Democracies created during the so-called “third wave” of democratization (1974–92) in southern Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and eastern and central Europe are in various states of health. Some have succumbed to democratic “backsliding” (“the deterioration of the qualities associated with democratic governance within any regime”, p. 32), which has surged in the last 15 years. One significant case is Brazil, the fourth-largest democracy in the world (after India, the United States, and Indonesia). Brazil emerged from a 21-year military dictatorship in the mid-1980s and established a democracy in subsequent decades. However, in the last 15 years it has suffered widespread protests, major corruption scandals, a decline in trust in political institutions, high levels of violence, the impeachment of a president, the election of a far-right president with authoritarian tendencies (Jair Bolsonaro, 2019–22), the emergence of a political movement around Bolsonaro (Bolsonarismo), and an attempted coup at the end of 2022. As the 2026 election looms, a center-left coalition will attempt to re-elect the three-times elected incumbent President Lula, while the forces of Bolsonarismo hope to return to power.
What does this mean for Brazilian democracy? In this book, Leonardo Avrtizer and Lucio Rennó, two accomplished Brazilian political scientists, attempt to provide an answer. They argue that contrary to the thesis offered by Marcus Melo and Carlos Pereira in Por que a democracia brasileira não morreu? [Why didn’t Brazilian democracy die?] (Rio de Janeiro, Companhia das Letras, 2024), Brazilian democracy did not “return to normal” after Bolsonaro’s presidency ended and President Lula took office in 2023. Furthermore, and again contrary to Melo and Pereira, Bolsonaro’s authoritarian maneuvers were not checked largely by the national congress. Instead, it was the judiciary, and especially the Federal Supreme Court, that was the key actor in blocking Bolsonaro’s executive over-reach. For Avritzer and Rennó, Brazilian democracy is still in crisis, although that crisis was attenuated by the 2022 election.
What caused the crisis? Avritzer and Rennó adopt a multi-factor analysis that takes account of unresolved tensions in the regime transition of the 1980s, subsequent developments, and the actions of various actors. Using clear concepts, an insightful theoretical perspective, and copious empirical evidence (displayed in 13 figures and 9 tables which include survey research on the mass public, data from the national congress and presidency, macroeconomic data, a diagram of the temporal sequence of the Brazilian regime transition and tables showing the prerogatives of the Brazilian Army), the authors make an argument with four main elements. These concern civil-military relations, changes in legislative-executive relations, the role of the judiciary, and antidemocratic sentiments among the mass public.
Avrtizer and Rennó argue that the Brazilian regime transition of the 1980s was flawed, in that military prerogatives were not reduced and authoritarian enclaves in the Brazilian state were preserved (pp. 7–8). Lying dormant and largely unobserved in the first three decades of Brazil’s post-dictatorial democracy, the armed forces’ interventionist vocation was reasserted at key moments in the 2010s. For example, article 142 of the 1988 Constitution bestowed on the armed forces the responsibility for the maintenance of “law and order,” a responsibility that cannot be exercised without instructions from one of the branches of government but one that some military officers argue gives them a tutelary power over civilian politicians. Many members of the mass public agree with this argument.
Furthermore, the military refused to cooperate with the Truth Commission (2012–14), established by President Dilma Rousseff (2010–16), that looked into human rights abuses under the dictatorship of 1964 to 1985. And in 2018, the commander of the army, with support from the commanders of the other two branches, tweeted a warning to the Supreme Court to imprison ex-President Lula. (The Supreme Court ruled to keep Lula in prison, and Bolsonaro won the presidential election that year; p. 58.) Once in office, President Bolsonaro gave places in the federal bureaucracy to over 6,000 active-duty and retired military personnel. During the attack on the Planalto on January 8, 2023 (an attack reminiscent of the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol in Washington DC), Army personnel were tacitly complicit, refusing, for example, to remove protestors who were camped outside barracks and sometimes even helping them gain access to government buildings. In Avritzer and Rennó’s words “Bolsonaro and the military shared an antidemocratic agenda” (p. 61). Furthermore, the civilian Ministry of Defence, created by the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration (1995–2002) in 1999, is staffed largely by military personnel, with the creation of civilian experts in defence and security issues still not a reality. For these and other reasons, Avritzer and Rennó argue that civilian control over the armed forces has not yet been established (p. 53), and that this has exacerbated the crisis of democracy.
