As Carl Sagan said, he who wishes to bake a cake from scratch must first create the universe. This series is going to be about the Fourth Republic, but to understand the developments of that period, it’s necessary to understand the developments of the Third Republic, better known as the Estado Novo (“New State”) — which, in turn, can’t really be understood without talking about the man around whom it was built: Getúlio Vargas.
The rule of Getúlio Vargas spanned fifteen years, going through three different constitutions. The last one, passed in 1937 and dubbed the Constitução Polaca (the “Polish Constitution”) because it was closely modelled on the Polish constitution of 1935, was arguably the least democratic in Brazilian history — it banned all political parties, curtailed civil and political rights more generally, and set up tight central control of state and local governments. After the Constitution was promulgated, Vargas declared that the elections it presaged would not, in fact, take place, and that the emergency powers now granted to him would be used to suspend civil rights even further. In practice, Brazil was under martial law, and would remain so for eight years.
The centralisation drive was largely done out of a desire to rid the country of the sort of local cliques and patronage networks that had run the Old (pre-Vargas) Republic, but of course a country the size of Brazil would be impossible to govern centrally, especially in the 1930s, so what ended up happening in practice was that supporters of Vargas in the states set up their own local cliques and patronage networks to supplant the old ones. Of course, this still meant a complete about-face of the political power structure of Brazil — now, rather than the President answering to the regional bosses who had turned out the vote for him, it was the regional bosses who owed their positions to Vargas. This also meant Vargas was allowed to pursue his policies of industrialisation, national self-strengthening and economic development without having to worry about upsetting local power brokers who had a stake in the status quo, which (so the logic went) was the factor that had hobbled the Old Republic.
So to TLDR this a bit, Vargas was basically a fascist, but his government tended to rest on the urban lower and middle classes rather than the business and agricultural elite. To them, Vargas seemed like the most benevolent and active President Brazil had ever had — he brought in better labour laws, gave women the vote, supported urban development and planning, and just generally seemed to care about them in a way none of the Old Republic’s leaders had. Of course, it was all strictly top-down populism rather than bottom-up organising, but the trade unions that existed (largely in Rio, São Paulo and a few other large, industrialised cities) tended to view Vargas as better than the alternative, and the labour movement in Brazil continued to be pro-Vargas (and his successors) until and past the 1964 military coup.
Also despite basically being a fascist, Vargas supported the Allies in WWII, declaring war on Germany and Japan in 1942 (after some equivocation) and sending an expeditionary force of 25,900 to help liberate Italy in 1944. This soon turned controversial for Vargas, who had himself risen to power from his position as a junior army officer, and saw all too well the risk involved in sending people to liberate foreigners from an enemy that looked a hell of a lot like his own government. So in spring 1945, as it became clear that the war in Europe was winding down, Vargas decided to immediately demobilise the entire expeditionary force while it was still in Italy. By this point he was already under extreme pressure from both his opponents in the old elite and his allies in the labour movement to democratise the country, and demobbing the unit that had just helped win the greatest military victory of the 20th century added the armed forces to his list of enemies. This was not a tenable position to be in, and in October, the military (led by War Minister Eurico Gaspar Dutra, hitherto a staunch Vargas supporter) launched a coup that forced Vargas out of power.
On the whole, it was probably one of the least bad coups in Brazilian history. The coupists did not take power for themselves, instead installing the President of the Supreme Court, José Linhares, as interim President with the sole task of preparing the country for new, democratic elections. Voters would elect a President of the Republic for a five-year term, alongside a National Congress on the US model — a Senate with two seats per state (initially, elections were held for both seats, but in the future one seat per state would be up at each election), and a lower Chamber of Deputies with membership apportioned by population and elected by open-list proportional representation. In the 1945 elections, the border territories (other than Acre, which Vargas had given special rights to in the 30s) did not participate, but starting from the supplementary elections of 1947, they would be entitled to elect one deputy each.
