It seems no overstatement to claim that we are facing a process of self-enforcing democracy, which is shown in various layers.
By Mônica Sodré, O Estado de S.Paulo
8 September 2022 | 03h00
Democracies are a civilizing conquest relatively recent, of non-linear trajectory, and nothing guarantees they will last. Nowadays, 80% of the global population live in country only partially free or not-at-all-free and the level of liberty has been decreasing in the last 16 years in a row.
In Brazil, since 2019, we are pointed as one of the ten countries with the highest tendency of self-enforcing democracy in the world. We stopped, about 7 years ago, being classified as a liberal democracy – where elections are free and regular, there’s freedom of speech and association, as well as respect to the State of Law – and we lost a category rank, now being classified as an electoral democracy by Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM), which is one of the global most prestigious think tanks. In a 2021 report, we perform as one of five global leaderships in a process known as “self-enforcing democracy”, along with Hungary, Poland, Serbia and Turkey.
Literature on democratic regimes in the world allow us to state that we are facing a new wave of self-enforcing democracy, whose characteristic is singular: it moves slowly and the democratic rupture is given under a legal disguise, in a process that englobes political elements as well as justice itself. Here, it seems no overstatement to claim that we are facing this process, which is expressed in various layers.
Its expression can be noticed through the state’s quest for control over society’s everyday life, translated in the use of mechanism of surveillance, which occurs when the Army buys, with public bidding, tools that extract mobile data and allow the recovery of images and locations, as well as the registration in social media. Or when the Parliament seeks to modify its antiterrorism legislation by broadening its scope of interpretation and awaiting the manifestation of a committee in the House of Representatives.
In civil society, this is viable when the reduction of spaces becomes a goal, as an attempt to hold the Secretariat of the Government responsible for the surveillance and the control of non-governmental organizations, done neither by the political articulation between them, nor when participatory councils or consolidated political spaces for society’s engagement in the formulation of public policies are abolished. When information of public interest, such as the agenda of the Chief Executive, is classified as secret or when, by his own decision, the increase in the number of actors to declare official documents secret becomes part of a maneuver.
In education, the process of self-enforcing democracy expresses itself in the attempt to execute a historical-scientific review, when the Ministry of Education (MEC) excludes “violence against women” and “quilombolas” from school textbook issues or when the Ministry of Defense claims that the 1964 coup d’état strengthened democracy.
Its expression occurs, equally, in the incitement to violence, when the number of registered guns in the Country is raised from 638,000, in 2017, to 1,5 million, in 2021. When major violence against journalists is growing at annual rates of over 20%, reaching a record of 69,2% in the last seven months, in comparison to the same period of 2021.
It’s also possible to notice it when institutions are emptied from the inside, having its autonomy reduced or its functions disfigured. This is what happens when the Federal Public Ministry, whose function is to defend society’s interests, chooses not to act.
When Indigenous people, minorities whose rights of existence is guaranteed by the Constitution, have a record number of murders in 25 years, therefore, it shows how distant we are from the 1948 UN’s declaration, which affirms that we are all born free and equal regarding rights and dignity, and how distant we are from constitutional principles.
Moreover, when the vulnerability of institutions gives room to a twisted use of freedom, including of opinion, as federal deputies defend pro-government military intervention, they attack ministers and praise the Institutional Act No. 5. It also occurs when one-third of the rapporteur’s amendments have an unreported destination, despite the transparency requirements of the Country’s main Court.
In relation to the Military Forces, every new attack of the President of the Republic against the institutions and the democracy, uncertainty arise about the military’s position and cohesion. The uncertainty is not groundless nor a mere ancillary issue within a recent post-military regime democracy; it comes from one premise: the democratic rupture has not yet taken place.
Part of the population and the analysts are waiting for a blatant catch to determine the occurrence and timing of this rupture, while ignoring two facts: it was not consensus that guided the group in the 1955 and 1964 coups, which did not prevent history from happening as we know it. Secondly, we are facing a process of politico-institutional erosion, which is a characteristic of current democracies, where everything looks the same day after day, until everything becomes different. Facts talk by themselves. The exits can only rely on consciousness, politics, the qualification of political leaderships, the gathering of democrats and democracy itself.