When did the crisis begin? The authors argue that the June–July 2013 demonstrations were the spark (p. 19), and the Carwash anti-corruption investigation (begun in March 2014) made a major contribution to Brazil’s democratic backsliding. In the subsequent years, the national congress gained more control over the federal budgetary process and curbed the president’s ability to issue decrees and veto legislation, changing a system that had been executive-centered to one in which the “centrão” (the majoritarian bloc of right-wing parties) could hold the president hostage. According to Avritzer and Rennó, this has created a political system marked by “legislative authoritarianism” (a term coined by Sosa-Villagarcia, Incio, and Arce in “The Rise of Legislative Authoritarianism” in Journal of Democracy, Volume 36, Issue 2, April 2025, pp. 106–17), in which the national congress colludes in democratic backsliding when doing so is in representatives’ interests. Against Melo and Pereira (2024), Avritzer and Rennó argue that most congressional representatives did not support Bolsonaro’s attempted coup in 2022 because they had won their seats in the same election that Bolsonaro tried to revoke, not because they were principled defenders of democracy. Furthermore, the party system has become fragmented, with ten effective parties in Congress, and more veto players ready to extract rents in exchange for relinquishing their veto. It is more difficult than ever before for a governing coalition to deliver a coherent legislative package to the voters who put it in power.
The third element in Avritzer and Rennó’s argument is the judiciary, and especially the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, and in particular judge Alexandre de Morães, who was simultaneously President of the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) and a member of the Supreme Court during the 2022 election, became a defender of democracy during the Bolsonaro administration. For Morães, judicial activism was necessary to counter authoritarian digital militants of Bolsonarismo, who spread fake news, threatened opponents and journalists, and called for military intervention in politics. However, this judicial activism came at a price. The Supreme Court began to be seen by many in the Brazilian public as a self-interested political actor. The judiciary’s privileges (and those of prosecutors) “reduce its legitimacy in the eyes of the public” (p. 95) and have created a system that Avritzer and Rennó describe as a “mutual blockade” rather than a balance of powers between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government.
The fourth and final piece of the book’s argument has to do with the mass public. The Carwash corruption scandal and the economic recession of 2015–16, which frustrated many people’s hopes for continued social mobility, played a part in the rise in popularity of Bolsonaro amongst the electorate. Throughout Bolsonaro’s presidency, a core of about 20 percent of the electorate remained loyal to the president and aligned with him in his hard-right conservative agenda, in favor of religious teaching and prayer in schools, lowering the age of criminal responsibility, violent policing and capital punishment, and liberalizing access to gun ownership. Furthermore, a hard core of Bolsonaristas favored a military intervention to stop the transfer of power to a democratically elected president, Lula, in 2022, making Brazil a “near miss” case in which democracy was almost ended by an incumbent hard-right government. Bolsonarismo is still an electoral force to be reckoned with despite the jailing of Jair Bolsonaro in November 2025, and a Bolsonarista candidate could well get into the second round of the presidential election in October 2026. For democrats the nightmare scenario would be an election in which, unlike in 2022, democracy is not considered to be at stake, but in which a Bolsonarista candidate wins, enacts an amnesty for all those responsible for the attempted coup in 2022 and the attack on the Planalto on 8 January 2023, and, supported by the Trump administration in the United States, finishes the dismantling of democratic institutions that was begun under the Jair Bolsonaro presidency. The fact that such a scenario has some plausibility is why Avritzer and Rennó’s argument is persuasive. Brazil’s current democracy may be highly economically unequal, violent, and prone to corruption, but its loss would be a blow to democracy worldwide and could contribute to the undermining of other democracies in South America.
This book is not without flaws. It could have used a copy editor. More importantly, it could have considered an important background variable in analyzing the causes of Brazil’s democratic backsliding. This is the political economy of the PT presidencies from 2003 to 2016. While in the first phase of this period the PT’s policies were successful, reducing poverty and (more modestly) income inequality, the policies were clearly exhausted by the 2010s. Successive increases in the real value of the minimum wage could not be sustained, the economy continued to de-industrialize, and when commodity prices sank, Brazil’s unbalanced economy deteriorated with them. Furthermore, social policy was focused mainly on injecting cash into poor households, rather than improving the quality of public goods (including education, health, public transportation, and public security) that can improve living standards and well-being. The difficulty of the PT’s center-left coalition in making democracy deliver, in terms of rising living standards, social mobility, and a sense of a national economic project, is an underlying condition that helps to explain the rise of Bolsonarismo. Those difficulties are more daunting now than they were a decade ago, and Bolsonarismo remains a force in Brazilian politics.
This book is the best analysis so far of Brazil’s contemporary democratic crisis. It is better than the Panglossian and improbable argument made by Melo and Pereira (2024). It is a rich, theoretically informed case study that shows the context of Brazil’s democratic decline. It makes several important points that will be useful for researchers of democratic backsliding elsewhere. These include the observation that backsliding occurs at different speeds, and if it is slow enough, it allows for the forces of democratic resistance to regroup and fight back. Furthermore, flaws in regime transitions can remain dormant for years before becoming problematic for democracy, and the sequence of backsliding events also matters for the fate of democracies. Despite the speed and complexity of events in Third Wave democratic regimes, this book represents an important advance towards an “integrated theory … [of] backsliding and the crisis of new democracies” (p. 40).
