Populism in Brazil After 2003

Abstract

This article argues that the left and right populist governments that followed each other in Brazil after 2003, although they had quite different ideological frameworks, functioned within the same neoliberal framework. Both populist periods took shape as a contemporary expression of the search for a solution to the same elite-popular conflict that had emerged throughout Brazilian history. Right and left populisms were effective in absorbing the anger that had accumulated within large segments of the population under neoliberalism, but at the same time, they were also social movements that aimed to eliminate the structural problems of the political sphere that was desired to be re-established each time. This dual movement has been the social and political expressions of the anger that has accumulated within the deep rift between the elites and the people in Brazil from the colonial period to the present day. Both approaches have reproduced the structural inequalities in the social structure of Brazil. In this context, although right and left populisms have a constituent power discourse against the existing established order, they have not been able to break out of the economic and political boundaries of the same order at the level of action.