The stillborn democracy as victim of the tragicomic coup of 2016 in Brazil

Abstract

Karl Marx (2011), in the work 18 Brumaire de Louis Bonaparte, reports that the philosopher Hegel commented in many passages of his writings that “all the great facts and characters of world history are staged twice.” But, Marx remarks, Hegel forgot to add that the first stage is as a “tragedy,” and the second as one as a “farce.” In Brazil, the coup d’état, which was repeated more than twice, now in 2016 became effective as a tragicomedy. Recent events in Brazil’s political history prove this thesis, with an aggravating factor: the assassination of the democracy. In 1964, the military, the bourgeois elite, and others, struck at the flawed foundations of democracy at the time when they took over dictatorially assuming command of the State (executive, legislative, and judiciary), and therefore, of social relations and practices, economic, ethic, of work, educational. In 1985, the period of “redemocratization” began, or rather, of the gestation of democracy in Brazil. However, before being reborn, the democracy underwent a new attack in 2016 when the them President Dilma Rousseff was the victim of a politico-juridico-mediatic coup. The nature of this coup is tragicomic. Sometimes, the outcome of a tragicomedy is “a happy ending”. But this is not the case of the 2016 coup in Brazil. The purpose of this text is to characterize the coup of 2016 in Brazil as tragicomic and to evidence it as a murderer of democracy.