Authoritarian Populism as a Response to Crisis: The Case of Brazil/Krize Yanit olarak Otoriter Populizm: Brezilya Ornegi.

• Author: Akgemci, Esra

Introduction

During the past decade, authoritarian populism has gained momentum in world politics with the rise of rightist/far-rightist leaders, including Viktor Mihaly Orban (2010) in Hungary, Narendra Modi (2014) in India, Rodrigo Duterte (2016) in the Philippines, Donald Trump (2016) in the United States, Andrej Babis (2017) in the Czech Republic, and JairBolsonaro (2018) in Brazil. Furthermore, the outcome of the Brexit referendum in 2016 demonstrated that even if authoritarian populist trends do not dominate national politics, they can still shape the policy agenda by fueling anti-E.U. and antiimmigrant attitudes. (1) It is essential to comprehend how authoritarian values combine with right-wing populist rhetoric in the current conjuncture, marked by the uncertainties arising from the continuing effects of the 2007-2008 global economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. (2) Examining the roots of authoritarian populism embedded in the political economy of modern capitalism would exceed the limits of the article. However, focusing on how authoritarian leaders create a sense of crisis and respond to that crisis will contribute to understanding authoritarian populist movements. This article argues that accelerating anxiety and manipulating ethnic, religious, and cultural differences can be the primary authoritarian populist mechanism to respond to crisis.

This article uses the term "authoritarian populism" as a distinctive combination of authoritarianism and populism, following the theoretical framework developed by Stuart Hall in his analysis on Thatcherism and applied to the Brazilian case by Neto and Cipriani, (3) De Oliveira and Maia, (4) and Morelock and Narita. (5) The first section of the article discusses the advantages and limitations of using the term in the Brazilian context to put this position forward. Accordingly, the following sections examine how authoritarian populism emerged as a response to crisis in Brazil. The electoral victory of Jair Bolsonaro, a polarizing figure who has consistently been promoting authoritarian values, has drawn on bitter conflicts and antagonisms. The construction of existential threats and the fear of "dangerous others" are Bolsonaro's main answer to crisis. The article addresses three mechanisms through which Bolsonaro aims to construct a "popular" consent to an authoritarian regime in Brazil. These mechanisms are closely associated with the six-step model developed by Benjamin Moffitt to explain how populist actors "perform" crisis and try to unite "the people" against a dangerous other. (6) On this basis, it firstly examines nativism as a conservative view on how politics should be structured by perceiving all "non-native" peoples and ideas as threatening. Secondly, messianism, the fetishism of Bolsonaro as a "messiah" who leads the way in the battle between "good" and "evil," will be discussed as an instrument that serves to reinforce the support of the Evangelist social base against the Workers' Party (PT) members (petistas). Finally, the article demonstrates how conspiracism provides an easy way to eradicate ambiguities and helps to fuel an antagonism against "enemies." It concludes by assessing the potential of alternative political realities constructed by authoritarian populists to appeal to people in times of crisis.

Construction of Popular Consent and Formulating Coercive Responses to Crisis

The term "authoritarian populism" emerged to conceptualize the new moment in the conjuncture of the capitalist restructuring in the 1970s. After reading Nicos Poulantzas's State, Power, Socialism, Stuart Hall developed the concept to periodize the "relationship between the state and the political crisis." (7 )He found many similarities between his considerations formulated in Policing the Crisis and Poulantzas's discussions of "authoritarian statism" as a distinctive form of the capitalist state. Yet Poulantzas focused on the totalitarianism inherent in every capitalist state and the construction of hegemony in the ruling classes. Hall shifted the characterization of the conjuncture from "authoritarian statism" to "authoritarian populism" to comprehend how popular consent is constructed, a dimension that he thinks Poulantzas neglected. (8) According to Hall, the British state's crisis in the 1970s was an "exceptional moment" in which "representative" and "interventionist" aspects of the state were combined in a particular form. (9) Therefore, authoritarian populism emerges as a response to the crisis, aiming to "construct a popular consent to an authoritarian regime." (10) Based on this framework, the authoritarian position is accompanied by a "powerful groundswell of popular legitimacy" and constructs an "authoritarian consensus." (11) Hall argues that this response to the crisis can be seen as a distinctive form of "passive revolution," which aims to "shift the previously existing disposition of social forces," as Gramsci described. (12) Conceptualizing authoritarian populism as a response to a specific crisis defined as "an actual field of struggle, on which the forces of right have been actively intervening" enables us to question the "exceptional moment" in which we live.

