Brazilian youth movements and shifting partisan relationships

• In Event: Youth Movements, Political Parties, and State Interactions: Comparative Insights from South Asia and Latin America

Proposal

Brazilian student and youth movements have had an enduring yet contentious relationship with political parties. In protests in the years following the 2008 financial crisis, the sentiment was generally against parties (Gold & Mische 2008, Castells 2012, Gerbaudo 2017). Dominant narratives and scholarship alike on youth-led protests of recent years in Brazil characterizes young activists as non-partisan and rejecting the political system and state (Araújo and Pérez, 2021). The June Days in Brazil of 2013 were typically understood as anti-partisan even with displays of hostility toward people bearing partisan flags (Tatagiba 2014). Similarly, Brazilian youth movements that emerged in and were fortified since 2013 emphasized a reluctance to rely on political parties. Youth activists chanted and spoke about beating Bolsonaro in ballot boxes and in the streets, saying “Our dreams do not fit in ballot boxes.” Yet each election season, youth movements of the Brazilian left have engaged feverishly in elections both at local and national levels, and in universities and high schools. This paper explores this puzzle of youth movements’ relationship to political parties. I ask, how do youth movements navigate partisan politics, and how has this relationship shifted over time? What do Brazilian youth movements teach us about re-examining the relationship between movements and partyism?
Drawing from multi-sited ethnographic research in Brazil and through hybrid (online and offline) spaces, I accompanied several municipal and state elections in Rio de Janeiro (2018, 2020, 2022), national elections (2018, 2022), and university elections (2022). This analysis focuses on interviews carried out with 14 politicians and people who ran for office. In addition, I conducted 110 in-depth interviews with youth activists in three cohorts, from ages 16 to 30 years old. It will also include recent findings from fieldwork carried out in Fall 2024, including follow-up interviews and ethnographic research leading up to the 2024 municipal and state elections.
This paper develops two main arguments. First, youth movements illustrate expanded political fields beyond voting outcomes in elections; i.e., engage institutions not typically contemplated as movement actors - universities, and they develop intersectional projects. Building from but departing from Mische’s (2008) work, this allows me to build a framework that shows how activists engage elections for strategic purposes of their movements. Second, I argue that beyond representation and “occupying” spaces, youth struggled for new kinds of politics, what I call a “political culture of audacity” and in ways that build from a popular education foundation. Digital platforms provide new landscapes for navigating movement struggles alongside elections – and new possibilities for combining traditional street-based approaches with online activism and campaigning.

Author

• Alice Taylor, University of Denver