dissatisfaction with traditional politics and politicians was capitalized on by the far right, who attempted to kidnap the June Days, seizing on the opportunity to criticize the PT government and fomenting an anti-petismo (anti-PT-ism). The 2013 protests thus set the stage for the formation of a new activist right in Brazil, which eventually found a front man in Bolsonaro. These right-wing activists adopted the methods and tactics of mobilization from the 2013 manifestações – notably using social media to channel the anger of the protests away from social and political issues and towards a villainous depiction of the PT and towards the valorization of anti-PT activists like Bolsonaro and his conservative, nationalist agenda.
Two of the most active anti-PT groups – Vem Pra Rua (Take to the Streets) and Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL – Free Brazil Movement) – funnelled general unrest into specifically partisan attacks. As their names highlight, these groups adopted the very language of the original manifestacões. Vem Pra Rua was the key slogan of the 2013 protest, and O Movimento Brasil Livre was named after the Movimento Passe Livre, the movement that called the initial demonstrations. Like the MPL, both groups also relied heavily on social media – WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter – to disseminate their ideas and especially to call people to the streets. In doing so they presented the manifestações as a chance for the middle classes to reclaim their space in Brazilian society. On its Facebook page, Vem Pra Rua, for instance, referred to the protests as an ‘avenue for the middle classes to repossess what had been taken away from them.’ And, in one of the MBL’s online videos Bolsonaro was referred to as the only person who could protect Brazil from ‘rabid communists who are trying to destroy the foundations of the country’s property rights.’
Both right-wing movements in this way capitalized on concerns about losses of middle-class status. Distributive economic strategies and programmes introduced by the PT (see Chapter 9), such as the incorporation of millions of workers into formal labour markets, the diffusion of higher education, and the expansion of employment rights to the domestic workers, led to an unprecedented reduction in inequality in Brazil. The established middle class resented the loss of their position and privilege in society as members of a new lower-middle class began accessing services and spaces once reserved for them. Furthermore, with the inflation of wages it was harder and more expensive to hire household help. These factors created a marked sense of frustration amongst Brazil’s middle class, convinced that welfare policies and cultural erosion were undermining their privileged place in Brazil. Despite being enshrined in the country’s constitution since 1981 it is clear that the right to the city with its promise of freedom of space and mobility was been highly and unevenly truncated.
Right-wing groups like Vem Pra Rua and the MBL tapped into this frustration offering the middle class a politics of resentment that was based on the vilification of left-wing politics and politicians. Videos and postings by the movements cast the PT, as well as left-wing activists, high-school teachers, members of the lesbian, gay, transgender, and queer community, and other marginalized groups, as threats to the established order and to the traditional foundations of Brazilian society, foundations that as Chaui has noted are far from based on equality. In doing so these groups did not just foster a conservative consolidation of the demands of the 2013 June Days into an anti-petismo, they decoupled ideology from historical and empirical reality, fostering an idea of the middle class as an oppressed people subject to the will of the state, something that was evident in the rejection of party politics and that gave rise to an authoritarian populism.
Some commentators were tempted to see the rejection of party politics and the call for ‘direct democracy’ in 2013 as ‘the return of the [authentically] political;’ to see Brazil’s manifestações as an act of political subjectivation, the emergence of productively antagonistic and embodied decisions ‘to act, to interrupt, to stage’ (Swyngedouw 2014, p. 129); whose vitality resides in their refusal to observe the proper place allocated to people and things in a social landscape where the coordinates of democracy are well proscribed. In this capacity the June protests represent a rupture in the historical fabric of Brazilian society, a society in which, as anthropologist Roberto Da Matta (1991) has argued, each individual knows their place and in which a social contract of cordiality has traditionally diffused conflicts in public space. In this rupture, many saw 2013 as representing a hopeful renewal of past political struggles. Raquel Rolnik, for instance, wrote that the Brazilian manifestações ‘renewed the dream of a utopia’ (2013, p. 8). For her, ‘the right to have rights that fed the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s, that inspired the constitution and saw the emergence of new actors on the political stage, all of which had appeared to have vanished’ suddenly reappeared (2013, p. 9).
Such utopian feelings about Brazil’s June Days keyed into wider enthusiasm sparked by other contemporary international protests. Indeed, while the 2013 manifestações dumbfounded many in Brazil at the time, some international commentators soon began to underscore commonalities between the Brazilian demonstrations and global movements: protests across the Arab world, Occupy in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, student demonstrations in Chile, the Indignados in Spain, and other flash points throughout the world. The uniting thread of these international protests was their anti-capitalist thrust (privatizations of public space and public services), an awareness that market freedoms do not bring about universal freedoms.
Such links between Brazil’s manifestações and other heterodox international protests can then be understood as evidence of a ‘return of the political,’ to use Erik Swyngedouw’s (2014) phrase. Much of this broadly post-Marxist work has attempted to theorize such mass movements as a reawakening of the political in anodyne ‘post-political’ or even de-politicized contexts. The idea of the post-political, along with notions such as the post-democratic (Crouch 2004) and post-politics (Mouffe 2005), speak of a contemporary democratic condition in which real contestation and conflicting claims about the world are not apparent. Such theorizing rests on the understanding that the post-Cold War period has witnessed a new political and economic settlement centred on the norms and interests of the global market, and governance structures in which consensus has foreclosed proper political debate (Žižek 2008). The general thrust of this post-political literature is that the political realm has been hollowed out or that the political itself has disappeared (Mouffe 2005), that the parameters of political discussion and political action have narrowed to preclude alternatives to neoliberalism (Crouch 2004). Today’s consensual times have thus eliminated genuine political disagreement.
These discussions have impacted thinking about cities. For Swyngedouw (2010) urban politics has been excavated of the truly political and are constructed through empty signifiers such as the ‘global city.’ All that is left of the formerly political realm is the management and policy-making of consensus, in which political decisions are led by global public–private administrative elites, whose the outcomes are known in advance. Urban governance now operates ‘beyond the state,’ (Swyngedouw 2005, 2008) through a range of geographical scales, mobilizing a wide assortment of social actors, including architects and planners, corporations, non-governmental agencies, and the more traditional forms of local, regional, and national government. This regime exposes what Jacques Rancière (2005) calls the ‘scandal of democracy:’ while promising equality and the right to the city, it produces a form of governing in which political power fuses with economic might and an arrangement that consensually shapes the city according to the dreams, tastes, and needs of the transnational economic, political, and cultural elites.
For Swyngedouw, as for Rolnik, Brazil’s urban protests, along with those that took place elsewhere in the world, reveal the possibility of the revitalization of political agency and enactment and the possibility of formulating new ways to counteract the end of the political. This revitalization, though, should not be thought of as a step back in time. The post-politics thesis is clear that the interruption afforded by ‘the return of the political’ is a moment, and one that requires the subsequent slow materialization of new democratic and egalitarian practices going forward, not the imitation of an old order. To this extent, the phrase ‘political enactment’
