically demand that the military cancel an election because their preferred candidate lost.
The distinction sounds obvious.
Brazil’s history makes it especially important.
The country experienced military dictatorship from 1964 until 1985. The democratic system operating today is therefore not some ancient permanent feature of Brazilian politics. Many Brazilians alive now lived under military government.
Calls for military intervention are consequently not abstract constitutional speculation.
They invoke an institution that governed the country within living memory.
The armed forces’ behaviour during the transition therefore matters enormously. Their democratic role is not to determine whether Lula is a good president.
It is to remain outside the decision.
This is one of the paradoxes of military power in democracies. The armed forces possess extraordinary coercive capacity, but their constitutional value often comes from the things they refuse to do.
A general declining to become an electoral arbiter contributes more to democratic stability than a thousand speeches about patriotism.
Power exercised through restraint appears again.
There is also something symbolically important about the way Lula received the presidential sash today. Because Bolsonaro was absent, the traditional transfer from outgoing president to incoming president could not occur normally. Instead, representatives of Brazilian society participated in the ceremony.
That image can easily become sentimental, but the symbolism is politically interesting. It reframes presidential authority as something transferred through the constitutional state and ultimately derived from citizens rather than personally bestowed by one leader upon another.
Presidents do not create successors.
Elections do.
That principle is worth preserving because personalised politics encourages the opposite impression. Leaders begin to behave as though their political movements, parties and even states are extensions of themselves.
Bolsonarismo demonstrates some of this personalisation. Bolsonaro remains the central reference point for much of the Brazilian right, even after leaving office.
Lulismo has its own personalised features. Lula’s extraordinary political career means the Brazilian left is also heavily organised around one individual whose personal popularity exceeds that of many institutions associated with him.
Brazil therefore enters 2023 with two enormous political movements strongly connected to individual leaders.
That creates a long-term institutional question.
What happens after them?
Lula is now 77.
Bolsonaro is 67.
Neither can organise Brazilian politics indefinitely.
Durable democratic systems need political organisations capable of surviving their founders and charismatic leaders.
This is where parties matter.
Personal political movements can mobilise voters extremely effectively because people identify with individuals more easily than bureaucratic organisations. But parties provide succession mechanisms, ideological continuity and internal procedures capable of surviving changes in leadership.
A democracy dominated by personalities can therefore remain electorally competitive while becoming institutionally fragile.
Every succession becomes a crisis because nobody possesses enough legitimacy to inherit the movement.
Brazil’s future will depend partly on whether both left and right become more institutionalised beyond Lula and Bolsonaro.
Lula’s immediate governing coalition makes that problem even more complicated. His victory was produced by an unusually broad alliance extending beyond the Workers’ Party and traditional left. Centrists and former political opponents supported him partly because they considered Bolsonaro a threat to democratic institutions.
That coalition succeeded at removing Bolsonaro.
It now has to govern.
The distinction is substantial.
An anti-Bolsonaro coalition can agree that Bolsonaro should lose.
A governing coalition needs to agree about budgets.
How much should Brazil spend?
How quickly should public debt stabilise?
How should social programmes expand?
How should the Amazon be protected?
What should happen to state-owned enterprises?
How should taxation change?
What relationship should Brazil maintain with China, the United States and Russia?
Those questions reveal ideological differences that electoral opposition could temporarily conceal.
This is the problem of negative coalition decay.
Once the opponent who created the coalition leaves office, the common threat becomes less immediate and internal disagreements become more important.
Lula therefore needs to convert an electoral coalition into a governing coalition.
That will require compromise with political actors considerably more centrist than parts of his own party.
Brazil’s Congress makes this especially important. Lula won the presidency, but Brazilian voters did not simultaneously hand the left uncontested legislative power. Conservative and centre-right forces remain powerful in Congress, meaning presidential victory will not translate automatically into legislative success.
Again, Brazil has produced distributed legitimacy rather than one ideological mandate.
Lula represents the presidential majority.
Congress represents another aggregation of the same electorate.
The president will have to negotiate.
This should constrain interpretations of his 50.90% victory. Winning by 1.8 percentage points does not make Lula’s political programme illegitimate.
It should make claims of sweeping ideological transformation implausible.
A narrow mandate is still a mandate.
It is also evidence that nearly half the participating electorate preferred something else.
That fact should influence style of government even if it does not change constitutional authority.
There is a difference between governing decisively and governing as though opposition does not exist.
Brazil needs the first without the second.
This may be particularly important on economic policy. Lula’s earlier presidencies coincided with a favourable international commodity environment and substantial improvements in poverty and living standards. Those achievements contribute heavily to his political reputation.
But 2023 is not 2003.
Brazil faces fiscal constraints, global interest rates are higher, and the international economic environment is weaker. Lula cannot simply recreate the conditions of his first presidency through political will.
