How Ukraine’s Fight Solves Global Problems - Andreas Umland (The National Interest)

How Ukraine’s Fight Solves Global Problems

Kyiv’s struggle, if successful, could reignite worldwide democratization and help speed along political transitions in other nations.

by Andreas Umland

The National Interest, August 12, 2024 

While the Russian-Ukrainian War is only one symptom of broader destructive international trends, its outcome will co-determine the direction of the world’s development. 

Popular yet imprecise expressions like the “Ukraine Crisis” or the “Ukraine War” have been misleading many to believe that the Russian-Ukrainian War is a solely Eastern European issue. According to this misperception, a Ukrainian leadership that was more submissive to Russia could have avoided the unfortunate war. Supposedly, Kyiv can still stem the risks spilling over from the “war in Ukraine” to other realms and regions if it accommodates Russian aggression.

If seen from a historical and comparative perspective, the Russian-Ukrainian War looks different. It is only one of several permutations of Moscow’s post-Soviet imperialism and merely one facet of larger regressive developments since the end of the twentieth century. Russia’s assault on Ukraine is a replay or preview of pathologies familiar to Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. The alleged “Ukrainian Crisis” is neither a singular nor a local issue. It is less the trigger than a manifestation of larger destructive trends.

At the same time, the Russian-Ukrainian War is a grand battle about the future of Europe and the principle of inviolability of borders. Moreover, the war is about Ukraine’s right to exist as a regular UN member state. The conflict has genuinely global significance.

Yet, the war’s course and outcome can either accelerate, contain, or reverse broader political, social, and legal decay across the globe. Moscow’s partial victory in Ukraine would permanently unsettle international law, order, and organization and may spark armed conflicts and arms races elsewhere. A successful Ukrainian defense against Russia’s military expansion, in contrast, will generate far-reaching beneficial effects on worldwide security, democracy, and prosperity in three ways.

A Ukrainian victory would, first, lead to a stabilization of the rules-based UN order that emerged after 1945 and consolidated with the self-destruction of the Soviet Bloc and Union after 1989. It would, second, trigger a revival of international democratization, which has halted since the early twenty-first century and needs a boost to start anew. Third, the ongoing Ukrainian national defense and state-building contribute to global innovation and revitalization in various fields, from dual-use technology to public administration, fields in which Ukraine has become a forerunner.

Stabilizing International Order

The Russo-Ukrainian War is only one of several attempts by powerful states to expand their territories since the end of the Cold War. Several revisionist governments have tried or are planning to install their uninvited presence in neighboring countries. The resulting military operations have been or will be offensive, repressive, and unprovoked rather than defensive, humanitarian, and preventive. Several revisionist autocracies have engaged in, or are tempted to try, replacing international law with the principle of “might is right.”

An early post-Cold War example is Iraq’s 1990 annexation of Kuwait, which was instantaneously reversed by an international coalition in 1991. Another example is Serbia’s revanchist assaults on other former Yugoslav republics once ruled from Belgrade. During this period, Russia began creating so-called “republics” in Moldova (i.e., Transnistria) and Georgia (i.e., Abkhazia and “South Ossetia”). At the same time, Moscow ruthlessly suppressed the emergence of an independent Chechen republic on its own territory.

Only recently has the Kremlin turned its attention to Ukraine. In 2014, Moscow created the “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk and illegally annexed Crimea to the Russian Federation. Eight years later, Russia also illegally incorporated Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions into its official territory.

The international community’s reaction to Russia’s border revisions has remained half-hearted, unlike its responses to the Iraqi and Serbian attempts of the 1990s. The West’s timidity only provoked further Russian adventurism. Moscow now demands Kyiv’s voluntary cessation of all parts of the four Ukrainian mainland regions that Russia annexed in 2022. This includes, oddly, even some parts of Ukraine’s territory that Russian troops never managed to capture. The Kremlin’s final aim is still the eradication of Ukraine as a sovereign state.

At the same time, Beijing is bending established rules of conduct in the South and East China Seas and stepping up its preparations to incorporate the Republic of China in Taiwan into the People’s Republic of China by force. Venezuela has announced territorial claims on neighboring Guyana. Other revisionist politicians across the globe may be harboring similar plans.

Moscow’s official incorporation of Ukrainian lands is unique since Russia is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, which was created to prevent such conquests. Russia’s behavior is also peculiar in view of its status as an official nuclear-weapon state and depositary government under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Nevertheless, Moscow is trying to reduce or even destroy an official UN member and non-nuclear weapon state, thereby undermining the entire logic of the non-proliferation regime and its special prerogatives for the five permanent UN Security Council members whom the NPT allows to have nuclear weapons.

At the same time, the Russian assault on Ukraine is not entirely exceptional, neither geographically nor temporally. It is only one of several recent symptoms of more generic Russian neo-imperialism. It is also just one aspect of larger expansionist and revanchist tendencies across the globe.

A Ukrainian victory against Russia would not be a merely local incident but an event of far broader significance, notwithstanding. It can become an important factor in preventing or reversing international border revisionism and territorial irredentism. Conversely, Ukraine’s defeat or an unjust Russo-Ukrainian peace would strengthen colonialist adventurism across the globe. Ukraine’s fight for independence is, for world affairs, both a manifestation of broader problems and an instrument of their solution.   

A Revival of International Democratization

Russia’s assault on Ukraine challenges principles such as peaceful conflict resolution, national sovereignty, and the inviolability of borders. It also represents another negative global political trend of the early twenty-first century, namely the decline of democracy and the resurgence of autocracy. This regressive trend manifests itself through the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine.

A major internal determinant of the Russian assault on Ukraine is that Putin’s various wars have, since 1999, been sources of his undemocratic rule’s popularity, integrity, and legitimacy. Sometimes overlooked in analyses of Russian public support for authoritarianism, the occupation, subjugation, and repression of peoples like the Chechens, Georgians, and Ukrainians finds broad support among ordinary Russians. Their backing of victorious military interventions—especially on the territory of the former Tsarist and Soviet empires—is a major political resource and social basis of Putin’s increasingly autocratic regime.

Regressive tendencies, to be sure, were already observable in Yeltsin’s semi-democratic Russia of the 1990s—for instance, in Moldova and Chechnya. Yet, under Putin as prime minister (1999–2000, 2008–12) and president (2000–2008, 2012– ), the viciousness of Russian revanchist military operations in and outside Russia has rapidly grown. This radicalization is a function not only of escalating Russian irredentism per se but also an effect of fundamental changes in Russia’s political regime. Moscow’s increasing foreign aggressiveness parallels the growth of domestic repression after Putin’s take-over of Russia’s government in August 1999.

