Brazil: Polarizing Presidential Leadership and the Pandemic
After an electoral campaign based on harsh attacks against a notoriously corrupt political establishment, in late 2018 the far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. Reasoning that he would not retain popular support unless he stuck to this confrontational strategy, as president Bolsonaro has relentlessly assaulted mainstream political parties, major media outlets, and Brazil’s Congress and Supreme Court. When the coronavirus hit Brazil in earnest in March, Bolsonaro was confident that this same strategy would carry him through. Taking an initial cue from U.S. President Donald Trump, he dismissed the virus as a hoax, refused to consider a national social distancing policy, and went so far as to recommend risky self-medication approaches.
But as mayors in large Brazilian cities and governors in the most affected states began to impose quarantines, using powers constitutionally guaranteed under Brazil’s federal system, the president went on the offensive. He called coronavirus infections “sniffles,” claimed that his background as an athlete would ensure his good health, and refused to release his own test results. (Twenty-three members of his entourage tested positive after returning from a visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.) Bolsonaro has repeatedly attacked social distancing measures, saying that deaths are a fact of life and should not stand in the way of restarting the economy.
In March, as the coronavirus began spreading widely throughout the country, overwhelming an already broken healthcare system, Bolsonaro’s popularity began to suffer. Across quarantined Brazil, people regularly banged pots and pans in protest against the president every evening. By mid-April, polls showed that 38 percent of Brazilians regarded the government’s performance as “excellent” or “good,” as opposed to 56 percent who saw it as “regular,” “poor,” or “bad.”
And yet Bolsonaro has stuck to his original plan. Within his inner circle, advisers fear that any policy that associates Bolsonaro with establishment individuals or institutions will come back to haunt him at the ballot box. In one of his riskiest decisions to date, in April Bolsonaro sacked the popular minister of health, a figure who had become a champion of the national health service and social distancing measures.
Key in Bolsonaro’s calculations are the economic consequences of social distancing policies. According to estimates from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, Brazil’s economy could shrink by up to 6 percent over the rest of 2020. For Bolsonaro, such a recession could spell ruin in the upcoming municipal elections this October, in which Brazilians will elect more than 5,000 mayors. Seeking to keep the economy afloat, Bolsonaro has appeared on television daily to ask people to go back to work and reopen the economy, and he has begun to blame mayors and governors for the economic collapse that now seems inevitable.
Bolsonaro’s incendiary response to the pandemic has brought polarization in Brazil to a level not seen in decades. The president has all but declared war on Congress, the courts, the press, and now the mayors and governors who are imposing social distancing policies. In the early days of April alone, the intensifying political struggle saw members of parliament vote down government legislation, courts block administration requests, and the major media outlets cast Bolsonaro as unhinged. Against the president’s wishes, Congress passed legislation to provide poorer Brazilians with monthly stipends (of around $120). Bolsonaro has fought back by mobilizing his base, with many supporters now taking to the streets, even if that means blocking the passage of ambulances. Pro-Bolsonaro bots and social media influencers have launched daily attacks against the speaker of the lower house of Congress, Rodrigo Maia, now a leading voice opposing the president. And in late April, Sergio Moro, a judge with a strong anticorruption record whose popularity rating in polls has over the last year been higher than Bolsonaro’s, clashed with the president and resigned as justice minister.
The spread of the coronavirus will be a watershed moment in Bolsonaro’s presidency. But perhaps more importantly, it also will mark a new, troubling chapter in the trajectory of a country that is becoming ever more polarized.
Matias Spektor is associate professor of international relations at the School of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in Brazil.
Chile: A Fleeting Respite from Protests and Polarization
Immediately prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Chile was in the midst of its most serious political turmoil since its return to democracy in the late 1980s. Simmering discontent over the country’s socioeconomic inequality, corruption, and deficient state services prompted massive protests and widespread looting in October 2019. Previously, Chile had been considered a model of prosperity and democracy in Latin America, and its precipitous descent into chaos caught most people—in particular, President Sebastián Piñera and his center-right administration—by surprise.
Chile’s mass protests, which extended well into 2020, inaugurated a period of intense political and societal polarization. In response to the protests, Piñera deployed the armed forces to reinforce police units, yet pervasive abuses by security forces against the protesters only exacerbated political tensions. Although Piñera announced structural reforms aimed at containing the unrest, the limited nature of these efforts reinforced the public perception that the government was more interested in repression than in substantive solutions to societal demands. Furthermore, recriminations among the political parties aggravated and exposed deep societal divisions over the legacies of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and the devastating economic effects of Chile’s upheaval only intensified disagreements.