This is another danger of restoration politics.
Voters remember periods of prosperity and elect the leader associated with them.
The leader returns.
The external environment does not.
Successful government therefore requires adaptation rather than nostalgia.
Lula’s social-policy ambitions will need to coexist with fiscal credibility. Brazil has significant inequality and poverty, providing strong arguments for social spending. It also needs a sustainable fiscal framework if the government wants to prevent higher borrowing costs and inflation expectations from undermining those programmes.
This is not simply the familiar argument that left-wing governments should spend less.
The distribution and credibility of spending matter.
Public investment or transfers can produce substantial social returns.
But permanent programmes require permanent financing eventually.
Britain’s experience with Liz Truss demonstrated the opposite ideological version of the same constraint: tax cuts do not become free because a government believes they will produce growth.
Likewise, social expenditure does not become free because its objective is equitable.
Ideology changes which expenditures and taxes governments prefer.
Budget constraints remain.
Lula’s environmental promises create another distributional problem. He has pledged to reverse deforestation in the Amazon and restore Brazil’s role in global climate diplomacy.
That has obvious global benefits.
The Amazon stores enormous quantities of carbon and contains extraordinary biodiversity.
But the political costs of stronger enforcement are concentrated among specific Brazilian constituencies, including parts of agribusiness, mining and communities dependent on land conversion.
Foreign governments asking Brazil to protect the rainforest therefore have obligations too.
If preserving the Amazon produces a global public good, international financing should help distribute the cost.
Otherwise wealthy countries effectively ask Brazilian voters to bear local opportunity costs for benefits consumed globally.
Climate diplomacy should recognise that.
Again, justice becomes allocation.
This is where Lula may be particularly well positioned internationally. Brazil is simultaneously a major democracy, agricultural power, environmental power and member of the Global South. It maintains extensive trade with China while possessing strong relationships with Europe and the United States.
Lula historically preferred a foreign policy based on strategic autonomy rather than simple alignment.
That approach may become increasingly valuable in the multipolar world emerging now.
Brazil does not need to choose permanently between Washington and Beijing.
It can cooperate differently across issues.
The G7 discussion earlier this year showed why middle powers increasingly possess leverage precisely because great powers need their cooperation.
Brazil is one of the largest examples.
But international influence depends partly on domestic credibility.
A country presenting itself as a major democratic voice in the Global South needs its own transfer of power to remain peaceful.
That is why today’s inauguration matters beyond Brazil.
The largest democracy in Latin America held an extraordinarily polarised election.
The incumbent lost by less than two percentage points.
He questioned the electoral system repeatedly.
Some supporters demanded military intervention.
He refused to perform the traditional handover.
And the elected successor still became president on schedule.
That is not a perfect democratic transition.
Perhaps perfection is the wrong standard.
Institutions are most useful when politics becomes imperfect.
If every defeated president conceded graciously, every supporter accepted the result immediately and every political leader respected every norm voluntarily, constitutional safeguards would have much less work to do.
The real test comes when someone refuses.
Does the system still know what happens next?
Brazil did.
There are reasons for concern. Political polarisation remains severe. Bolsonaro’s supporters have not disappeared. Lula’s coalition is ideologically broad. Distrust of institutions remains significant.
None of that changes the fact that constitutional succession occurred.
This brings the year back to a theme I did not fully appreciate when I began writing these posts.
I used to think political stability meant governments remaining in power for long periods and political conflict remaining relatively low.
This year has made that definition increasingly difficult to defend.
Britain changed prime ministers repeatedly while its constitutional order remained intact.
Sri Lanka removed a president after mass protests while the state continued.
Peru replaced a president within hours after institutions rejected his attempt to dissolve Congress.
Brazil has now transferred power despite an incumbent who never embraced his defeat conventionally.
Political stability may therefore be less about preventing change than about making change survivable.
Leaders should be replaceable.
Governments should be reversible.
Policies should be correctable.
Election losers should remain politically alive.
Institutions should continue when individuals leave.
That is a very different conception of stability from the authoritarian promise of permanence.
Authoritarian systems often look stable because the same leader remains.
Democracies can look unstable because leadership changes constantly.
The deeper question is what happens when change arrives.
Does the constitution need to be reinvented?
Does the military intervene?
Does violence determine succession?
Or does somebody else simply take the oath?
Lula took the oath today.
That does not prove Brazilian democracy is secure forever.
No election can do that.
Democracy is maintained through repetition.
One election.
One concession, or sometimes no concession.
One transfer.
Then another.
The process becomes durable because people begin expecting it to continue.
Perhaps that is the most useful way to begin 2023.
Brazil did not require Jair Bolsonaro to approve the next president.
It required him to stop being the current one.
The institutions handled the rest.