The two major early spikes of Kremlin aggressiveness towards the West and Ukraine followed, not by accident, Ukrainian events in 2004 and 2014. They had much to do with the victories of those years’ liberal-democratic Orange Revolution and Euromaidan Revolution. Ukraine’s domestic development questions Russia’s imperial pretensions, as it leads the largest former colony out of Moscow’s orbit. The democratizing Ukrainian polity is also a conceptual countermodel to authoritarianism in the post-communist world. Its very existence challenges the legitimacy of the post-Soviet autocracies in Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia.  

Ukraine’s fight for independence is thus not only a defense of international law and order but also a battle for the cause of worldwide democracy. The contest between pro- and anti-democratic forces is global and has been sharpening already before, in parallel to, and independently from, the Russo-Ukrainian War. At the same time, the confrontation between Russian autocracy and Ukrainian democracy is a particularly epic one.

If Ukraine is victorious, the international alliance of democracies will win, and the axis of autocracies around Russia will lose. In this scenario, not only will other democracies become more secure, self-confident, and energized, but also it is likely that more democracies will appear—above all, in the post-communist world from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. Diffusion, spillover, or domino effects could also trigger new or re-democratizations elsewhere.

Conversely, a Russian victory will embolden autocratic regimes and anti-democratic groups throughout the world. In such a scenario, democratic rule and open societies would become stigmatized as feeble, ineffective, or even doomed. The recent worldwide decline of democracy will be less likely to reverse and may continue further or accelerate. While the “Ukraine Crisis” is not the cause of democracy’s current problems, its successful resolution would revitalize worldwide democratization.

Transferable Innovations

A third, so far, underappreciated aspect of Kyiv’s contribution to global progress is the growing number of new and partly revolutionary Ukrainian cognitive, institutional, and technological advances that can be applied elsewhere. Already before the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022, Kyiv initiated some domestic reforms that could also be relevant for the modernization of other transition countries. After the victory of the Euromaidan uprising or Revolution of Dignity in February 2014, Ukraine started to restructure its state-society relations fundamentally.

This included the creation of several new anti-corruption institutions, namely a specialized court and procuracy, as well as a corruption prevention agency and investigation bureau. The novelty of these institutions is that they are all exclusively devoted to the preclusion, disclosure, and prosecution of bribery. In April 2014, Ukraine started a far-reaching decentralization of its public administration system that led to the country’s thorough municipalization. The reform transferred significant powers, rights, finances, and responsibilities from the regional and national levels to local self-governmental organs of amalgamated communities that have now become major loci of power in Ukraine.

The Euromaidan Revolution also led to a restructuring of relations between governmental and non-governmental organizations. Early independent Ukraine, like other post-Soviet countries, suffered from alienation between civil servants and civic activists. After the Revolution of Dignity, this gap began to close. For instance, Kyiv’s famous “Reanimation Package of Reforms” is a coalition of independent think tanks, research institutes, and non-governmental organizations that has been preparing critical new reform legislation for the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council), Ukraine’s unicameral national parliament.

Also, in 2014, Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia signed EU Association Agreements of a new and, so far, unique type. The three bilateral mammoth pacts go far beyond older foreign cooperation treaties of the Union and include so-called Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas between the EU and the three countries. Since 2014, the Association Agreements have been gradually integrating the Ukrainian, Moldovan, and Georgian economies into the European economy.

These and other regulatory innovations have wider normative meaning and larger political potential. They provide reform templates, institutional models, and historical lessons for other current and future countries undergoing democratic transitions. Ukraine’s experiences can be useful for various nations shifting from a traditional to a liberal order, from patronal to plural politics, from a closed to an open society, from oligarchy to polyarchy, from centralized to decentralized rule, and from mere cooperation to deeper association with the EU.

While Ukraine’s post-revolutionary developments are, above all, relevant for transition countries, its war-related experiences and innovations are also of interest to other states—not least the members and allies of NATO. Such diffusion concerns both Ukrainian accumulated knowledge of hybrid threats and how to meet them, as well as Ukraine’s rapid technological and tactical modernization of its military and security forces fighting Russian forces on the battlefield and in the rear. Since 2014, Ukraine has become—far more so than any other country on earth—a target of Moscow’s multivariate attacks with irregular and regular forces in the media and cyber spaces, within domestic and international politics, as well as on its infrastructure, economy, and cultural, religious, educational, and academic institutions.

Since February 24, 2022, Ukraine has engaged in a dramatic fight for survival against a nominally far superior aggressor country. Ukraine’s government, army, and society had to adapt quickly, flexibly, and thoroughly to this existential challenge. This included the swift introduction of new types and applications of weaponry, such as a variety of unmanned flying, swimming, and driving vehicles, as well as their operation with the help of artificial intelligence. In a wide variety of military and dual-use technology, Ukraine had to innovate rapidly and effectively so as to withstand the lethal Russian assault.

In numerous further fields such as electricity generation and preservation, electronic communication, war-time transportation, information verification, emergency medicine, large-scale demining, post-traumatic psychotherapy, and veteran reintegration, to name but a few areas, the Ukrainian government and society have, and will have to react speedily and resolutely. While Ukraine often relies on foreign experience, equipment, and training, it is constantly developing its own novel kit, approaches, and mechanisms that could potentially be useful elsewhere. This new Ukrainian knowledge and experience will come in especially handy for countries that may be confronted with similar challenges in the near or distant future.

It All Depends on Kyiv

The escalation of the so-called “Ukraine Crisis” in 2022 has been only one expression of earlier and independently accumulating international tension. At the same time, the Russian-Ukrainian War is no trivial manifestation of these larger trends and no peripheral topic in world affairs. A Russian victory over Ukraine would have grave implications for the post-Soviet region and beyond. Conversely, a Ukrainian success in its defense against Russia’s genocidal assault and the achievement of a just peace will have stabilizing and innovating effects far beyond Eastern Europe.

Apart from being a revanchist war of a former imperial center against its one-time colony, Russia’s assault on Ukrainian democracy is driven by Russian domestic politics. It is a result of Russia’s re-autocratization since 1999, which, in turn, follows more significant regressive trends in the state of global democracy. Ukraine has been less of a trigger than a major victim of recent destructive international tendencies.

At the same time, Ukraine’s fight can make crucial contributions to counteracting the global spread of revanchism. It can reignite worldwide democratization and help speed along political transitions in other nations. A Ukrainian victory and recovery may save not only Ukraine but also its neighbors from Russian imperialism. Ukraine’s fight also contributes to solving numerous larger problems of the world today.

