Over the last four years, President Jair Bolsonaro’s government has made steep budget cuts to Brazil’s public universities. In the run-up to the second and final round of presidential elections, his government announced a new freeze on funds, angering students anew. The fields of education, culture and environmental studies have been favourite targets for the far-right president, who has said such institutions are leftist breeding grounds.
By slashing more than €450 million from the budget for federal universities on October 5 – just three days after the first round of presidential elections – Bolsonaro prompted a fresh outpouring of anger. On October 18, demonstrations against yet another budget cut took place in nearly 70 cities around Brazil.
In Rio de Janeiro, students, teachers and other members of education unions marched from Candelária Church to Cinelândia in the city centre. "We’re here because education is Bolsonaro's worst enemy," lamented Jessica Pinheiro, 19, a social sciences student from Rio de Janeiro Federal University (UFRJ). Jessica is part of the Juntos UFRJ student union, which she joined when she started university a year ago. “We’ve come to stop these cuts,” Pinheiro continued.
“Jair Bolsonaro’s government is the one that has targeted universities the most.”
The “Out, Bolsonaro” signs and slogans condemn the far-right president and his crusade against education. Faced with the protests, the government was forced to backtrack temporarily, freezing the budget until December.
“When the people take to the streets, they can change things. Every time we demonstrate we manage to get the government to back down, whether on the streets or on social media,” Pinheiro said.
But according to the national association of directors of federal higher education institutions (Andifes), the situation remains dire. Successive budget cuts are already jeopardising the functioning of universities and making it difficult for them to pay staff.
Federal Universities in dire straits
Reductions in the budget for federal universities began in 2015 when Dilma Rousseff (of the Workers' Party) was president but accelerated under Bolsonaro.
The country’s 68 public federal universities are now in dire straits. According to UFRJ’s finance secretary, Eduardo Raupp, "the UFRJ budget has decreased by more than €13 million between 2019 and 2022, not taking inflation into account".
Rio de Janeiro’s 102-year-old federal university is the best and largest in Brazil – with 67,000 students, 4,200 teachers, 1,500 research labs and 45 libraries. It’s the third best university in Latin America, according to the EduRank 2022 rankings of Latin American universities. It’s a national and international point of reference for teaching and the sciences, arts and culture.
But over the years, the drop in funding has profoundly damaged buildings and operations. Located in the city centre on Largo São Francisco de Paula, UFRJ’s Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences is hard to spot. In this former psychiatric hospital, built more than 120 years ago, all that remains of its past splendour is its wooden staircase. Today one finds dirty toilets, weeds, broken furniture, crumbling walls, leaks and broken elevators.
“The university can’t afford to pay the cleaning staff any longer. The workforce is smaller. As a result, there’s a lot of neglect,” explained Ligia Bahia, professor at the UFRJ Faculty of Medicine and a public health researcher.
Since the start of the pandemic, thousands of study and research grants have also been suspended. Beyond the physical infrastructure, the whole education system is in danger.
Bahia, who signed an appeal to vote for Bolsonaro challenger and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, underscored that scientific study is in great difficulty in crucial areas such as biodiversity, public safety and even virology.
“Brazil already has a low level of scientific and technological research. [With these cuts], the country will be left behind. We won’t be able to be there at the start of innovations and will lag behind the international scientific community.”
Ministry of education in crisis
Since 2019, the ministry of education has been affected by a series of crises caused by controversy and rapid turnover. In June, Brazilian police arrested Milton Ribeiro, Bolsonaro's education minister at the time, on charges of bribery and influence-peddling in the distribution of public funds.
In March, the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper published a recording in which the minister said he prioritised giving grants to schools in municipalities run by "friends", in particular two influential pastors, at President Bolsonaro’s request. According to press reports, one of the pastors asked a mayor to give him a kilo of gold in return for having his school-funding request cleared.
Ribeiro resigned in the wake of the scandal. He’s facing a sentence of two to five years in prison for influence-peddling and two to 12 years for corruption. Brazil has had five ministers of education in quick succession during Bolsonaro’s time in office. This state of affairs, coupled with the Covid-19 crisis, has severely weakened the Brazilian education system as a whole.
University access at stake
A few days before the protest march in Rio, the Juntos UFRJ student union met under the trees in the courtyard of the Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences. The microphone was passed around the circle where they were sitting.
“For me, protest is necessary. My family is Black. Only two or three of us have managed to go to university. This is an achievement for me. And I'm coming back knowing that it might close," worried Jessica.
Under banners proclaiming, “Racists, out!” and posters bearing Lula’s image, history student Dulce Silva begins speaking. With a broad smile and a powerful voice, she reminds the captivated audience that "every year it's the same story, we’re told yet again that the university is in danger of shutting down". While she says she is not in full agreement with Lula, she considers him a better option than Bolsonaro: “At least Lula isn’t going to attack us like Jair Bolsonaro's government is doing. Lula managed to do great things for universities. So many people managed to go to university thanks to him.”
Many students and teaching staff believe the Bolsonaro government wants to privatise the management of universities because it sees them as a threat to its hold on power. “For Jair Bolsonaro, universities bring together intellectual elites where anti-racist ideas, feminism, gender ideology develop. He sees universities as places that destroy the religious and conservative values that he defends,” said Bahia.
Pro-Lula student activism
In 2005, Lula’s government made access to education easier for disadvantaged students by introducing the University for All programme (Programa Universidade para Todos, in Portuguese), which set up a scholarship system for low-income students. As a result, the number of enrolments in higher education more than doubled during Lula’s and Rousseff’s governments, rising from 3.5 million in 2002 to more than 7.1 million in 2014, according to the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira.
During a vitriolic first television debate between the two rounds of voting, the former president did not fail to remind people of his record on education compared to Bolsonaro’s. Lula asked him twice how many universities and technical schools he had opened under his presidency. Bolsonaro didn't give him a figure and blamed the Covid-19 crisis.
The left-wing former president has promised to make education and access to university a priority if he wins on Sunday. And for many UFRJ students, voting for Lula is the clear choice.
