The Progress Report: Brazil Could Go Right!

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Zachary Karabell: What could go right. I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined by my co-host Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network, and this is our weekly progress report, our adjunct to our longer form what could Go Right, interview, podcast, even in a world full of dark despair. There’s lots of points of light that we ought to be paying attention to because that is just as much part of the human existence as the negative, except that we don’t pay as much attention to it, except for Emma who pays inordinate attention to it. So what do you have for us this week?

Emma Varvaloucas: I thought it would be a good time to talk a little bit about Brazil and South Korea.

Zachary Karabell: Always a good time

Emma Varvaloucas: What do they have in common?

Zachary Karabell: Always a good time to talk about Brazil and South Korea. Hard to know what they have in common. One’s a peninsula. One’s not a peninsula. Tell us

Emma Varvaloucas: Going in the wrong direction. I think most people would not have caught this common thread. But both of ’em have had particularly good few weeks for democracy. I guess depending on your vantage point, but yeah, that old conard. Both have gone through very interesting political tumult recently.

Let’s start with Brazil. Late last month. So late March, Brazil Supreme Court ruled that the former President Jair Bolsonaro must stand trial for charges related to an alleged coup to overthrow the results of their 2022 presidential election. This coup plan was pretty substantive. A 884 page report by the federal police alleges that it entailed not only killing the winner of the presidential election, which is the current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, which is a third time he’s been President Brazil, by the way, the Vice President and a Supreme Court Justice. So this was pretty deep as insofar as coup plots go.

Zachary Karabell: And then there was of course the storming of the state capital, and had very similar themes, echoes of January 6th, 2020 in the United States. Brazil had its own. Brasilia in particular had its own version thereof.

Emma Varvaloucas: Right, and that activity had already gotten Bolsonaro borrowed from running. For public office until 2030, although he to this day says that he’s not going to listen to that. But the Supreme Court weighed in on, is he gonna have to stay in trial for this coup attempt? They said, yes, he’s going to have to do it.

And so. The criminal proceedings for that started last week, so this is mid-April. He’s not the only one that’s facing charges. There are also a handful of high ranking military officials, and it’s actually the first time in Brazil’s history that high ranking military officials are gonna have to stand trial for a coup or an attempted coup.

So, Brazil was in dire straits a couple years ago and now political scientists are now noting that it’s essentially back to business as usual there. So it just goes to show that some countries can come pretty close to the brink and recover quite quickly.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. And then we have South Korea, which had the weirdest. Six hour declaration of martial law by the then president, who I think you’ll tell us about what has happened to the then president. But the one thing about South Korea that struck me over the past six months is it’s one of the few countries in the world that felt like making the United States look less dramatically weird by comparison.

Emma Varvaloucas: You know, I, I would agree until it came, kind of came to this final conclusion. I. Or one of the final conclusions on the matter. So yes, the now former president Yoon Suk Yeol, he declared martial law in late December, citing these sort of like vague anti-state forces, North Korean communist forces. Like there’s no reason to declare emergency martial law, but he did. And when Parliament gathered immediately to repeal that declaration, he actually sent troops to their state house to prevent that happening. But the vote went through anyway. Martial law was only in place for like six hours, and since then there has been an attempt by Parliament to have him impeach.

And earlier this month, South Korea’s constitutional court did decide unanimously. And it’s an eight judge panel to uphold that impeachment. So, he is out of there. And the South Koreans will be voting for a new president by early June.

Zachary Karabell: He is also on trial separately for I think corruption and anti, I mean, a whole series of charges.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yes. He’s facing criminal charges for that whole martial law for no reason.

Zachary Karabell: Although several prime ministers and presidents of the past 20 or 30 years in South Korea have, have also been charged and sentenced. So they do have a South Korean tradition of, trying and sentencing former leaders. So we talk a lot in the United States about weaponization law fair, all the things that, particularly the Trumplandia folks have accused.

The Biden folks of doing legit or not legit, clearly is the case in many other countries as well, where there is a kind of arena-ish quality. To being in high politics, the stakes of which can in fact be incarceration and trials and endless trials. Some of that, it’s interesting, I guess we’ll see from Brazil in the next years whether this series, ’cause Lula, the current president, was also imprisoned for corruption, right?