As Chileans anxiously braced themselves for a resumption of the protests following a brief summer hiatus, the coronavirus outbreak unexpectedly brought a respite to a restless society. After the government introduced social distancing measures, protests quickly fizzled, enabling what one astute observer described as a “fragile new social truce.” Yet the lull seems to owe much more to the population’s fear of contracting the virus and collective exhaustion after months of turmoil than to satisfaction with how the government has handled the crisis and addressed societal grievances. The current truce thus seems to be a transitory phase, and many Chileans fear that once the current rally-around-the-flag effect has weakened, polarization will divide the public once more.
The health crisis has handed the beleaguered Piñera administration a precious opportunity to regain the public’s trust and ease political divisions. At present, it remains too early to evaluate the government’s handling of the crisis, but thus far its response appears to have been effective. The government has introduced stringent measures, such as declaring a state of emergency, closing Chile’s borders, imposing nightly curfews, speeding up testing, and imposing total lockdowns in areas with coronavirus outbreaks. One positive sign for the government is that Piñera’s calamitous 6 percent approval rating has risen to a less immediately dire 21 percent.
However, other aspects of the government’s response, including measures to mitigate the economic effects of the crisis, have been more controversial. Thus far, the government has provided cash transfers to people in the informal sector, postponed employers’ tax payments, and introduced a new law to regulate remote work. Although the government’s supporters lauded this economic package, its detractors argued that powerful interest groups unduly shaped the legislation in ways that favor the business elite and fail to protect vulnerable populations. Another critical issue concerns the government’s decision to postpone a referendum on the creation of an assembly to rewrite Chile’s constitution. The vote, originally scheduled for this April, was the product of a broad, cross-party agreement that helped ease political tensions. With the opposition’s support, the government delayed the referendum until November, but politically charged debates about its feasibility are already emerging.
These points of controversy indicate that the current crisis has not substantially altered preexisting divides or generated a shared vision for the country’s path forward. Opposition leaders and societal groups have been measured in their criticism of the government during the pandemic, but they nevertheless have been disinclined to create a common front with the president and his governing coalition. Their reluctance stems to a significant degree from a deep-seated distrust of Piñera and his supporters, in particular the influential business elite, whom they continue to perceive as out of touch and insincere in their commitment to structural reform. If the crisis lingers, the risk of resurgent polarization seems high.
Andreas E. Feldmann is associate professor in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program and Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
India: Infections, Islamophobia, and Intensifying Societal Polarization
The coronavirus pandemic struck India at a moment when the country was more polarized than it has been in decades. Particularly since 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a landslide reelection victory, he and his government have exacerbated the country’s polarization by advancing a majoritarian, Hindu nationalist agenda. On the surface, the coronavirus has put political animosities on hold, as Modi has toned down his populist and confrontational rhetoric. Yet at the same time, fears surrounding the pandemic have rapidly amplified societal polarization and intolerance, in particular against India’s Muslims.
Although Modi has long loomed as a polarizing figure in Indian politics, during the pandemic he has championed national unity and won broad national support. The prime minister’s signature policy initiative has been a nationwide lockdown—the world’s largest—which began on March 25 and has been extended until at least May 3. Even though the lockdown was announced with just hours’ notice and caused a mass migration of more than 600,000 people walking on foot to reach their villages, a majority of Indians have embraced the prime minister’s policy enthusiastically. Furthermore, Modi has sought to cultivate a feeling of “collective resolve and solidarity” throughout the lockdown, for instance by asking all Indians to clap together in support of essential workers or to light candles at a designated time. Likely as a result of the crisis and his skillful public outreach, Modi’s net approval rating soared to 68 percent in mid-April, up from 62 percent in mid-March. By this token, polarization has at least somewhat receded.
At the broader societal level, however, the pandemic has fueled intolerance and even violence in some instances against the country’s Muslim minority. The catalyst for rapidly growing anti-Muslim sentiment was a single event in mid-March organized by a Muslim missionary movement called Tablighi Jamaat. The group’s event center, or Markaz, rapidly emerged as a major hot spot in India’s coronavirus outbreak. Hundreds of followers, including many foreign nationals, attended the Markaz event, and by mid-April, after weeks of testing and contact tracing, the Indian government had identified more than 4,000 coronavirus cases related to the event, representing almost 30 percent of India’s total confirmed infections.
