A lot can change in 10 years: or, at least, a lot can happen in 10 years. And no doubt about it, the 10 years from 2005 to 2015 were politically intense in Brazil.
We had, in this period, times of prosperity and recession, democracy and a series of major corruption scandals, elections, popular manifestations and a bitter power battle between the two political parties that have held sway since the redemocratization: the Worker’s Party (PT – Partido dos Trabalhadores) and the social-democrats around PSDB (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira), who have fought over the country’s last four presidential elections.
What the reader has in his/her hands here is a series of articles about Brazilian politics written for the London-based website openDemocracy (www.opendemocracy.net) between the years 2005 and 2015. As the subtitle of this book says, these are fragments of Brazilian recent political history, and, more importantly, fragments of Brazil’s restored democratic path, recommenced in the middle of the 1980s after two decades of a military regime.
In this context, my hope for this volume is less that it will provide a commentary on the complex dynamics of Brazilian democracy, and more that it will strengthen the conviction that, despite some setbacks, democracy is an inevitable prerequisite for Brazilians if they are to deal with their country’s historical injustices.