Patriots at the Ballot Box

The Allied victory heavily influenced the democratization of 1945 in Brazil. However, the connections between internal and external developments were far from linear. The international context was characterized by the defeat of the Axis, the consolidation of US hegemony, and the heroic survival of the USSR. But Brazilian politics continued to be fundamentally shaped by Vargas and his legacy, although fitting him into the period’s ideological framework was difficult. This chapter questions the approaches that see the transformations in the relationship between society and politics in Brazil in the 1940s as a process entirely controlled by the state apparatus, as expressed by the concepts of “populism” or “laborism.” We seek to demonstrate that this process was inseparable from the period’s global geopolitical and ideological clashes. The exceptional circumstances of the war increased the concentration of power in the hands of the national state. However, the political plans of the Brazilian political elite were challenged by the emergence of a new international order that redefined the conditions for the exercise of sovereignty and by an insurgent civil society committed to realizing the new promises of social rights. This process shook the racial and class hierarchies that naturalized and legitimized the country’s abysmal social inequality.