 Dr. Andreas Umland is an Analyst with the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI). Follow him on LinkedIn and X @UmlandAndreas.

A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government - Nakae Chomin

 

A Discourse by Three Drunkards on Government

By Nakae Chomin

Translated by Nobuko Tsukuba

Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1984 (9th printing, 2015)

Um livro curioso, escrito por um cientista político do inicio da era Meiji, Nakae Chomin, que teve um papel preeminente nas reformas daquele período, com base na sua cultura francesa – ele era chamado de "Rousseau do Oriente – e na sua adesão aos princípios do governo constitucional, com amplas liberdades para a livre expressão do pensamento. 

Foi censurado diversas vezes, dado o autoritarismo dos governos da era Meiji, e vários dos seus jornais foram fechados pelas autoridades da vigilância política. Ainda assim foi eleito para o Parlamento, mas renunciou quando constatou que pouco poderia fazer para levar o Japão a uma situação de governo democrático, não militarizado e não autoritário.

Os três "bêbados" consistem no Mestre Nankai, e dois interlocutores, um, de modos e pensamento europeus, por ele chamado de Gentleman, o outro de tendências militaristas, dito Champion. Ele trocam opiniões sobre como seria melhor o Japão se preparar para sustentar os desafios externos.

Eles bebem e trocam ideias sobre o que o Japão deveria fazer para se defender das potências agressoras mais avançadas, e também sobre como ele poderia se organizar internamente para conquistar a democracia e os princípios constitucionais dos países mais avançados do Ocidente.

O autor cita todos os filósofos europeus, os pensadores mais respeitados no mundo, na esperança de que o Japão caminhasse pela via do governo democrático.

Depois de muita conversa, e muita bebida, os dois visitantes se despedem. Dez dias depois, Mestre Nankai completou o seu livro:

"The two guests never returned. According to rumor, the Gentleman of Western Learning went to North America and the Champion went to Shanghai. Master Nankai, as always, keeps drinking." (p. 137)

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Brasília, 18 de março de 2024

Timothy Snyder on Ukraine, and the duty for Americans and Europeans: Would you sell them out?

Would you sell them out?

A question for American lawmakers about Ukraine

Timothy Snyder

November 8, 2023

 

Imagine that freedom was in decline around the world.  Imagine that things had gotten so bad that a dictatorship actually invaded a democracy with the express goal of destroying its freedoms and its people.  And yet... imagine that this people fought back.  Imagine that their leaders stayed in the country.  Imagine that this people got themselves together, supported and joined their armed forces, held back an invasion of what seemed like overwhelming force.  Imagine that their resistance is a bright moment in the history of democracy this whole century.  We don't have to imagine: that attack came from Russia and those people are the Ukrainians.  Would you sell them out?

Americans have an alliance in North America and Europe which has existed for more than seventy years, with the goal of preventing an attack from the Soviet Union and then from Russia.  Imagine that, when the Russian attack came, the hammer fell on a country excluded from that alliance.  Ukraine indeed took the entire brunt of the invasion, resisted, and turned the tide: a task assigned to countries whose economies, taken together, are two hundred fifty times larger than Ukraine's.  In so doing, Ukraine destroyed so much Russian equipment that a Russian attack on NATO became highly improbable.  With the blood of tens of thousands of its soldiers, Ukrainians defended every member of that alliance, making it far less likely that Americans would have to go to war in Europe.  Would you sell them out?   

(If there is anyone out there who still thinks that NATO had anything to do with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, consider this: invading Ukraine made Russia far more vulnerable. If Russia actually feared NATO, invading Ukraine would be the last thing it would do. Russian leaders are perfectly aware that NATO will not invade Russia, which is why they can pull troops away from the borders of NATO members Norway and Finland and send them to kill Ukrainians.) 

For this whole century, American politicians and strategists of all political orientations have agreed that the greatest threat for a global war comes from China.  The scenario for this dreadful conflict, in which hundreds of thousands of American soldiers could fight and die, is a Chinese offensive against Taiwan.  And now imagine that this can defused at no cost and with no risk.  The offensive operation the Chinese leadership is watching right now is that of Russia against Ukraine.  Ukrainian resistance has demonstrated how difficult a Chinese offensive operation in the Pacific would be.  The best China policy is a good Ukraine policy.  Will we toss away the tremendous and unanticipated geopolitical gain that has been handed to us by Ukraine?  There is nothing that we could have done on our own to so effectively deter China as what the Ukrainians are doing, and what the Ukrainians are doing is in no way hostile towards China.  Ukrainians are keeping us safe in this as in other ways.  Would you sell them out?

Imagine, because it's true, that the whole world is watching the war in Ukraine.  From everyone else's point of view, whether they like us, hate us, or don't care about us, Ukraine seems like an obvious ally and an easy win for the United States.  Anyone around the world, regardless of their own ideology, knows that Ukraine is a democracy and America is supposed to support democracies.  Anyone around the world, regardless of the state of their own economy, knows that our economy is enormous, far larger than Russia's, and that economic strength wins wars.  Anyone around the world can easily see that Americans are not at risk in Ukraine, and that Americans draw extraordinary moral and geopolitical gains from Ukrainian resistance.  From the point of view of all observers, in other words, defunding Ukraine would demonstrate enormous American weakness.  Is that the face we want to show the world?  Do we want to tell everyone that we are unreliable and unaware of our own interests?  Ukrainians, with American help, make Americans look sensible and strong.  Would you sell them out?

Imagine that this is a winnable war, because it is. Russia's main strategic objective, the seizure of Kyiv, was not achieved.  Ukraine won the Battle of Kyiv.  Russia was forced to retreat from Kyiv and Chernihiv and Sumy oblasts.  Imagine the Russia's campaign to take Kharkiv failed.  Ukraine won the Battle of Kharkiv.  Imagine that Kherson, the one regional capital Russia has taken in this war, was taken back by Ukraine.  Ukraine won the Battle of Kherson.  Snake Island, lost early in the war, has been taken back by Ukraine.  Ukraine has taken back more than half of the territory seized by Russia in this invasion.  Knowing that all is this is true, imagine that Putin knows it too.  Russia's main offensive instrument, the paramilitary Wagner Group, staged a coup against Putin and that Putin had to kill its leader.  Imagine that Putin knows he cannot really take much more Ukrainian land -- not without American help, anyway.  Ukraine has a theory of victory that involves gains on the battlefield. Putin has a theory of victory that involves votes in the US Congress. Putin thinks that he has a better chance in the Capitol than he has in Kyiv.  Should we prove him right?