The 1945 election campaign went by very fast — by the time Vargas left office on 29 October, he had already begun the preliminary planning for general elections, which followed on 2 December. Even so, this brief window of time saw the emergence of more or less all the principal players that would characterise the Fourth Republic. The emboldened opponents of Vargas decided to form as broad a coalition as possible, and quickly cobbled together something they dubbed the National Democratic Union (União Democrática Nacional, UDN), an anti-Vargas united front that would gather all good democrats under one roof to prevent the re-emergence of dictatorship in Brazil. The UDN would very quickly consolidate into a right-wing conservative party, largely made up of army officers and businessmen, which formed the main bulwark against the populist instincts of the Fourth Republic and enjoyed very good (some would say suspiciously good) relations with the United States. That was all in the future in 1945, but you could sort of see it coming.
Their presidential candidate was Brigadier Eduardo Gomes, a former tenente (radical junior army officer) who had helped Vargas stage his “revolution” in 1930 before souring on him. Gomes would lose both the elections he stood in, but his legacy lives on in every Brazilian café — a sympathetic Rio confectioner created a sweet out of condensed milk, cocoa and butter covered with chocolate sprinkles, and christened it the brigadeiro in honour of her favourite candidate (this being the first free election in which women could vote). The brigadeiro quickly became far more popular than Gomes himself, and remains one of Brazil’s favourite sweet treats.
The Vargas coalition quickly split with the big man out of power, and each of its two halves formed their own political parties. The Social Democratic Party (Partido Social Democrática, PSD) was just as hastily cobbled together out of the various regional cliques and patronage networks installed by Vargas during his time in power, and despite having no clearly-discernible ideology, it instantly became Brazil’s largest political party. Their candidate, Eurico Gaspar Dutra, had helped orchestrate the coup against Vargas, and was now elected President by a wide majority. Despite having just led a coup, Dutra was arguably the most legitimate President thus far in Brazilian history, and his victory was backed by majorities in both chambers of Congress. It wouldn’t stay at quite this level of strength for long, but it’s still probably reasonable to refer to the PSD as the Fourth Republic’s natural governing party — again, despite (or perhaps because of) having no real ideology.
The other part of the Vargas machine — the trade union movement — formed the Brazilian Labour Party (Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro, PTB). This was the party Vargas himself joined, and it kept its head well down in 1945, declining to nominate a presidential candidate and placing a distant third in the parliamentary elections. The PTB would slowly lurch forward throughout the Fourth Republic, becoming the second-largest party by 1962, and its rise played a significant role in stoking the coup of 1964. By this point, however, it was still challenged for leadership of the labour movement by another force — the Brazilian Communist Party (Partido Comunista Brasileiro, PCB), which had been banned during the Vargas era but now emerged in full force, supporting the presidential candidacy of Petrópolis mayor Yedo Fiúza, who stunned everyone by getting nearly 10% of the vote. The PCB replicated this success in the legislative elections, winning a Senate seat in the Federal District with a plurality of the vote and 14 seats in the Chamber.
The Old Republic’s dominant party, the Republican Party (Partido Republicano, PR), also tried to stage a return under former President Artur Bernardes. It didn’t get very far outside Bernardes’ own patronage network in Minas Gerais, as most right-wingers in other states just voted for the UDN, but that was enough to get it eight seats. Other minor parties included the People’s Trade Unionist Party (Partido Popular Sindicalista, PPS — you could also translate this more directly as the “Popular Syndicalist Party”, but I chose not to do that as I don’t think they were actual syndicalists in the usual English sense of the word), which AFAICT was basically an anti-Vargas version of the PTB based in the North-East, the Christian Democratic Party (Partido Demócrata Cristão, PDC), which was pretty much what it says on the tin, the Progressive Republican Party (Partido Republicano Progressista, PRP), which was formed out of a small centre-leftist clique in São Paulo (there will be more of those), and the Liberation Party (Partido Libertador, PL), who wanted to prevent any future executive power grabs by instituting a parliamentary republic on the French model. None of those gained more than two percent of the vote, but some of them will become slightly more significant later on.
The new Congress had been given constituent powers by Linhares as one of his few acts in office, and immediately set about writing a more democratic constitution, which extended civil liberties and created strict checks on presidential authority that hadn’t existed before. The plan was to achieve a stable Brazilian democracy, something that had never previously existed (unless you count the Empire, which is… dicey, and really depends on your definition of “democracy” — no denying it was stable though). And it seemed to work, for a while. Dutra would serve out his five years in power, handing the reins to a freely-elected successor in February 1951. You’ll never guess who that successor was.
