Brazil's politics: a strong president who cannot govern alone

How Brazil's current constitution divides power

The constitution promulgated on 5 October 1988 was written by a constituent assembly in the years after the military left power, and it reads like a reaction to what came before. It makes torture and armed action against the constitutional order crimes without bail, it provides for plebiscites, referendums and citizens' initiatives beside ordinary elections, and it puts a long list of social rights into the text. A plebiscite in 1993 confirmed the presidential system. The Wikipedia article on the country counts 124 amendments by July 2022.

Brazil is a federation of 26 states and a Federal District, which holds the capital, Brasília. Power at the centre is split three ways.

The courts sit beside them. The Supreme Federal Court has 11 members, nominated by the president and approved by the Senate, and gives final rulings on constitutional questions and on cases involving the president, Congress and ministers; the Superior Court of Justice has 33 judges and is the final court on everything else.

The constitution protects its own core. Article 60 says no amendment may even be considered that aims to abolish the federal form of the state, direct, secret, universal and periodic voting, the separation of powers or individual rights. Everything else can be amended by three fifths of each chamber voting twice.

Why no president commands a majority

The electoral rules for the Chamber of Deputies multiply parties. Each state votes as one constituency and voters pick a candidate from an open list, and the PSA paper cited below notes that in 2014 a party needed seats in the Chamber to reach public funds and free broadcasting time. Freedom House counted 32 registered parties before the 2022 election, and 23 of them won seats in the Chamber. The PL finished with 99 deputies and the PT with 69, so the two parties whose candidates met in the presidential runoff held 168 of the 513 seats between them.

The weight sat elsewhere. Five parties known together as the Centrão, the Big Centre, won 231 seats in 2022; Freedom House describes them as patronage-based and without clear ideological positions, and records that they had supported the previous government in Congress. Politicians also change party often, so a coalition counted at the start of a term is not the coalition at its end.

A researcher at the Chamber of Deputies, writing for the Political Studies Association in 2014, put the arrangement plainly: a president cannot govern in Brazil without a coalition, and none of the president's legislative powers is enough without broad support in both chambers, above all in the Chamber of Deputies, which votes on the executive's bills first. The name political scientists give the system is coalition presidentialism.

How a president holds a coalition together

The constitution hands the president unusual tools for managing a legislature. Under Article 62 the president may issue provisional measures with the force of law in urgent and relevant cases. They take effect at once and lapse unless Congress converts them into law within sixty days, extendable once for another sixty. The president may veto bills in whole or in part, ask Congress to vote on a bill urgently, and holds the exclusive right to introduce the budget. The PSA paper argues that these agenda powers were built in deliberately, to balance a legislature pulled apart by its own party system.

Freedom House describes one way a coalition was held together under the government of 2019 to 2022: a secret budget that routed billions of reais in grants to lawmakers through a single budget rapporteur in exchange for support, without oversight. The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in late 2022, and in August 2024 suspended lawmakers' budget amendments until their transparency was guaranteed. Both chambers appealed.

Corruption investigations have followed the same money. Operation Car Wash ran from 2014 to 2021 and examined bribery, money laundering and bid-rigging between the state oil company Petrobras and construction firms. In 2019 leaked messages showed an improper relationship between the trial judge and the prosecutors, and the Supreme Court annulled the convictions in 2021.

What it takes to remove a president

Removal is a two-chamber procedure. Two thirds of the Chamber of Deputies must accept the accusation. For a crime of responsibility the Senate then tries the case, with the President of the Supreme Federal Court presiding, the president is suspended while the trial runs, and a conviction needs two thirds of the senators. It removes the president from office and bars him or her from public office for eight years.

Both presidents who went through it had first lost Congress. Fernando Collor, elected in 1989 with a party that held few seats, was impeached by Congress in 1992 and resigned, after a corruption scandal and street demonstrations led mostly by students. Dilma Rousseff was removed on 31 August 2016, in her second term, on charges of breaking budget law, after protests over a corruption scandal and a recession that began in 2014. Her vice-president, from the party that had been her coalition partner, took over.

Why small states weigh more in Congress

The constitution fixes the Chamber's seats by population, with a floor of eight and a ceiling of seventy per state. São Paulo, with more than 20 million people when the PSA paper was written in 2014, is held at seventy seats; Amapá and Roraima have eight each. Britannica concludes that the rule gives a disproportionate share of power to the states of the North and Northeast and severely underrepresents São Paulo. The Senate compounds it: every state has three senators whatever its size.

