Faced with a choice between Lula, a corrupt socialist, and Bolsonaro, an ends-justify-means right-wing populist, many voters lean toward the latter.
Faced with a choice between Lula, a corrupt socialist, and Bolsonaro, an ends-justify-means right-wing populist, many voters lean toward the latter.
B razil’s October 30 runoff between President Jair Bolsonaro and former president Lula da Silva will be momentous. Facing each other in the world’s fifth-largest country are a controversial leader of the populist Right, hellbent on rescuing God, family, and country from wokeism, corruption, and leftist anticapitalism, and a former trade-union leader who champions every socialist cause, redistributed lots of money when his administration struck gold with the commodities boom of the 2000s, and went to jail for taking bribes and laundering money before his sentences were annulled on procedural grounds.
The result of the election’s first round took everyone by surprise: Bolsonaro obtained more than 43 percent, about ten points higher than leading polls had predicted, and his party became the largest in Congress. The next Congress will be controlled by a pro-Bolsonaro right-wing bloc allied with the non-ideological “Centrāo” parties.
Lula, who expected an outright victory but still won an impressive 48 percent owing to his popularity among the poor in the northeast, is the slight favorite in the runoff. That is no small achievement for a man who has epitomized corruption since the investigation known as Operation Car Wash unearthed an empire of graft, including billions of dollars in kickbacks and money laundering, involving the development bank, the state-owned oil company, construction entities, and the political class, preeminently his Workers Party.
As president, he used the abundant revenue to distribute handouts and was careful not to antagonize foreign investors, whose activities kept the government coffers full. But his administration, marked by profligacy, suffocating debt, and statist regulations (for instance, in the energy sector), took a heavy toll on his country once the commodities boom dissipated, causing Brazil’s longest recession. By then he was out of power, and his successor and ally, Dilma Rousseff, was on her way out through impeachment.
Bolsonaro is partly to blame for Lula’s resurrection. In classic right-wing populist fashion, Bolsonaro has taken his personal war against the Supreme Court (where some Lula appointees have undermined Bolsonaro) to unhealthy heights. His rhetorical ferocity against environmentalists has smacked more of negationism than of reasonable economic criticism of the excesses of climate activists, and his cavalier handling of the pandemic, including his antivaccine stance in a country with 700,000 Covid-19-related deaths, hurt his credibility.
Still, Bolsonaro’s cultural war against wokeism resonates with many Brazilians, and his pro-business drive, supported by a finance minister who is a renowned free-marketeer, has struck a chord with a middle class acutely aware of the need to liberate the country from the shackles of decades-old interventionism. Bolsonaro’s government has reduced spending on pensions, the largest source of government expenditure; undertaken $35 billion worth of privatization projects; deregulated some areas of the economy; and given the central bank its independence — a reason why inflation is coming down and the currency has appreciated against the dollar.
During the campaign, the populist in him has led Bolsonaro to ask Congress to suspend the constitutional ceiling he once favored on the rise of public spending, to increase aid for some 20 million families through Auxílio Brasil, and to meddle with the price of gasoline and some of the decisions taken by the state-controlled oil company. On the other hand, Brazil was the first economy to recover from the pandemic in Latin America; economic growth has picked up; and thousands of jobs are being created. This helps explain Bolsonaro’s first-round performance.
How tragic that Lula, who embodies much of what is wrong with Latin American politics, could come back to power, especially now that many countries are in the grips of autocratic, left-wing populist governments. It is also unfortunate that the one guy who might be able to stop him, and who has delivered some positive results as well as much verbal abuse against opponents, believes that the end justifies the means.
Given the stakes and the electorate’s choice so far, one is not surprised that Bolsonaro has attracted second-round support from foes such as former judge — and now senator-elect — Sergio Moro, who was the first to sentence Lula and who, after serving as Bolsonaro’s minister of justice, left the government and denounced the president’s disrespect for democratic institutions. For many Brazilians, Bolsonaro has become the lesser of two evils.