Brazil ranks 4th among countries that have most moved away from democracy in 2020 – Report

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil is the country that has moved away from democracy in 2020 more than all but three other countries, in a ranking of 202 countries analyzed. The conclusion is from the Variations of Democracy (V-Dem) report by the institute linked to the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Published in March 2021, the document is read by investors and researchers worldwide to define priorities for actions globally.

The country’s drop was exceed only by that of Poland, Hungary, and Turkey. The latter two, one under right-winger Viktor Orbán and the other under conservative populist Recep Erdogan, have officially become autocracies, in V-Dem’s classification.

“Almost all the indicators we use show a drastic drop [in democracy] in Brazil from 2015 on. The only point in which the country did not lose from there to here was in freedom of association,” political scientist Staffan Lindberg, director of the Variations of Democracy Institute, told BBC News Brazil.

The index is formulated from the contribution of 3,500 researchers and analysts, 85% of them linked to universities worldwide.

The result for each country comes from the statistical aggregation of data for 450 different indicators, which measure aspects such as the degree of freedom of the Judiciary and Legislative branches in relation to the Executive, the population’s freedom of expression, the dissemination of false information by official sources, the repression of civil society demonstrations, the freedom and independence of the press, and the freedom of political opposition.

Global autocratic wave

According to the report, the world is experiencing what researchers consider a wave of expansion of autocracies that started in 1994. This would be the third wave since 1900, as the first occurred in the 1920s-1940s and then in the early 1960s and late 1970s.

If in 2010, 48% of the world population lived under regimes considered non-democratic, in 2020, this percentage rose to 68%, returning to the level observed in the early 1990s.

In the G-20 group – which includes the largest economies globally – in addition to Brazil and Turkey, India also presented a fall in democratic parameters so significant that it is no longer considered the largest democracy in the world and is now classified as by V-Dem as an “autocracy with elections”.

According to the researchers, the processes in India, Turkey, and Brazil, despite being at different stages, follow the same script. “First, an attack on the media and civil society, then the encouragement of polarization of society, disrespecting opponents and spreading false information, and then undermining formal institutions,” the report says.

“We are very concerned because we realize that Bolsonaro has shown clear signs that match the behavior patterns of other autocratic leaders we have seen action before, such as Viktor Orbán. These are worrying moves for the survival of Brazilian democracy,” says Lindberg.

Still far from autocracy

The 2021 V-Dem index was finalized before the Brazilian president’s recent crisis with the Armed Forces. In March, the departure of then-Defense Minister Fernando Azevedo e Silva was announced, which also triggered the change in the Army, Navy, and Air Force commanders.

In his resignation letter, Azevedo e Silva stated that “in this period (at the head of the portfolio), I have preserved the Armed Forces as State institutions,” which provoked questions about a possible attempt by Bolsonaro to politicize the Brazilian Army, as he has routinely used the expression “my Army” to refer to the country’s Armed Forces.

Before that, however, the current Brazilian president has repeatedly attacked the press, praised the military dictatorship established in the 1960s, and endorsed a demonstration by his supporters calling for the Supreme Court’s closure.

Shortly before being sworn in, Bolsonaro even stated that he would send his opponents to the “beachhead,” an apparent reference to the Navy base in Restinga da Marambaia, Rio, where prisoners were tortured and killed during Brazil’s dictatorial regime.

“Petralhada [PT supporters], all of you go to the beachhead. You will no longer have a place in our homeland because I will cut off all your perks. You will no longer have NGOs to feed your hunger for bologna. It will be a cleansing never seen in the history of Brazil,” said the then-president-elect in 2018.

These aspects contribute to the country’s current results. Other indices also point to a regression of Brazilian democracy in recent years, although the decline is milder.

The NGO Freedom House assessed that Brazilian democracy reached 79 points, on a scale of 0 to 100, in 2017. Currently, the index has receded to 74.

For Lindberg, although Brazil’s data is worrying, the country is still far from being framed as an autocracy, as happened with Turkey and India. This is due to the quality of the Brazilian electoral system.

“Although there are still some voting irregularities, a bit of electoral intimidation or vote-buying, the elections in Brazil are still free and fair, and it is possible to change the running of the country through them,” Lindberg says.

According to him, the electronic voting system, as used in Brazil, has proven to be safe and reliable. Bolsonaro had campaigned for printed ballots in Brazil and said that the country could repeat the history of the last American elections if he doesn’t change the electoral system.

And if the turn towards autocratic turn affects large populations around the world, on the other hand, democratization processes, although they happen, are concentrated in smaller countries such as Sri Lanka, Tunisia, and Armenia.

For the researchers, these countries are relatively more distant from the influence of autocratic powers such as Russia and China and seem to have managed to steer their internal political dynamics towards a freer system.

Source: BBC Brasil