What is a Coup? Analysing the Brazilian Impeachment Process
What is a Coup? Analysing the Brazilian Impeachment Process
October 11, 2016
by Aline Piva - Frederick B. Mills
The debate over whether the regime change in Brazil constituted a coup hinges on whether the impeachment process used to depose President Dilma Rousseff had democratic legitimacy or was an illicit use of formal procedures to undermine the popular mandate granted to the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) by the Brazilian people in the last presidential election. Proponents of the view that the impeachment was legal and that this legality confers democratic legitimacy tend to abstract the impeachment process from its lived context. This abstraction leaves the politics behind the regime change opaque and even irrelevant. The notion of legality and the impeachment that took place, however, is inevitably refracted through the lens of a historical, cultural, economic, and political context. We argue that the social contract that gives legal avenues their democratic legitimacy has been undermined by the impeachment process and that this caused a breach in the democratic order. On this view, the “legality” that prevails at the present moment is a subversion of democracy and justice — it is driven by corruption and elite economic interests, and has given rise to a golpista regime.
It is essential first to assess whether the protagonists of the impeachment process were representing constituent power, or whether they had taken themselves and special interests as the ultimate point of reference in order to advance an agenda that is contrary to the popular mandate — a mandate expressed in democratic elections just months before the regime change. If the latter were the case, and we think it is, then there has been a rupture in the democratic order brought about by an institutional coup. On account of this rupture, the legality in force is at the service of a new master and not the constituents who had delegated their power to government institutions through democratic procedures.
Many critics of the use of the term “coup” to describe Brazil’s regime change argue that this term is being misapplied. In his Political Dictionary, Noberto Bobbio defines coup d’état as a change of government through unconstitutional means. This change of government has five distinctive characteristics: 1. Is an act perpetrated by one or more institutions within the State; 2. Leads to a change in political leadership; 3. May be accompanied by political and/or social mobilization; 4. Is usually followed by the reinforcement of the State’s bureaucracy and law enforcement apparatus; and 5. Leads to the elimination or dissolution of political parties. All five of these characteristics can be found in Rousseff’s impeachment.[1] When we place the impeachment in the historical and lived context of Brazilian politics, we find that the legal process that drove the impeachment became the mere spectacle of legality, a “legality” high-jacked by a political-economic bloc to bring about a radical lchange in the overall economic and social platform — one more amenable to the neoliberal gospel, one that was simply not possible with the platform upon which Rousseff was democratically elected. When judicial manipulations in this way become the instrument of regime change toward a desired economic agenda, democracy is undermined.
Impeachment or Coup?
To understand Rousseff’s impeachment, one must understand Brazil’s history of constitutional rupture. The civil and military coup of 1964 is the most exemplary of such ruptures, but there were similar attempts in 1930, 1937, 1954, and 1961.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/11/what-is-a-coup-analysing-the-brazilian-impeachment-process/
Good Reads:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016168315
