Ascensão e queda do populismo em Alagoas – o impeachment de Muniz Falcão

Abstract

This analysis comes from the importance of the subject to the history of Alagoas, trying, first of all, to clarify the political disputes between the oligarchic elites, and at what moment a government of populist bias became the central figure of the debate. Political disputes that would culminate in constant conflicts between traditional families that took turns in controlling the state. We will highlight the figure of Sebastião Muniz Falcão, who would be the acknowledged figure chosen by the Alagoas popular front to run for election in 1955, as a mass inspired candidacy supported mostly by workers. Politics, in some cases, is the only way, even if indirectly, to record history and include the working class in the debate, largely due to the limited documentary collection of the time. The rise and fall of populism in Alagoas, through this work, seeks to collaborate with the historiography of Alagoas, in order to make clear events of great importance to the history of our people during this period of political restlessness, through the birth of populism and the electoral systems that help us understand this conjunction of events. Populism began to grow in the Alagoas political scene from the 1930 revolution until the end of governor Muniz Falcão's term in 1960. Highlighting some of the most powerful oligarchies in the state and the violent conflicts fought between them, conflicts that mark the history of Alagoas; the populist government that reached its peak in the second half of the 1950s, the strength of laborism, the impeachment process and the participation of the conservative opposition that happened on September 13, 1957, to deliver a blow to the government of the state.