The Markaz incident fanned the flames of societal polarization in a country where violence against Muslims has erupted as recently as February 2020. The event became a 24/7 subject of conversation on social media and television stations, while bigots exploited the outbreak to paint the entire Muslim community as a vector of disease. “Coronajihad” became the top trending hashtag on Twitter for days; between March 28 and April 3, the incendiary hashtag appeared 300,000 times and was viewed by possibly 300 million people on Twitter. Meanwhile, prominent television channels openly spouted anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, and even many respected print outlets fell into the trap of playing to Islamophobia. The relentless media attention to the event found its way into the health ministry’s daily press briefing, in which the spokesperson regularly cited the number of coronavirus cases linked to the Markaz incident.
This outpouring of hateful rhetoric has translated into an increase in anti-Muslim discrimination and violence across India. Painted as “corona villains” or virus spreaders, Muslims have been beaten and attacked by vigilante groups. After many days of silence, Modi appealed for unity, emphasizing that the virus “doesn’t see religion, language, or borders.” Yet his words have proven largely unable to stem growing intercommunal discord, and in this context, Muslim communities’ deep distrust of the Hindu nationalist government—evident in a series of violent attacks on frontline health workers—has emerged as a potential barrier to providing them with healthcare and containing the spread of the virus to others.
Thus, the pandemic has aggravated the religious polarization that has been intensifying since Modi took office in 2014. Just months before this crisis, in December 2019, Modi’s government passed the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act that established religion as a basis for granting citizenship and proposed a National Register of Citizens, fueling fears among many Indian Muslims that their legal citizenship was in jeopardy. Now, at a time when the minority community already was under attack, it must confront a new wave of hatred and stigma.
Niranjan Sahoo is a senior fellow with the Governance and Politics Initiative at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
Sri Lanka: Elections, Polarized Politics, and the Pandemic
When the Sri Lankan government implemented a lockdown in late March to contain COVID-19, its actions did not take place in a political vacuum. Rather, the government’s efforts reinforced its existing push to mobilize majoritarian social forces, consolidate power, and forestall an economic crisis.
The coronavirus pandemic hit Sri Lanka just as the country was grappling with its democratic future with a significant parliamentary election ahead. Having won a divisive presidential election in November 2019, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa dissolved parliament in early March, on the earliest date constitutionally allowed, six months before the end of the parliament’s term. While the opposition was caught infighting over its leadership and scrambled to select its candidates, the president’s party capitalized on an orderly nomination process and prepared the ground for a major victory. With confirmed cases of the coronavirus slowly increasing after March 10, the president postponed a nationwide lockdown until the day after nominations were over on March 19. However, authority over the electoral process then shifted to the Election Commission, which postponed the parliamentary elections due to public health concerns.
With elections still on the horizon now in June, the president has aggravated polarization by disregarding calls to reconvene parliament and address the crisis with the opposition’s support. Parliament remains dissolved, and the ruling party has sought to take sole credit for what Sri Lankans widely perceive as a successful response to the pandemic. Indeed, Sri Lanka has controlled the spread of the virus better than many other countries, mainly thanks to Sri Lanka’s free healthcare system and robust preventive community health infrastructure.
The government’s militarized response to the coronavirus crisis undermines democratic space and reinforces a polarized political culture. Rajapaksa was defense secretary during the final phase of Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983–2009), while his brother, the current prime minister, was president. Drawing parallels to their wartime efforts, which they billed as a “war against terrorism,” the Rajapaksa regime has given the military a dominant role in the pandemic response. Army Commander Shavendra Silva heads the National Operation Centre for Prevention of COVID-19 Outbreak, along with other military personnel holding prominent positions. Crucially, the government has also promoted a militarized mindset in dealing with the pandemic, and as during the civil war, militarization has been combined with nationalist ideology alienating minority groups.
Further complicating the political situation is an impending economic depression. With weeks under lockdown, Sri Lanka’s already fragile and indebted economy has now been pushed over the cliff into a downward spiral of falling foreign exchange earnings in key sectors, including tourism, migrant worker remittances, and garment exports. And over a month after the lockdown began, the government is attempting to resume production, particularly in the export industries, and hastily hold parliamentary elections before the economic pain fully hits. In addition, a chauvinist narrative has already emerged that scapegoats Muslims for the spread of the pandemic. This narrative conveniently disregards the government’s own lapses; while the first cases of the coronavirus were traced to European tourists, their arrivals were not blocked for weeks due to the economic costs.
