Ricardo Pagliuso Regatieri, Professor of Sociology at the Federal University of Bahia and Visiting Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, gave a research seminar entitled “God, Lies, and Tsunami Rider” on November 15. The seminar was moderated by Graziella Moraes Silva, Co-Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute. 

In his presentation based on his ongoing research, Ricardo Regatieri discussed the hardships of democracy in postcolonial contexts. As opposed to the thriving democracies of European colonizing nations as well as of North America , which are also former expansion colonies, he found that most struggling democracies are in countries that were former exploitation colonies that excluded the colonizers from the local population. He observed that a vast majority of struggling democracies are found in post-colonial nations such as Brazil. 

Because of its colonial past, religious monarchism plays a strong role in Brazil. Ricardo Regatieri suggested that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was continuing this tradition by mobilizing on a political platform of “Brazil above everything, God above everybody.” He cited Bolsonaro’s elective affinities with conservative Catholics and evangelical groups as evidences of his alignment with this tradition. He also built on Shalini Randeria’s work when he argued that authoritarian leaders learn fast from each other and that they succeed in manipulating social frustrations, creating scapegoats, and presenting lies as the new truths. According to Prof. Regatieri, Brazil’s cultural background of  conservativeCatholicism and its experience of a parliamentary coup d’état, together with the online rhetoric orchestrated by Olavo de Carvalho, created a political tsunami that Bolsonaro was able to ride on.

READ MORE about his research project on Authoritarianism, Democracy and Political Crises in the Periphery of the Modern Capitalist World-System: the Brazilian Case