Sérgio Abranches
In 1988, I wrote an article analyzing the political model underlying the debate within the Brazilian Constituent Assembly. Brazil was about to have a new Constitution, and constituents were on the verge of adopting a modified version of the 1946 Constitution’s political model. It was my view that we should examine the main institutional elements of the 1946 version and their interactions to see whether they contributed to the model’s failure. I developed a comparative conceptual framework to demonstrate that our presidential model was so different from the American as to characterize a new type of presidential government. I defined this new type as a presidential coalition government. The peculiar combination of extensive and heterogeneous federalism, proportional representation (PR), a multiparty system, an independent bicameral Legislative and a strong presidency originated a very different political system. From a comparative perspective, the presidential coalition government is a type of governance system different from both American presidential government and parliamentary regimes. The president is elected by the direct plurality vote of a national constituency, in a two-round process. State-wide vote elect House representatives and senators. Different constituency configurations for presidential and legislative elections prevent the president from acquiring a congressional majority for her party.
As a consequence, both governability and governance depend on the president getting the support of a stable majority coalition in Congress.
The reiterated need for constitutional amendments aggravates this dependency on a substantial majority. The lack of trust among social forces and contending parties motivated the inclusion of a large amount of policy-related subjects into the Constitution. As a result, most relevant policy changes would call for a constitutional amendment, requiring a supermajority of 3/5 of the vote in a two-round voting process. Due to this sweeping constitutionalization, both governability and governance depend on the president getting the support of a stable surplus majority coalition.
Thirty years after the enactment of the new Constitution, and the publication of my paper, I decided to review the historical and structural origins of the 1988 version of the presidential coalition government, as well as its institutional performance. I was particularly interested in the model’s resilience in moments of severe crisis. The result was the book Presidencialismo de Coalizão: Raízes e Trajetória do Modelo Político Brasileiro (Coalition presidential government: Origins and pathways of the Brazilian political model). The aim of the book was twofold: to trace the origins and development of the structural and institutional elements of the Brazilian political model, and to evaluate its performance in political crisis, with particular attention to the 30 years experience of the 1988 version.
The first question to me was: why a centralized multiparty federal system with a strong presidency replaced the decentralized bipartisan federalism with a weak president? In other words, why the presidential model of the First Republic (1889-1930) very much inspired by the American Constitution, did not move towards a fully developed bipartisan presidential system as it did in the U.S.?
The Brazilian First Republic was a loose federation of powerful states under a weak Union. The president was a representative of the political consensus among the dominant forces in the leading states. The bipartisan system encapsulated different state party systems that amounted to a multiparty system in embryo. The collapse of the First Republic led to a highly centralized autocratic regime under the leadership of Getulio Vargas. The breakdown of the Vargas dictatorship at the end of the World War led to the first real attempt at establishing a fully democratic regime in Brazil. An independent Constituent Assembly voted a new Constitution, in 1946, creating the political model I conceived as a presidential coalition government.
The Second Republic was born as a moderately fragmented multiparty system. Party fragmentation would increase incrementally at each new election. Although the separation of powers provided for an independent Judicial branch, it failed to act as a third force to mitigate conflicts between the Executive and the Legislative powers. The military assumed this role, instead, and the continued military intervention in political affairs led to their politicization, and ultimately to the collapse of the Second Republic with the 1964 military coup, and a two-decade-long period of military rule.
The 1988 Constitution, as I already pointed out, chose to reestablish presidential coalition government on a revised version. Centralization was even higher, the Presidency stronger, the system of checks and balances, including the Judicial branch, more independent and endowed with encompassing powers. The party system of the Third Republic is the most fragmented one and evolved from high fragmentation to hyper-fragmentation at each electoral round.
I’ve observed a clear developmental pattern: at each cycle of authoritarian government, the subsequent Republican Constitution would retain some of its features. The final result was a political model with a highly centralized federalism; a budgetary process that gave the Presidency largely discretionary power to decide how to execute the budget and manage expenditure. States and municipalities became dependent on the Federal government to finance even actions that were their sole constitutional duty. Members of Congress became primarily political brokers with the task of extracting resources from the Federal government for their states and constituencies. This system of dependency has become a powerful incentive to pork politics, and to the dispute of cabinet posts as a means to get a partial hold of the purse strings. The complexity of the political process for building and retaining majority surplus coalitions, as well as the permanent bargaining for fiscal resources as a prerequisite for legislative decisions and coalition discipline, are, in my view, the primary sources of dysfunctions in the Brazilian political system. These politico-institutional features also have clear built-in incentives for corruption.