Imagine a world food system with Ukraine as a major node.  In normal times Ukraine can feed four hundred million people, and usually the UN World Food Program depends upon Ukraine.  Ukrainian exports feed some of the most sensitive parts of the Middle East and Africa.  Much of the instability in those regions is related to shortages of food.  Russia has destroyed a major dam to destroy Ukrainian farmland.  And mined Ukrainian farms on a huge scale.  Russia targets ports and grain storage facilities with its missiles, and claims the piratical right to stop all shipping on the Black Sea with its navy.  And yet...  Imagine that Ukrainians resist here as well.  Ukrainians farmers are hard at work.  Ukraine still supplies food to the World Food Program.  Ukrainians, through their own innovative weapons and clever tactics, managed to intimidate the Black Sea Fleet and open a lane for commercial shipping.  That they are feeding the people who needed to be fed.  Would you sell them out?

Imagine that we were a country that cared about war crimes.  And imagine that there was a law, an international genocide convention, that defined five actions that constitute genocide, and that Russians have committed every one of these crimes in Ukraine.  I cannot keep on writing about "imagining" when I have seen some of the death pits myself.  I cannot say "imagine" when writers I know have been murdered because they represent Ukrainian culture.  I cannot stay with my device when I read that the Russian state boasts of having taken 700,000 Ukrainian children to be russified, when every day Russian propagandists make clear that Russian war aims are exterminationist.  And yet Ukrainians resist and persist.  This is a genocide that can be stopped, that is being stopped.  We are living within the scenario, the one we say that we have been waiting for, when American actions can stop a genocide, simply by helping the people who have been targeted, simply by paying their taxes.  Whenever the Ukrainians take back land, they rescue people.  This is how they think of their liberated territories: as places where no more children will be kidnaped, no more civilians will tortured, no more local leaders will be murdered.  Would you sell out a people to a genocidal occupation?  A people that has done nothing but good for you?

I have heard the excuse that Americans are "fatigued."  I have been in Ukraine three times since the war began.  I have been in the capital and in the provinces.  I have seen almost no Americans, fatigued or otherwise, in the country.  And that is for the simple reason that we are not in Ukraine.  How can we be fatigued by a war we are not fighting?  When we are not even present?  This makes no sense.  It causes no fatigue to give money to the right cause, which is all that we are doing.  It feels good to help other people help themselves in a good cause.  

If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster: across all of these dimensions: food supply, war crimes, international instability, expanding war, collapsing democracies. Everything that the Ukrainians are doing for us can be reversed if we give up. Why would lawmakers even contemplate doing so?

If you happened to know lots of Ukrainians, as I do, you would know people who have been wounded or who have been killed.  You would know people who get through their days with dark circles around their eyes, because everyone has dark circles around their eyes.  You would know people who have lost someone, because everyone has lost someone.  You would know people who are grieving and yet who are nevertheless doing what they can do.  You would not know anyone in Ukraine who believes that fatigue is a reason to give up.  Would you sell such people out?

I have heard the other excuse: that we need to audit the weapons we send to Ukraine.  The expenses are minimal and the gains are great: a nickel on our defense dollar, achieving what we cannot ourselves do with all the rest.  And here's the thing: the weapons we send to Ukraine are the only ones in our stockpiles that are being audited.  They are being audited not by accountants in suits and ties but by men and women in camouflage.  They are being used and used well by people whose lives are at stake and whose country's future is at stake.  Ukrainians have used American air defense more effectively than anyone knew that it could be used.  

Ukrainians are using American missiles that we consider outdated to destroy the most advanced Russian assets.  Ukrainians are taking American weapons built in the last century and using them to defend themselves and the rest of us in this one.  In large measure they are literally using arms that we would otherwise be paying to disassemble because we regard them as obsolete.  

If that battlefield audit done by the Ukrainian army is not good enough: well, then, by all means, American lawmakers, come and visit Ukraine and see for yourself.  You and your staffers would be very welcome.  Ukrainians want you to come. It would be a very good thing if more of us visited Ukraine.

I will tell you what I witnessed in Ukraine: when Ukrainians see American weapons systems, they applaud.  Would you sell them out?

Tunisia, a primeira nação árabe a iniciar a primavera democrática é a última a recair na ditadura, depois de todas as outras - David D. Kirkpatrick (The New Yorker)

 Triste evolução da democrácia islâmica, estrangulada pelas suas contradições internas.

Tunisia Arrests Its Most Prominent Opposition Leader

Rached Ghannouchi has been a voice for democracy in his nation and across the Muslim world.

Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring, was the last place where it failed. After a decade of freedom and democracy, in 2021 a new strongman, President Kais Saied, shut down the parliament and, soon after, began imposing an authoritarian constitution and arresting his critics. This week, the police finally came for Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of Tunisia’s largest political party and the Arab world’s most influential thinker about the potential synthesis of liberal democracy and Islamic governance.

Born in 1941 to impoverished peasant farmers in remote southern Tunisia, Ghannouchi studied in Cairo, Damascus, and Paris; worked menial jobs in Europe; and returned to Tunis, in 1971. Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamist politics was on the rise across the region, as an alternative to the autocracies in power, and, in 1981, Ghannouchi co-founded a Tunisian Islamist movement. He was jailed and tortured for three years, and in 1987 he was arrested again, sentenced to death, and exiled to London. (Other Arab states would not take him.)

Ghannouchi’s examination of Britain’s liberal democracy through an Islamic lens set him apart from a generation of Arab intellectuals. Islamic scholars had long ago concluded that in the true “Abode of Islam” a Muslim must feel secure in his liberty, property, religion, and dignity, Ghannouchi wrote in his landmark treatise, “Public Freedoms in the Islamic State,” which he began writing in prison and published, in Arabic, in 1993. So why had he found that security only in the West? A true Islamic state, he concluded, must be founded on “freedom of conscience” for Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Quoting a revered twelfth-century scholar, Ghannouchi urged Islamists to learn from Western democracy—to benefit “from the best of human experiments regardless of their religious origins, since wisdom is Shari’a’s twin.”

