When covering Brazilian politics, the press tends to focus greatly on the main characters, such as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva or his nemesis Jair Bolsonaro, or the heads of both houses of Congress. But discussing how the political stage is set is perhaps even more important than analyzing how specific individuals navigate the scene.
The forces that limit the power of politicians are formed by the interaction of multiple events, often making it impossible to isolate the precise cause of any particular development. No political occurrence is the result of a single factor.
In this sense, figures such as Lula or Supreme Court Chief Justice Luís Roberto Barroso are less conductors of history than products of it. As Niccolò Machiavelli wrote, the virtuous prince is the one who deals carefully with circumstances as they arise. Enduring political figures are those who are able to work hard and dance to the tune.
That being said, three major institutional currents can be identified as guiding the Brazilian political system: democratization, parliamentarism, and judicialism. Rather than running in parallel, they intersect, feed, and drain each other, creating waves that, if properly interpreted, can lead to one situation or another.
The first is democracy, not as a political regime — a system that provides for periodic elections and mechanisms to protect individual freedom — but as a dispute of worldviews. Although ideological debate and radicalization are not new phenomena, the capillarity of debate and access to the public arena have been brutally boosted by social networks.
The result has been the introduction of new characters into the political system — such as Nikolas Ferreira, a YouTuber and the most-voted House member in the history of Minas Gerais state — and the encouragement for parliamentarians elected from the more radical fringes to remain in office.
Because they are under intense scrutiny on social networks, any move to the other side or even to the center is immediately punished,...
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