Vicissitudes of the Tupiniquim democratic itinerary: ups and downs in the recent history of democracy in Brazil

Abstract

Since the establishment of the Brazilian Republic in 1889, the political processes that the country’s society has gone through have been marked by crises, instabilities, discontinuities, coups and violations. Since that moment, the country’s democratic periods do not amount to more than one third of its whole republican phase, with the to-ings and fro-ings of its 43 official presidents, less than half of whom were elected by direct popular vote. Historical contextualization of the several stages of Brazil’s political development is needed in order to facilitate the analysis of the present period. In this article, we shall briefly present, in five sections, the main milestones and historical facts of the Brazilian Republic. We shall highlight the historical moment known as the “New Republic”, a period when, after over twenty years of military dictatorship, we witness the re-democratization of the country beginning with the indirect election of the country’s president in 1985 and continuing up to the recent presidential election in 2018.