He returned to Tunisia, in 2011, when a spontaneous wave of protests against police brutality drove its longtime ruler into exile and set the Arab Spring revolts in motion. Ghannouchi helped make the country’s political transition the most liberal in the region, and he did his best to salvage the prospects for democracy elsewhere. In the late spring of 2013—a decade ago—he flew to Egypt to offer advice to its first democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood. The hopefulness of those months is now difficult to remember. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya had all held credible elections and had started drafting new charters. Western experts cited Yemen as a model for the peaceful handover of power. Even in Syria most rebels still marched under the banner of democracy, rather than of extremist Islam; the uprising had not yet devolved into a sectarian civil war. But a sandstorm was blowing toward Tahrir Square, where two and a half years earlier an eighteen-day sit-in, inspired by Tunisia, had toppled President Hosni Mubarak and opened the way for Morsi. Now Morsi’s opponents were calling for protests to demand his resignation, and the head of the armed forces was sending mixed signals about his allegiance.

Ghannouchi had spent more than two decades thinking and writing about the same promises that Egypt’s Muslim Brothers had campaigned on—combining Islamic governance with democratic elections and individual freedoms. During his trip to Cairo, he told me a few months later, at his party’s headquarters in Tunis, he had tried to convince Morsi that, in order to achieve those goals, he should voluntarily forfeit some power. (Morsi advisers later confirmed the broad outlines of Ghannouchi’s account, which he told me on the condition that I keep it private at the time.) After revolutions like those in Egypt and Tunisia, a majority party should understand the anxious vulnerability of political or religious minorities, such as Egypt’s secular-minded liberals and Coptic Christians. They had been afforded at least some protections under the old authoritarian order, and those were now gone, with little reason yet to trust promises about the rule of law, checks and balances, and individual rights. Precisely because of the Brotherhood’s electoral success—Morsi had already won ratification of the new constitution—in the interest of democracy and to reassure the Party’s weaker rivals, it should bring in a unity government ahead of another election. Why remain the lightning rod for his opponents’ fears or resentments? “The democracy of consensus succeeds—not the democracy of the majority,” Ghannouchi told me.

Morsi rejected that advice, convinced that yielding power under threat of protests would be a capitulation to political extortion and set a dangerous precedent.. Had Morsi followed Ghannouchi’s advice, perhaps he could have defused the protests that filled the streets on June 30th, demanding his ouster, or at least won over more Egyptian liberals. We’ll never know: on July 3, 2013, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi—now President Sisi, possibly for life—ousted Morsi from power, ending Egypt’s thirty-month experiment with democracy and freedom.

More than a thousand Egyptian Islamists were killed in the streets for opposing the coup. Tens of thousands more were jailed. Those who were underground or in exile demanded retribution against the ostensibly liberal factions who initially supported Sisi’s takeover. But Ghannouchi still urged reconciliation. “The Egyptian ship needs to include all Egyptians and not throw some of them into the water,” he told me. “There should be no collective punishment. The cure for a failed democracy is more democracy.”

In the months after the Egyptian coup, one Arab Spring revolt after another foundered in despair and extremism—a reversal of 2011, when the Tahrir Square sit-in stirred democracy movements in capitals across the region. Tunisia was the exception to the dark turn after the coup, in part because Ghannouchi followed his own advice there the following year. The Islamist party that he co-founded and led, Ennahdha, meaning “the renaissance,” had won the dominant role in a transitional parliament. By late 2013, the assassinations of a pair of left-leaning, secular politicians had brought the political process and constitution-drafting to a halt; opponents suspected Islamist extremists of carrying out the killings, and blamed Ennahdha for failing to prevent them. Ghannouchi, who held no elected office at the time, defied many in his party to reach a power-sharing agreement with the main leader of the secular opposition. Ennahdha voluntarily handed power to a caretaker government to oversee new elections. Ghannouchi’s concession broke the logjam. Tunisia’s revolution celebrated a fourth anniversary—it was the only Arab Spring uprising that appeared to succeed—and the civil-society organizations that helped sponsor the talks between Ghannouchi and the opposition received a Nobel Peace Prize. “We are not angels. We would like to have power,” Ghannouchi said on a visit to Washington. “But we fervently believe that a democratic constitution is more important.”

His leadership made Ennahdha a unique example of what some called liberal Islamism. In fact, Ghannouchi helped persuade Ennahdha leaders to jettison the label “Islamist” and to begin describing themselves as Muslim democrats. (He published an essay in Foreign Affairs explaining the change.) His party, which led the drafting of the constitution, pushed through a charter with explicit protections for the rights of women and of religious minorities. When we spoke in 2014, he also noted that Tunisia’s was one of the few Arab constitutions that made no reference to Islamic law. He assured me that Tunisia guaranteed freedoms for mosques, churches, synagogues—and even “pubs.” He stopped short of endorsing same-sex marriage but described sexuality as a strictly personal matter—a more liberal stance than that taken by almost any Arab government.

Tunisia’s tourism-heavy economy, however, never fully recovered from the images of turmoil in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprising, and the pandemic shut down its resorts. Years of relative inaction by Tunisia’s caretaker government and its successors fuelled a backlash against the whole political class, and especially against Ennahdha. During the next elections, in 2019, Ghannouchi also made the questionable decision to seek a seat in parliament and was then chosen as its speaker. He had become a politician. Emad Shahin, a scholar of political Islam in exile from Egypt, who is now a visiting professor at Harvard, said, “That parliament was a circus—not a place for a leader of his intellectual calibre to preside over, and he was consumed by petty politics.”

In the 2019 elections, voters rejected every Presidential candidate who had held public office. Two populists—a prominent media mogul and an obscure law professor, who together received only a third of the vote—went to a runoff. The professor, Saied, won in a landslide. In many ways, Saied is an inverse of Ghannouchi. He has eschewed any known political philosophy or faction. He routinely rails against the West, directing particular vitriol toward the International Monetary Fund, whose support Tunisia now desperately needs. His constitution promises the state “will work to achieve the objectives of pure Islam” and gives the government control over Islamic interpretation and teaching. He has called gay people “deviants” and supported the criminalization of homosexuality. This year, in his own adaptation of “replacement theory,” he set off a wave of anti-Black violence by scapegoating dark-skinned African migrants for Tunisia’s economic travails.

Saied initially cited the crisis of the pandemic as a pretext to dissolve the parliament and to rule by decree. It was not long before he began detaining a long list of critics and opponents, culminating this week with Ghannouchi. His alleged crime involves a statement that he made last weekend: “Tunisia without Ennahdha, without political Islam, without the left or any of its components is a project for civil war.” Shortly before dusk and the breaking of the fast on Monday, the holiest night of Ramadan, more than a hundred plainclothes police officers raided his home, his party said in a statement. After two days in custody, Ghannouchi, now eighty-one, was interrogated for eight hours. On Thursday, a judge sentenced him to an extended pretrial detention. Initially accused of incitement, he now faces charges of conspiring against the security of the state—a crime that can carry the death penalty.