Anti-Muslim violence has been on the rise in Sri Lanka over the past decade, and the pandemic has provided fresh fodder for intolerance and abuse. The government has mandated the cremation of those who have died from COVID-19 and denied Muslim families the right to bury their dead, contrary to the World Health Organization’s guidelines. Furthermore, the media has demonstrated anti-Muslim prejudices, and social media discourse has targeted Muslim communities as an “other” that will not comply with the state’s militarized dictates to address the pandemic. Through such means, the government and allied societal forces have clearly sought to mobilize Sri Lanka’s Sinhala ethnic majority in a bid to consolidate support ahead of the parliamentary elections. Throughout Sri Lanka’s history, this combination of polarizing leadership at the helm of state power and majoritarian social movements has not only led to authoritarian repression but also to prolonged instability and social crises.
Ahilan Kadirgamar is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Jaffna in Sri Lanka.
Turkey: Deepening Discord and Illiberalism Amid the Pandemic
At the onset of the pandemic, Turkey enjoyed a brief period when its deeply polarized political elite—riven by a clash between President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his opponents—seemed to be uniting around the national response effort. Although Erdoğan has increasingly consolidated a form of one-man rule in recent years, he chose not to present himself as the face of the policy response. Instead, he empowered his minister of health, a doctor and technocrat who has gained considerable trust from citizens across party lines. The opposition, meanwhile, was careful not to explicitly criticize the government’s handling of the crisis. However, a bitter conflict between the government and opposition quickly terminated this initial wave of elite cooperation.
Polarization first flared over clashes between the central government and local governments controlled by the main opposition, most notably in Istanbul and Ankara. Ever since the opposition won mayoral elections in Turkey’s three largest cities in March 2019, the new mayors have been regarded as challengers to the incumbent president, and the central government has curtailed the powers and autonomy of local authorities.
During the pandemic, these tensions erupted when the mayors of Istanbul and Ankara launched donation campaigns to help struggling families in their cities. The central government suspended these fundraising initiatives, started its own national campaign, and opened criminal investigations into these local efforts. Its measures to undermine the opposition’s outreach to citizens during the pandemic have extended even to smaller cities such as Adana and Antalya, where it shut down soup kitchens and field hospitals operated by the local governments. Furthermore, when the government declared a last-minute lockdown in mid-April, it chose not to inform local officials beforehand, leaving them with no time to organize measures such as providing transportation for healthcare workers. Even though local authorities are on the front lines of fighting the pandemic, the central government has excluded them from the national response, thereby fueling polarization and hampering the delivery of much-needed local services to citizens.
Elite polarization also has deepened during the coronavirus outbreak as a result of the government’s sustained efforts to tighten its grip on the country and clamp down still further on the opposition. Erdoğan has referred to opponents in the media and politics who are critical of the government’s measures as “akin to the coronavirus,” and the state’s media watchdog has heavily fined opposition news channels for their critical pandemic-related coverage. Perhaps more concerningly, the government has prepared a draft law that gives the state extensive powers over social media platforms and companies. Although the bill has now been withdrawn from the parliament’s agenda due to emergency bills on the economy and public health, the opposition fears that it will be soon be reintroduced. The government has also passed divisive new legislation on criminal sentencing, which grants amnesty to thousands of prisoners yet entirely excludes those jailed for “political” crimes.
It is still too early to assess how these developments have impacted Turkish society at large, but the crisis and the government’s response seem to be aggravating preexisting societal divisions rather than fostering a sense of solidarity. The government’s exclusionary and unilateral response to the pandemic has fueled widespread distrust, as seen recently in the public reactions to the last-minute lockdown announcement. Many citizens did not trust the government’s claim that the lockdown would be limited to forty-eight hours, and consequently they rushed out in crowds to stock up on supplies, risking further infections. Similarly, many Turks sympathetic to the opposition do not believe the official numbers of infected individuals and deaths. The government’s divisive tactics, coupled with the lack of a free and independent media, have produced polarized views of the trustworthiness of official data. Finally, the government’s policy of implementing full lockdowns on the weekend but only partial restrictions during the week has fueled partisan debate among citizens regarding whether stricter quarantine measures are necessary.
In short, the growing polarization in Turkey during the time of the coronavirus tracks earlier patterns of political discord: it is largely elite-driven and more specifically has intensified owing to the illiberal policies and polarizing rhetoric of Erdoğan and his government. Despite initial hopes of unity, Turkey’s vicious cycle of polarized politics and democratic erosion has continued.
Senem Aydın-Düzgit is a professor of international relations at Sabancı University, Istanbul, as well as a senior scholar and research and academic affairs coordinator at Istanbul Policy Center.