The Brazilian Presidential Elections and 'The Rules of the Game' (original) (raw)

This article is an introduction to and translation of "A regra do jogo" ("The Rules of the Game"), an essay by the Brazilian psychoanalyst and social theorist Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker. “The Rules of the Game” focuses on the ideological and affective dimensions of two central events in the lead up to Brazil’s October 2018 elections: the parliamentary coup against Dilma Rousseff in 2016, which ended almost a decade and a half of the center-left Workers’ Party (PT) at the head of national government; and the punitive imprisonment of ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in April 2018, an act that eventually ended his presidential campaign as the PT’s prefered candidate and the frontrunner in polls. Dunker returns to Lula’s frequent use of soccer as allegory for politics to show how these events have altered both the “regulative rules” and the “constitutive rules” of the democratic game. In the first case, similar censurable practices of corruption received a very different treatment under the center-right government of Michel Temer, Dilma’s former vice-president and coalition partner, than they did under Dilma, when they were used to justify her impeachment. This contradiction has heightened the perception that the regulative rules were now being selectively applied against one side. In the second case, the imprisonment of Lula not only coincided with a more widespread rhetoric of hatred and the humiliation of the losing side. It also intensified patterns of social resentment and political violence, altering the constitutive rules that have defined democratic politics since the post-dictatorship Constitution of 1988. For Dunker, what ultimately emerged victorious with Lula’s legal defeat was “an archaic conception of power based on the strength of the person, the possession of means, and the instrumentalization of the State.” Although written before the recent dramatic rise and then election of the far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, Dunker’s essay presents a diagnostic of the social, political, and affective terrain in which an authoritarian neoliberalism with neofascist tendencies could find the conditions to grow.