The blow to Tunisian democracy is clear. But the imprisonment of a leader as singular as Ghannouchi is also a setback to the wider world. For Islamists who espouse violence, his imprisonment is a vindication—new evidence of the futility of the ballot box. And the silencing of his voice is a loss to the West, too.

“Marrying Islam and liberalism and democratic governance,” Robert Kagan, a historian of U.S. foreign policy, told me, “is the solution to our problems in the Arab world, and it is the solution to their problem with us.” That was also the hope that Ghannouchi tried to salvage in Egypt ten years ago.

Ghannouchi, in a prerecorded video released on Thursday, urged patience. He told Tunisians, “Trust in the principles of your revolution, and that democracy is not a passing thing in Tunis.”

Democracy stays: Brazilian presidential elections highlight precarity of civil-military relations - Pablo Uchoa (Janes)

Democracy stays: Brazilian presidential elections highlight precarity of civil-military relations

Janes, 27-Sep-2022
Author: Pablo Uchoa, 

UK Publication: Jane's Intelligence Review

Key points

•   Opinion polls consistently rank Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro below his challenger, with former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva widening the difference between them to approximately 15 points and edging closer to winning in the first round on 2 October

•   A victory for Lula in the first round would be highly likely to lead to a smooth democratic transfer of power in 2023, yet such likelihood would decrease if a second round takes place on 30 October, as Bolsonaro will be poised to ramp up the rhetoric and renew the criticism against the voting system

•   Despite Bolsonaro's attempts to discredit the electoral process and his refusal to commit to accepting the electoral results if he loses, the likelihood that Brazilian security forces would back his disregard of the election has declined during the preceding 12 months, since Bolsonaro has been unable to find enough support to trigger an institutional rupture if he loses

UPDATED

Brazil marked 200 years of its independence on 7 September, with supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro using the day to hold a political rally. A civil-military parade in the capital, Brasília, and a military display in Rio de Janeiro were the backdrop for political acts in support of the president, who is seeking a second four-year term in elections scheduled for 2 October. At the time of publication, Bolsonaro was trailing his main rival, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by approximately 15 points in opinion polls by pollsters including Datafolha, Ipec, and Ipespe.

In Brasília, a section of the civil-military parade featured tractors, representing the agribusiness sector's political support of the president. The second main event took place in Rio de Janeiro, with a full military display including a navy parade in Guanabara Bay, a demonstration by paratroopers, an air show by the air force acrobatic team, and a 21-gun salute. The scale of these events contrasted sharply with that in the previous years, which were held in a less prominent location in central Rio.

Bolsonaro gave two public speeches during the day. While addressing thousands of supporters in Brasilia, Bolsonaro struck a strongly religious note, targeting evangelical voters. He called Brazil “a promised land” and said he was following “a mission that god gave me”. Bolsonaro also listed what he considered the main achievements of his government and added that his objective for the country was “eternal freedom”.

Bolsonaro explicitly targeted the previous Lula administration, by describing the upcoming elections as “a struggle between good and evil”. The president claimed that “evil” had governed Brazil for 14 years, referring to Lula's Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores: PT), and vowed to stop the PT from “returning to their crime scene”.

In contrast with the previous occasions, Bolsonaro did not directly attack justices of the Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal: STF), however, he made strategic stops during his speech while supporters called for both Lula and Alexandre Moraes, the president of Superior Electoral Court (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral: TSE), to be jailed. Several attendees this year were pictured with signs calling on the president to shut down Congress, dismiss the courts, and enable the armed forces to grab power.

Bolsonaro said, “The will of the people will be known on 2 October” and added, “The voice of the people is the voice of god.” He gave a similar version of this speech in Rio later in the day, ramping up the tone of the attacks against Lula and promising to “extirpate” the left from politics.

Failed test

Polls released after the event suggested that it did not have the intended effect on the electorate, with the president failing to attract new voters while the distance between him and Lula grows. Political observers in Brazilian mainstream media, including Globonews, Folha de S.Paulo , UOL, and CNN Brasil, noted that, although dignitaries from Portuguese-speaking countries attended the celebrations in Brasilia as part of the expected protocol, domestic senior political figures, including the president of the Supreme Court, Luiz Fux, the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, and the lower chamber, Arthur Lira, were not present despite being invited. Bolsonaro was flanked by Silas Malafaia, evangelical pastor, and Luciano Hang, a billionaire businessman under federal police investigation for allegedly trying to articulate a military intervention along with other businesspeople on WhatsApp.

Juliano da Silva Cortinhas, a former defence adviser at the Secretariat of Strategic Affairs of the Presidency between 2012 and 2013, chief of staff of Instituto Pandiá Calógeras of the Ministry of Defence between 2013 and 2016, and co-ordinator of the Group of Studies and Research in International Security at the University of Brasília (Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas em Segurança Internacional: GEPSI/ UnB), told Janes on 8 September that the president demonstrated a strong ability to mobilise supporters, more than any other politician in Brazil today. Conversely, Cortinhas added that the main event in Brasilia was planned well in advance and relied on financial support from businesspeople who funded the deployment of pro-Bolsonaro groups to the federal capital. In addition, Cortinhas stated that Bolsonaro's “undeniable use of public money to fund his campaign” could create legal problems for him in the future. Indeed, the TSE ruled on 10 September that Bolsonaro was not allowed to use images of the event in his campaign, considering that the event had a clear electoral message.

Tensions between Bolsonaro and his political ally Ibaneis Rocha, governor of the Federal District and commander-in-chief of the Military Police in the federative unit, emerged in the lead-up to the rally. Two days before the event, Rocha ordered that Brasilia's central axis, the Esplanada dos Ministérios, be closed to traffic on security grounds. Ahead of the parade in 2021, unauthorised supporters of Bolsonaro removed several protective barriers on the Esplanada, creating a security breach especially affecting the Supreme Court, which had been targeted with fireworks by Bolsonaro supporters in June 2020. Bolsonaro had asked the army to enable approximately 50 trucks to access the site of the 2022 parade, but Rocha stood by his previous order and kept the security plan in place, with the trucks remaining outside the security perimeter. According to Cortinhas, the outcome suggested that Bolsonaro does not enjoy the institutional support of the military police in the Federal District, which had been criticised in 2021 for doing little to prevent supporters of the president from disrupting Independence Day celebrations.