His successor was impeached Dilma. Whether or not this leads to more. Political confidence in the system, more public confidence in the political system, or more cynicism about the corruption of the political system, and that I think, literally the jury is out on whether this endless series makes people feel like their leaders are accountable, or whether it makes them feel like their leaders are subject to the whims of other leaders depending on who has power at any given time.

I’m only raising this question because that’s clearly an active issue in the United States, you know, whether or not we have politicized our justice system or whether or not the justice system remains above politics in a way that engenders public confidence.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. It’s actually one reason why I talk about South Korea and Brazil in the newsletter this week, and it’s one reason why I didn’t bring up Marine Le Pen’s case because it is a corruption case. It’s like a misuse of money case. And while people are certainly entitled to their opinions about whether or not she should, you know, face consequences for that, she’s been barred for running for office for a certain number of years.

To me the anti-democracy power grab attempts are in another realm entirely. That being said, like absolutely, it’s true what you’re pointing out that if you are in South Korea, if you’re in Brazil these things. Are very polarized matters in society and how you view them is going to be a little bit different from how we’re viewing them on the outside, which is basically like this was a naked power grab and it didn’t turn out.

So I’m gonna call that a democratic win. Not so clear when you’re on the grounds to

Zachary Karabell: I mean the South Korea one, I mean I guess he had about 20, 25% popularity even after the martial law declaration. There definitely were people who were like, you go, this is, the forces are right against your evil and bad, even if they’re democratic and do whatever it takes. But that was a clear cut case, or at least it seems more clear cut.

They then, by the way, impeached. His successor for not appointing judge, I mean, it, it, it devolved into a little more of a messy aftermath. The South Korea case is, is cleaner. Like they’re just places you don’t go. It is disturbing that about 25% of the people in South Korea still supported that declaration of martial law.

So, I mean, yeah, it’s, it, there’s a consensus. It’s. Where you shouldn’t go. But it’s not like the Supreme Court ruled, the constitutional court ruled unanimously he should be removed. But it’s not like the public works quite as unanimous. Maybe that’s, maybe that’s not a fair litmus. Maybe in every society, like 20% of the people are gonna support something that 80% think this is nuts or questionable.

Emma Varvaloucas: I don’t know what the percent breakdown is in Brazil, about like pro Bolsonaro, anti Bolsonaro. I dunno if you are aware, I would be interested in that in terms of how the public is viewing this.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, the Bolsonaro is still 37% in December. There is a significant chunk of Brazilian public opinion that still supports Bolsonaro or supports his view of what Brazil should do.

Emma Varvaloucas: Moving beyond that discussion, I thought it would be nice to bring it up ’cause we haven’t talked about either of those cases on the podcast. And they certainly present a different kind of timeline than what we might be seeing in front of us right now. Let’s do one of my favorite things to reference.

1. On the podcast and in the progress hour in general, which is really long, finicky World Bank reports.

Zachary Karabell: Love those man. I once went into a World Bank bookstore, which was just festooned with these multi-volume, thick reports of positive developments and Equatorial Guinea and development reports for Bangladesh. I mean, things that I’m sure are very important on the ground, but clearly stuff that no one ever read or ever will read.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, most of the time when I’m reading these reports, I’m like, who else is even reading these? Why am I reading these?

Zachary Karabell: You should probably email the authors who’d be like, oh my God, someone read them. Thank God I’ve got a fan. I’ve got one person.

Emma Varvaloucas: I know, I, I hope they know that they do have a fan out there. It’s me, their number one fan. But there is some interesting stuff, and I’m just gonna say something as an aside, I wasn’t planning on talking about this, but for instance, I did find out from the World Bank recently that Nepal’s extreme poverty rate has dropped to like point 37%, which is crazy.

I used to live there. So, the fact that that has happened is wild. It’s not an alloy of good news because the main reason why that has occurred is not because the economy is stabilized. It’s mostly because of mass migration out of Nepal and remittances sent back home from like Gulf countries.