Hall explicitly clarifies how the public's anxieties in times of crisis and the perceived threats to the state coincide. (13) Through the "discovery of demons," "the identification of folk devils," and "the mounting of moral campaigns," authoritarian populists create several "moral-panics." (14) Using Stanley Cohen's criminological concept, Hall demonstrates how Margaret Thatcher established hegemony in the United Kingdom through a climate of paranoia, which combines some threats to the well-being of society with social concerns. The next stage is where social anxiety can refer to a specific enemy and a hidden power "behind everything" as well. Hall examines how the crisis in this stage looks like a more concrete set of fears and ironically appears in its most abstract form as a "general conspiracy." (15) In today's world, where the ability of people to tolerate uncertainties is decreasing, conspiracist assault on common sense has emerged as an inseparable component of authoritarian populism.

Neto and Cipriani assert that the significance of Hall's analysis is that it depends on a "bottomup thinking," which enables an understanding of authoritarian populism not only as an "organized conspiracies coming from above," but also as "a specific alliance with the poor population" through conservative values such as family, nation, duty, and order. (16) According to Hall, the phenomenon is not characterized by the mere imposition of an "external force"; instead, it has roots in people's thoughts and experiences. So, the authors find Hall's consideration helpful to explain how Bolsonaro's campaign served to translate desires, anxieties, and morals, whose bases were already established in the urban peripheries. (17) Neto and Cipriani focus on urban peripheries and consider Bolsonarism a new national-popular project that can redefine common sense and naturalize and operate unconsciously among ordinary people in their daily lives. (18) As interests are being redefined, politically and ideologically, conflict among different income groups occurs in morals throughout the representation process. In this way, Bolsonarism can articulate different social and economic interests within the same political project depending on a neoliberal agenda.

The end of PT rule under Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil was a significant shift from new-developmentalism to ultra-neoliberalism. The commodity price shock in 2014-2016 demonstrated the fragility of the PT's new developmentalist model, which combined macro-economic stability with social justice. Under less favorable external conditions, balancing the diverse interests of different social classes was more challenging in an unequal society (19) The severe economic crisis occurred alongside the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, who was accused of violating Brazil's fiscal responsibility law, and the subsequent political polarization paved the way for the rise of Bolsonaro, who blames the PT governments' developmentalist policies for the recession and corruption. Neoliberalism emerged in its most radical form in Brazil under the Bolsonaro government, dismantling social policies, making labor legislation more flexible, and advancing privatizations of state-owned enterprises. (20) Depending on Hall's writings on authoritarian populism and Poulantzas's arguments of authoritarian statism, Ian Bruff emphasizes that neoliberalism has always contained authoritarian tendencies but prominently tilted towards coercion with more punitive penal and criminal policies since the global economic crisis in 2008. (21) Applying the term "authoritarian populism" in the Brazilian context will then update Hall's argument to the era of the post-2008 rise of "authoritarian neoliberalism," an interrelated dynamic.

Neto and Cipriani point out the importance of punitivism, (22) since the fear of being the victim of a crime and the demand for "greater punishment and state repression" were essential elements of support for Bolsonaro's campaign. (23) The fear of violence in a "world of crime" has been seen as a vital factor in destabilizing residents' ontological security, breaking with the predictability of their routines, and raising collective anxiety. As stated in the work of Neto and Cipriani, these conditions make room for tensions in the social order that can be exploited by operations of authoritarian populism, especially in the peripheries. Besides, the expansion of the "world of crime" within an incrimination process has historically criminalized the peripheral population in Brazil, who are the primary victims of crime. (24) Police militarization legitimizes repressive violence against marginalized social groups, including Afro-Brazilians. Bolsonaro has been...