Election challenge

A poll conducted by Brazilian consultancy firm Research Intelligence and Strategic Consulting (Inteligência em Pesquisa e Consultoria Estratégica: IPEC) and commissioned by TV Globo on 19 September suggested that Bolsonaro trails Lula in the polls by 15 points (31% to 47%, respectively). Another poll by Datafolha published on 15 September suggested a narrower but still significant 12-point margin (45% to 33%). Both polls put Bolsonaro's disapproval ratings at approximately 50% among all voters, but higher among women and people on low incomes who earn less than two minimum wages (approximately USD230 per month) . A personal attack on a female journalist, Vera Magalhães, after she asked him a challenging question during the first televised presidential debate on 28 August 2022, appears to have played particularly badly with female voters.

Approximately 50% of voters in the Southeast region, which concentrates the largest share of voters, also disapprove of Bolsonaro. The polling therefore indicates that Lula is likely to reach more than 50% of votes in the first round and avoid a run-off on 30 October. If a run-off takes place, Lula is predicted by both polls to win a second round against Bolsonaro by 54%–35% according to IPEC.

To make his position more tenuous, the president is under scrutiny over alleged property deals involving his family, as revealed by a seven-month-long investigation by the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper published on 30 August. According to Folha , members of the Bolsonaro family allegedly used large sums of cash to purchase 51 properties, including flats, houses, and plots of land across the country between 1990 and 2022. The 51 properties are part of 107 purchased by the family for the equivalent in 2022 of BRL25.6 million (USD4.8 million), of which BRL11.1 million (USD2.08 million) was paid in cash. Bolsonaro claims he is not involved in his family affairs and on 18 September, on a visit to London, he denied using cash to make the purchases, during an interview with TV network SBT. He said, “On all the certificates, it says ‘current currency'. It is not written ‘cash'. It can be cash, it can be cheque, bank transfer, anything.”

Despite these challenges for Bolsonaro, if he is able to reach the second round of voting during the presidential election, it significantly increases his chance of countering pre-election polling trends. In August 2022 the government increased a handout paid monthly to families in the lower-income bracket, known as Auxilio Brasil, from BRL400 to BRL600 (USD75 to USD112) to ease the effect of food and fuel price increases. On 7 September, Bolsonaro promised an extra BRL200 (USD38) to people who find a job while receiving the benefit, pledging to keep the payments into 2023, however, the government did not set aside funds to finance this expense in a budget proposal sent to Congress.

The payments do not appear to have significantly affected Bolsonaro's performance in the polls, but Leonardo Sakamoto, a political commentator in São Paulo, told Janes on 27 August that it was too soon to gauge the effect with voters. He said, “In the initial moment, people use this money to pay their bills and ease their debts ... [The] feeling of wellbeing kicks in [later], it is not immediate. If Bolsonaro is given an extra month to campaign, he'll heap more benefits [from it],” Sakamoto said.

Rupture scenarios

Bolsonaro has repeatedly suggested that he would reject the election results if he were to lose on 2 October. Throughout his term, Bolsonaro has questioned the integrity of the ballot process. In July 2021 he suggested, without evidence, that electronic voting machines are not trustworthy, despite the fact that no fraud has ever been proven since machine voting was first adopted in Brazil in 1996.

On 7 August 2022 Bolsonaro called for institutions to enable the armed forces to conduct “parallel counting” of the vote, which is outside of its jurisdiction as set out in the constitution. Voting machines are audited before, during, and after the elections, and Congress rejected a government bill to introduce printed ballots in August 2021, prompting the former president of TSE, Luís Barroso, to label the controversy “water under the bridge” in December 2021.

Bolsonaro has nevertheless continued to discredit the electoral process and, during an interview with Brazil's most-watched television news Jornal Nacional on 22 August, he refused to commit to accepting the results if he loses. Minister of Defence General Paulo Nogueira had asked Moraes to enable the armed forces access to real-time data during vote counting, but the TSE firmly denied this possibility on 12 September, reiterating that vote counting is the constitutional responsibility of electoral authorities. The TSE nevertheless agreed to put in place a pilot project to use voters' biometric data to test a small sample of electronic voting machines on the election day, after being suggested by the Ministry of Defence. Cortinhas told Janes that the last 12 months had been “a moment of greater tension in civil-military relations” with “the constant being the participation of the armed forces in national politics”.

There are signs that the likelihood that the armed forces, or any other security forces, would back Bolsonaro if he decided to disregard the election has declined during the preceding 12 months. An internal report produced for the armed forces detailed the political position of its senior members, military police commanders, and some politicians. The left-leaning media outlet Brasil 247 published parts of the report on 6 September, and details were also discussed with Janes by a journalist with access to the material who requested anonymity. The journalist suggested that army commanders were the least likely to endorse Bolsonaro's attacks against the voting system, with much of the military's high command showing “low” and “very low” adherence to the president's allegations. The report, quoted by Brasil 247 , classed the commanders of the navy, Admiral Almir Garnier Santos, and the air force, Air Brigadier Lieutenant Carlos de Almeida Baptista Junior, as “highly” aligned with Bolsonaro's claims, along with mid-ranking officers.

The source told Janes that pro-Bolsonaro officers lacked both “leadership” and “a clear plan” to trigger an institutional rupture to favour the president. “It seems to me a mistake to understand the military as a group, a cohesive body, with an idea in their heads of what they want. They don't think as a unit,” the source said. In April 2018 the then army commander, General Eduardo Villas-Bôas, posted a tweet that was seen as a threat of intervention on the eve of a crucial Supreme Court decision on whether or not to allow Lula to remain free while appealing a conviction for corruption. The general, who later became a special adviser under Bolsonaro, acknowledged in a book interview with FGV military anthropologist Celso Castro, published in 2021, that it was a concerted effort to put the armed forces back on the forefront of Brazilian politics. However, the source told Janes that the army now lacks the political leadership that Gen Villas-Bôas represented, despite this role clashing with his constitutional duties.

Significantly, the analysis of the internal report indicated that all but two corps among the military police could be considered strongly bolsonaristas , with 14 of them under the control of state governments, notably São Paulo, according to the source. These forces would be crucial to any plan to destabilise the elections, given the improbability of the army staging a power grab in Brazil. Instead, it is more likely that Bolsonaro would opt to discredit the elections on the eve or immediately after the vote, and rally his supporters onto the streets, claiming to protect democracy and freedom. This would then lead to a scenario similar to the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 but, instead of acting to prevent chaos, the police forces would stand by and watch. The Supreme Court would have no option but to request an operation known as guarantee of law and order (Garantia da Lei e da Ordem: GLO), enabling the armed forces to act as police and opening the door for a military takeover.