So it’s not exactly, you know, what, what can you really say about that? It’s good, but it’s not like a stable situation for the country. So.

Zachary Karabell: Although there have been a lot of countries. From the, you know, the 1960s, seventies onward where remittances were a vital part of whatever economic breakthrough those societies had. So, you’re right that it’s not, you can’t like build an economy on remittances, but you can jumpstart or you can accelerate an economy toward breaking out of a cycle of poverty with remittances assuming the government and the country uses that well, and it doesn’t all just go into cash.

That gets spent in an informal economy way. So it kind of then depends on what happens with the remittances on the other side. But look, remittances have, have helped the Filipinos become a more affluent society. They’ve helped certainly multiple Latin American countries. So I think it depends.

Emma Varvaloucas: No, that’s a good point. Actually I should look a little bit more into the history. I know. Yeah. You mentioned the Philippines. The remains did play a good role, but there was some other stuff going on there too, I think in Southeast Asia generally. But anyway, that was just mentioned. As an aside, I will, I will get to the main.

Juicy World Bank News, which is that more people than at any other point in history are now covered by some form of social protection, which in this case means like targeted cash transfers, disability or unemployment benefits. Pensions things. Think, think things like that. Yes. This is a totally unfair quiz question ’cause I feel like how could you possibly get this right?

But if you were to guess how many people in the world are not covered by any form of social protection still, how many would you guess?

Zachary Karabell: Ooh. Wow. That is a good one. Putting me on the spot, how many people in the world are not covered by social protection? What would my guess?

Emma Varvaloucas: In some form-

Zachary Karabell: In some form I would say, somewhere between eight hundred thousand and 1.2 billion.

 

Emma Varvaloucas: You know, that is not a bad guess. I’m really impressed. You’re not that far off. It’s 1.6 billion is their estimate. Yeah, there’s no way I would’ve been able to guess anywhere near that. So on the one hand it’s 1.6 billion people. It’s certainly not a small number on the other. It’s more than we’ve ever had

Zachary Karabell: I didn’t even have, I didn’t have a chance to either Google or Chat GPT, that one. So just, just for the record, for those of you listening, you could check out the video. We didn’t edit it. It was a bonafide guesstimate on my part. Just, just saying,

Emma Varvaloucas: I am. I am really impressed. But yes, I mean, and it has expanded, you know, even over the last decade. It’s from a. Group of 75 countries that they found that particularly in poor countries and low and middle income countries, social protection has expanded, you know, 10, 15, 17 percentage points of the country’s population.

So it’s, it is one of those things where like, it’s, it’s hard to write like a really sexy article about that, but it’s actually like pretty significant historical change.

Zachary Karabell: It’s not hard to write a really dense world bank report that, that you then apparently treat as weekend reading.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: in there, Emma. Oh, nothing. Just the World Bank report on social service poverty alleviation, 2000 to 2024.

Emma Varvaloucas: they’re so long and so overly. Details.

Zachary Karabell: Hmm. A lot of graphs.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. No, there’s so no graphs!

Zachary Karabell: No?

Emma Varvaloucas: I mean, there’s some graphs, but there’s not nearly enough pictures. Let’s say that.

Zachary Karabell: Okay. Well if anyone from the World Bank is listening, we just, we want you to know

Emma Varvaloucas: More pictures. More graphs.

Zachary Karabell: We want more graphs. We love what you got. We love what you.

Emma Varvaloucas: And that’s what I’ve got for this week. So I hope that suits those listening.

Zachary Karabell: I think it should, it does, in my opinion, it, it has to. So thank you all for listening to our it wasn’t really a romp or even a tra it was more of a, a brief stroll through the world of better news, democracy, democratic institutions. Democratic institutions in Brazil and South Korea, poverty alleviation, better social services, all this stuff is going on all the time.

Easy to miss in a forest of bad news, but we are gonna keep trying to highlight that ’cause it’s important to be aware of it. Things are not all dark. At least that’s our argument and we’re sticking with it. So thank you for listening. To our longer forum What Go Right podcast. We’ll be back with you next week.

Please send us your ideas. We will highlight them. We’ll talk to you next week. Thanks.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks everyone.