Dilma Rousseff (2011 - 2016): A crisis of governance and consensus in Brazil

Abstract

This chapter examines the five and a half years in office of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first woman president. Her two terms in office, the second of which was truncated by her impeachment, coincided with the end of a two-decade cycle of post-transition democratic governance dominated politically by two parties (the PSDB and PT) and their presidents (Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva). Her presidencies saw the decay of a political consensus in the liberal centre ground, and a fragmentation of the party system that stressed Brazil’s form of coalitional presidentialism to breaking point. The capture of the nation’s legislature by new socially conservative forces that were both responding to, and attempting to reshape, Brazil’s political culture, began to threaten some of the progress on gender equality achieved in since the transition in the mid-1980s. The chapter explores the role that gender politics and discourses played in this political environment, her election, her government and her controversial impeachment in 2016.