Scenarios like the one described above are nowadays considered less likely to unfold, said Cortinhas. Nevertheless, he noted, “We continue with this tension in the electoral process. If Bolsonaro manages to get to the second round, we will have the apex of this tension. If Lula is elected in the first round, I think things will ease.”

Several violent incidents involving supporters for both main candidates have illustrated the potential for increased violence ahead of the election. On 9 September a Bolsonaro supporter stabbed to death a backer of Lula in the west-central state of Mato Grosso. In July, a local PT official was shot dead at his birthday party by a prison guard shouting “Bolsonaro”. Bolsonaro supporters have also claimed to have been attacked by PT supporters. Although Bolsonaro has distanced himself from such incidents, Lula has called the “climate of hatred in the electoral process ... completely abnormal” and suggested that it was part of “a political strategy”.

Support for democracy

As voting day approaches, it appears that Bolsonaro has been unable to find enough support, either in the military or civil society, to trigger an institutional rupture if he loses. In contrast, support for democracy has been widespread. Some of the strongest demonstrations took place across the country on 11 August, during which politicians, artists, intellectuals, public figures, and business leaders led people to read manifestoes in favour of democracy.

One of the most influential pro-democracy manifestoes, signed by more than one hundred entities including the Brazilian Banking Federation (Federação Brasileira de Bancos: Febraban), the National Industry Confederation (Confederação Nacional da Indústria: CNI), the National Confederation of Trade (Confederação Nacional do Comércio de Bens, Serviços e Turismo: CNC), and the National Confederation of Transport (Confederação Nacional do Transporte: CNT), the American Chamber (Amcham), as well as the largest unions, was organised by the confederation of industries of São Paulo (Federação das Indústrias de São Paulo: FIESP) whose members account for one-third of the national GDP, according to the news outlet Exame on 4 August. Another manifesto entitled “Letter to Brazilians” gathered more than one million signatures and was read out loud to a cheering crowd at the University of São Paulo law school, the same place where a similar manifesto was read in 1977 to denounce the country's military government at the time.

A strong sign of support for Brazilian democracy also came from abroad after Bolsonaro invited about 70 diplomats, including dozens of ambassadors, according to Brazilian media, to the presidential palace on 18 July. Bolsonaro rehashed false claims about the electoral system and mounted an attack on Brazil's electoral system without presenting any evidence to back his claims. According to the New York Times ' article of 19 July, citing two diplomats who spoke on the condition of anonymity, many were “shaken by the presentation”, particularly at Bolsonaro's suggestion to increase the involvement of the military to improve “transparency”, and some worried that Bolsonaro was trying to “lay the groundwork” to dispute election results if he loses.

Following this event, various foreign governments, including the US, have expressed their trust in the Brazilian electoral system. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated this position on 7 September, saying, “The United States trusts in the strength of Brazil's democratic institutions. Brazil has a strong track record of free and fair elections, which are conducted with transparency, and high levels of voter participation. The elections that have been conducted by Brazil's capable and time-tested electoral system and democratic institutions serve as a model for nations in the hemisphere and across the world.”

Paulo Roberto de Almeida, a former diplomat, professor, and adviser to the Brazilian Center for International Relations (CEBRI), told Janes on 15 August that after this fruitless event, any chance of Bolsonaro finding international support for institutional rupture is “doomed”. He said, “I think this is a closed chapter. [The meeting] exposed Bolsonaro to ridicule.”

Almeida pointed out that US support for Brazilian democracy carries heavy weight, because being at odds with the US government would come at a cost for the military. “Today, we have military personnel who have been co-operating with the United States for a long time and who consider it very positive that Bolsonaro obtained an extra-NATO ally status for Brazil from Trump. The military has the need to exchange information, to have access to weapons and to be aligned with partners who can co-operate in terms of technology, training, equipment supply, co-operation etc. The Brazilian military knows that if there is any attempt of military intervention, Brazil would be isolated diplomatically, militarily, and economically.”

Support for Bolsonaro continues to be solid among members of the armed forces, who resent Lula and PT governments for the 2011–14 national truth commission that held critical views of the 1964–85 military regime. Almeida, among other political observers in Brazil, does not believe it is enough for the institution to back an anti-democratic adventure by Bolsonaro. Almeida said, “[The military] want to keep the material gains achieved under Bolsonaro, but without a break with democracy or the law, because it would have a very high cost for Brazil and for them. Sure, they would like Bolsonaro to continue, but they will not follow him into an extra-constitutional adventure.”

However, within two weeks of the vote, he dialled up the rhetoric once more, telling supporters during a visit to London on 18 September that “there is no way we will not win in the first round”, citing the “simply exceptional” welcome he receives from voters in the campaign trail. He also told SBT on the same day that “if I get less than 60% of votes, [it means] something abnormal happened in the TSE”.

Given the president's refusal to commit to accepting election results, such comments should not be dismissed as purely campaign rhetoric. They could lead to localised clashes between his supporters and Lula supporters before, during, and after the election. However, it is looking less likely that the president could count on widespread support from the armed forces and state-wide police forces to disregard election results.

A victory for Lula in the first round would be highly likely to lead to a smooth democratic transfer of power in 2023. This likelihood would decrease if a second round takes place on 30 October, as Bolsonaro will be poised to ramp up the rhetoric and renew the criticism against the voting system. He could reap more benefits from handouts paid monthly to families in lower incomes, which have so far made little difference to his performance.

For the armed forces, a Lula government in 2023 would not lead to a full-scale withdrawal from politics, but Cortinhas believes the military would seek an accommodation with the former president, keeping the benefits achieved under Bolsonaro while agreeing to subordinate to a “precarious” civilian control. “The military will continue to be active in politics as they have in every moment of our history,” Cortinhas said. “They will put up some resistance in the beginning, but they will gradually accept the new rules.”

Pablo Uchoa is a journalist and PhD candidate on civil-military politics at the UCL Institute of the Americas in London.

Outlook

Polls suggested Bolsonaro's comments on 7 September were badly received by voters, with Lula widening the difference between him and Bolsonaro to approximately 15 points and edging closer to winning in the first round on 2 October. Bolsonaro initially toned down this rhetoric, telling a poll of podcasters intended at young evangelical listeners on 13 September, “If it is god's will, I will continue [being president]. If not, we will pass the sash and I will retire, because at my age, I have nothing more to do here on earth if I end my time in politics on December 31 of this year.”