BRAZILIAN BONAPARTISM: ABSENT DEMOCRACY AND THE PATHS OF THE STATE OF EXCEPTION IN BRAZIL (2016-2022)

Abstract

The 2016 soft coup d'état forged a particular type of State of Exception that partially suspended the civil, political and social rights of large, super-impoverished population groups and their classist representations. It was a complex process of generalized legal uncertainty and, therefore, of crisis and deepening of institutional instability, in such a way as to put two issues of the Fourth Republic (1988-2016) on the agenda: Military (internal war and doctrine of national security) and judiciary (lawfare). Both ideologies forged by European and American capital-imperialism, with their particular expressions in the binomial colonialism-slavery.This process deepened with the atypical election and the autocratic government of Jair Messias Bolsonaro (2019-2022), marked by the militarization of political institutions, control of institutions of coercion, strengthening and expansion of militias (paramilitary groups) and constant threat of self-coup. Thus, the social phenomenon of Bolsonarism strengthened the military issue and raised it to the status of a Military Party. Faced with the advance of socio-cultural and political-economic militarization, the Judiciary – which had been fundamental for the execution of the Coup d’état – was forced to defend democracy, under penalty of extinction of both Parliament and the Judiciary itself, if it remained in the coup camp. In a typical electoral process, elections would simply demarcate the governmental succession. However, the 2022 presidential elections placed Brazil at a crossroads: the deepening of the State of Exception, via a particular type of Bolsonarist bonapartism or the opening of a potential process of (re)democratization, however, subject by the Judiciary.