Conclusion: Military-Authoritarian Rule and Party Politics

Abstract

The intention of this study has been to look closely at a specific case of opposition politics in the authoritarian context of military rule. It has attempted to tell the history of the MDB, its problems, dilemmas, failures and successes as a legal opposition party operating under the constraints of Brazil’s military-authoritarian regime. Although this has not primarily been a study of the regime established in Brazil after 1964, it has shown the major features of this regime as well as its development in so far as they affected or conditioned the way in which the MDB operated. We emphasized the hybrid nature of the political order that emerged after the so-called 1964 Revolution, and followed the different phases undergone by the regime, so as to provide the context in which the MDB operated, and to understand how this context affected and sometimes was affected by the opposition. Before making final remarks about this case of opposition politics under authoritarianism, we shall underline some points related to the Brazilian experience of military rule whose distinctive features must have contributed to make it difficult the institutionalization of the regime.