The judicialization of politics has been a direct side-effect of both sweeping constitutionalization and the need for amending the Constitution as part of regular policy-making. Judicial review of policy outcomes, and the intervention of the Supreme Court to arbitrate conflict among Congressional parties, and between the Legislative and Executive powers have become commonplace in Brazilian political life. Reiterated Supreme Court involvement in political and institutional conflicts has led to its politicization. My impression, though, after analyzing Supreme Court proceedings, is that the judicialization of politics has been higher and more pervasive than the politicization of the Court.
The 1988 version of our presidential coalition government has been far more resilient to crisis than the former. It has withstood two impeachment crisis; hyperinflation and its successful resolution, requiring broad constitutional reforms and policy changes; the shift of the power balance from the center-right coalition of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s presidency to the center-left-right coalitions of Lula’s and Dilma Rousseff’s administrations. Since Lula’s second term, the political system has faced severe strain resulting from corruption investigations and judicial procedures under the so-called Lava Jato (Car-Wash) operations. Democratic stability prevailed in spite of rising political and institutional stress.
Impeachment procedures have been by far the hardest stress test until now. Impeachment is an unsatisfactory and traumatic means to remove unpopular presidents who have failed to secure the support of a majority coalition. Impeachment procedures ousted the first president elected by direct popular vote, Fernando Collor de Mello, and Lula-sponsored president Dilma Rousseff. In both cases, impeachment followed the rule of law. In both cases, Legislative decisions regarding the directions for impeachment were subject to judicial review, and the Supreme Court has issued strict guidelines to be followed by Congress. Supreme Court guidelines, however, differed very much from one case to the other. It is a delegitimizing anomaly to have different impeachment rules under the same Constitution. Collor’s impeachment was a far more summary process, and it took Congress 122 days to depose him. The president was temporarily removed from office 28 days after impeachment proceedings began in the House, and before any deliberation by the Senate.
Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment was longer. It took Congress 273 days to depose her. The president was temporarily removed only 162 days after House proceedings began, and after the Senate’s decision to prosecute her for crimes of responsibility. In spite of far more favorable conditions for her defense, Dilma Rousseff’s deposition was considered to be a “parliamentary coup.” Either both impeachments were “parliamentary coups,” or both were legally binding decisions, which I think has been the case. Their legal and democratic nature notwithstanding, both resulted from arbitrary political decisions. Impeachment is not a functional equivalent of a no-confidence vote in parliamentary systems. A president’s term belongs to the people’s majority that elected her. A prime-minister’s tenure, on the contrary, belongs to the parliamentary majority from which she rose. In the former, the proper instrument for removal would be a recall, a majority popular vote to oust a president. In the latter, it would be the no-confidence vote from the Parliament’s majority. Impeachment as the sole mechanism to depose a minority president is an evident dysfunction of the Brazilian political model. Excessive centralization of power in the Union, the economic dependency of the states, and presidential discretionary expenditure power are other fundamental dysfunctions.
The 2018 general elections were disruptive. They occurred several months after the book’s publication. They interrupted the political cycle that has organized both government and opposition in Brazil which I have analyzed in detail. A bipartisan dispute for the Presidency confronting center-right PSDB and center-left PT has dominated this cycle, while the other parties ran to maximize the number of seats in Congress to qualify to form the governing coalition. The presidential election broke this political duopoly. For the first time since the 1994 elections, PSDB was not on the runoff vote for the Presidency. The rightist candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, a backbencher in the House, defeated PT in the runoff without the support of an organized party.
In Congress, all major parties sustained severe seat losses. Party fragmentation has increased very much. The renewal rate was very high, and newcomers hold about 20% of the House seats. PSL, Bolsonaro’s party, has jumped from 1 to 52 seats. PT remained the larger party, with 56 seats, but it is on a sharp downward trajectory, and lost 14 seats. It seems that the political system has entered an interregnum between the terminated 1994-2018 political cycle, and a new one that will perhaps begin in the next general elections, in 2020.
Bolsonaro’s performance will very much influence this new cycle. The president has decided not to build a parliamentary coalition, in spite of having a bold reform agenda. By doing that he’s chosen the more difficult and costlier way to deal with the Legislative, trying to get support for his policies through negotiations with issue-oriented groups, and individual members of Congress disregarding both party lines and party leaders. Congress, however, is a partisan institution and the rules focus on party-led procedures. It is a high political risk choice. Whether the president will succeed in imposing a new pattern of relationship with Congress is uncertain. If both governance and governability continue to depend on a stable surplus majority, the president will be in dire straits.
References
“Presidencialismo de coalizão: o dilema institucional brasileiro” (“Coalition presidencial government: the Brazilian institutional dilemma”), Dados, vol. 31, n. 1, 1988, pp. 5-34.
