On the eve of Brazil’s elections, Bolsonaro turns the country’s bicentennial to his own ends

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Lilia Moritz Schwarcz is senior professor at the Universidade de Sao Paulo, global scholar and visiting professor at Princeton University. She is the author of Brazilian Authoritarianism.

On this year’s Brazilian Independence Day, marking the 200th anniversary of the country’s break with Portugal, President Jair Bolsonaro gathered tens of thousands of supporters along the Esplanade of Ministries in Brasilia, the capital. The giant procession on Sept. 7 included soldiers, tanks and tractors, and was just one of hundreds of Independence Day rallies that took place to rev up his supporters ahead of the first round of Brazil’s elections on Oct. 2.

When urging his supporters to attend the rallies, the President told them to “make a stand” and “fight for your freedom” – worrying phrases for many who fear Mr. Bolsonaro will falsely claim the election was stolen and try to overstay his mandate if he loses at the ballot box.

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Mr. Bolsonaro’s main rival in the election, leftist ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, wasn’t happy to see the incumbent hijack the commemorative date and transform it into a platform for demonstrating his military might and intimidating the country’s democratic institutions.

“I never used the national day, the day for the Brazilian people, the most important day because of independence, as a political campaign tool,” Mr. da Silva said.

Celebratory dates of a civic nature are always subject to narrative wrangling, but this year the temperature is particularly high enough to make the commemoration of the events of Sept. 7, 1822, a handy pretext for all sorts of protest – though mainly radical right-wing ones.

Before Brazilian Independence Day is reduced to an ideological motif once and for all, we need to take a good look at what really happened on that date.

The country’s path to independence wasn’t a conventional one. In the early 1820s, Brazil was being ruled by Portuguese prince Dom Pedro (Pedro I), the son of King John VI of Portugal. The royal family had fled to Brazil after Napoleon invaded Portugal, but after the king returned home, Dom Pedro decided to stay, break with his family and declare independence. Pedro I was proclaimed emperor.

Few would disagree that Brazilian independence was the fruit of a conservative force that, in the interests of maintaining a status quo, favoured the landowning elite, preserved slavery and reaffirmed the national borders. This was not a revolutionary movement.

Rather than emancipation from Portugal leading to a participative and presidential regime, power was handed over to a Portuguese prince, heir to the Bragancas and Hapsburgs, who turned independent Brazil into a lone monarchy among republics – a political anomaly in the region.

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Almost since the country’s inception, the date of Sept. 7 was shrouded in a sort of legend; a fantasy that painted a movement that, unlike those of its South American neighbours, involved no conflict or civilian or military casualties. The general perception has been that the change of regime was enacted peacefully, without discord or disruption.

However, this was a narrative mainly spun by the landowning elite in the southeast of the country, and it totally glossed over the trouble in the northeast, where unrest was quashed across the provinces of Bahia, Piaui, Pernambuco and Maranhao. The latter two did not support the intended political solution or trust the leadership in the then-capital, Rio de Janeiro.

Over the years, the narrative around Independence Day has kept shifting.

In 1828, three years before Pedro I abdicated the throne under pressure from local politicians, he spread a previously unknown story about himself proclaiming the country’s emancipation on the banks of the Ipiranga stream in Sao Paulo.

It is interesting that it was only after 1830 that this particular narrative surrounding the emperor Pedro I’s heroic role gained such traction that it would eventually become the official version: a monarchical independence forged under the strong and uncontested leadership of a European sovereign.

One hundred years later, in 1922, on the centenary of Brazil’s independence, it was Sao Paulo, now the nation’s economic powerhouse, that endeavoured to snatch the spotlight for itself. The story this time was that the events in the fields of Ipiranga were a symbolic marker of Sao Paulo’s brawn, trail-blazing and pilotage. It was time to revise the national memory to emphasize a state long shunted to the sidelines of Brazilian culture and administration.

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But the narrative hijackings would not end there. In 1972, 150 years after independence and in the middle of Brazil’s dictatorship period, the military started redefining the country’s political emancipation as their conquest and, to that end, they recast Pedro I as a warrior prince. The civic commemoration gave way to one with parading tanks, marching legions and a display of heavy weaponry.

What’s more, the dictatorship claimed Brazil’s independence for itself, advocating a highly conservative version that saw it as a demonstration of order: a movement, not the coup that it actually was.

To kick it all off, they had the remains of Pedro I and his wife, Maria Leopoldina, brought over to Brazil for reburial, turning them into a material and funereal reminder.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s government is following a similar course. On last year’s Independence Day, the President attacked the Supreme Federal Court, maligned democratic institutions and announced that he would not accept an unfavourable outcome to the 2022 elections. He used the commemorations to assert his autocratic power and harnessed historical allusions to burnish his image among his supporters.

Mr. Bolsonaro did the same thing again this year. He presented himself not as an emperor, but as a “myth” (as he’s commonly called at rallies); not as an authoritarian ruler, but as the guardian of order who must sometimes exercise force to keep things “on the straight and narrow.” In other words, his would be an “autocoup”: a coup d’état in which a lawfully elected head of state seizes power from the other branches of government, unafraid of nulling democracy.

In August, with a nod toward the agenda pursued by the military dictatorship, Mr. Bolsonaro decided to have Pedro I’s formaldehyde-soaked heart, which was removed from his body by his request after death, brought over from Portugal. The organ was “received like a head of state,” said the Brazilian foreign ministry’s chief of protocol, Alan Coelho de Sellos.

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Brazil is mired in paradox. The word “coup” has never been so present on people’s lips. And if this bicentenary has served as a pretext for an ultra-right-wing, retrograde and narcissistic government intent on shrinking democracy, then the coming elections draw our attention to the importance of civil society and its leadership role.

German sociologist Ulrich Beck would have defined the present situation as a “social metamorphosis”: a period in which the transitory looks permanent. As the new order attempts to break through, the old ways refuse to stand aside. It’s a context that generates immense frustration and dissatisfaction, but which also allows us to envisage a time when the old will no longer be recognized by the new.

We know that, worldwide, democracy finds itself shrouded in suspicion and doubt. We also know that many of the world’s democracies have taken a conservative turn, further undermining their own stability. But that’s what democracies are all about: They have their promises – equality, liberty and inclusion – but their problems, too. After all, the vows of democracy require constant renewal and improvement.

If Mr. Bolsonaro doesn’t get his way, it’s possible the country might join the progressive shift being undertaken by the “new Latin-American reformers,” as they are often called – a group including the recently elected Gustavo Petro in Colombia, Gabriel Boric in Chile and Luis Arce in Bolivia. Collectively, a gust of fresh utopian air.

This could be a moment for refounding democracy and ethically honouring the idea of independence: a state where the citizens are truly in control of their own destiny.

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