The states are more than districts. Each has its own constitution, a directly elected governor who needs an absolute majority, a single-chamber legislative assembly and its own courts. Criminal and civil law is federal and uniform across the country. Below the states sit the municipalities, each with an elected mayor and council and its own organic law in place of a constitution. The 2022 census covered 5,568 municipalities, the Federal District and the island district of Fernando de Noronha.

The federal government has no regional tier of its own. It channels money to the poorer regions through development agencies, SUDENE for the Northeast, founded in 1959, and SUDAM for the Amazon, founded in 1966, which grant federal funds and manage tax incentives; Britannica notes that their policies have shifted from one federal administration to the next and that their work often overlaps with that of the states and municipalities.

How Brazilians vote and who counts the votes

Voting is compulsory under Article 14 for literate citizens from eighteen to seventy and optional for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, for those over seventy and for people who cannot read. Ballots have been cast electronically since 1996. The Superior Electoral Court, the TSE, registers the parties, controls their finances, sets the dates of elections and hears electoral cases.

The machines became a political question in 2022, when the sitting president claimed without evidence that they could be defrauded. The defence ministry inspected several hundred of them that October and found no irregularities. The challenger won the runoff with 50.9% of the vote. On 8 January 2023, a week after the inauguration, thousands of supporters of the defeated president stormed the National Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace in Brasília, calling on the army to intervene. In November 2024 the Federal Police indicted the former president and 36 others for planning a coup to stop the transfer of power; no charges had been formally filed by the end of that year, according to Freedom House.

Representation is still uneven. Women held 9% of the seats in the Chamber after the 2010 election and 18.1% as of December 2024. Freedom House records that Afro-Brazilians remain underrepresented in electoral politics and in government, and cites a survey by two NGOs that found political violence rose by 400% between 2018 and 2022.

How the armed forces fit the republic

The armed forces governed from 1964 to 1985, and the constitution of 1988 left the president as their commander in chief. Britannica observes that civil control has never been taken for granted: many senior officers whose careers began under military rule saw their institution as the country's ultimate political moderator, while younger officers appear more willing to accept constitutional limits. Since 1985 elected governments have gradually reduced the military's political influence. Freedom House notes that active-duty and retired officers in the government of 2019 to 2022 caused unease, and that the government which took office in 2023 reduced their role.

Who polices Brazil and how

The constitution sets up six police agencies. Three are federal, the Federal Police among them, and two belong to the states: the uniformed Military Police, commanded by each state and independent of the armed forces since 1988, and the plain-clothes Civil Police, which investigates crime. Britannica describes violence and corruption within the police as serious concerns and records that officers in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are implicated in hundreds of extrajudicial killings every year.

The figures on violent crime have moved sharply within a decade. The Wikipedia article on Brazil gives 63,880 homicides in 2017, 38,374 in 2024 and 34,086 in 2025, when the national rate was 16 per 100,000 inhabitants. The regional spread is wide: 5.4 per 100,000 in São Paulo state and 32.6 in Ceará in 2025. The prison population was about 909,067 in 2024, and the same source puts the shortfall of prison places at about 200,000.

The courts have been reformed to cope with the volume. Constitutional Amendment 45 of 2004 made the decisions of the higher courts binding on the lower ones and created the National Council of Justice to oversee judges and hear complaints against them. Freedom House records the reach of the courts in politics as well: in August 2024 a Supreme Court justice ordered the social network X blocked nationwide after it ignored a court order, and the block was lifted in October once the company complied and paid a fine.

How Brazil deals with the world

Article 4 of the constitution lists the principles of foreign policy: national independence, human rights, self-determination, non-intervention, equality among states, peaceful settlement of conflicts, the repudiation of terrorism and racism, and political asylum. A single paragraph commits Brazil to seek the economic, political, social and cultural integration of Latin America. The president has final authority over foreign policy, and Congress approves treaties and diplomatic appointments.

Brazil was a founding member of the United Nations and of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries. Its record lists its membership of the Organization of American States from 1948 and of BRICS from 16 June 2009, beside Mercosur and the G20. It managed a peacekeeping mission in Haiti and hosted the United Nations climate conference in 2025.