Brazil's Election
Risks, outcomes, and reactionary populism's enduring popularity
Following the first round of voting on Sunday, Brazil is heading for a runoff to determine its next president. It’s already proven to be one of the most polarizing and violent election campaigns in recent memory. Not a proud moment for Brazilian democracy.
From the WSJ:
Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took the most votes in Sunday’s first round of Brazil’s presidential elections, but President Jair Bolsonaro’s better-than-expected performance means the two will face each other again in a runoff vote at the end of the month.
Mr. da Silva, a standard-bearer of the Latin American left who is widely popular among the poor despite having been jailed on a corruption conviction in 2018, clinched 48.2% of the vote. The tally was just shy of the majority he needed to win outright, with 99.1% of votes counted Sunday night, according to Brazil’s electoral court.
Brazil’s right-wing leader notched 43.4% of the vote, nearly 51 million and far more than the 36%-37% support that polls from Datafolha and Ipec said that the ex-army captain would garner. Allies of Mr. Bolsonaro also swept to victory in an election that included votes for members of congress and state governors.
Lula, who served as president from 2003-2010 and remains extremely popular with a large segment of Brazil’s poorer and working-class voters, took in close to half the overall vote tally. To be clear: he remains favored to prevail in the second round. And yet, I imagine yesterday’s outcome provides cold comfort to the former president and his supporters, who, according to polling in the runup to the vote, were projected to cross the 50% threshold needed to secure outright victory in the first round.
Source: Bloomberg
The big story coming out of Sunday, as it’s often been over the past four years, remains Bolsonaro. By significantly outperforming the polls he frequently lambasted as biased against him, the president scored a major victory in defeat. While he remains the underdog, he carries significant momentum into the next stage of the campaign, which culminates with the runoff vote scheduled for October 30.
While many election analysts saw Lula’s victory as a foregone conclusion, it’s now conceivable that Bolsonaro holds onto power. At a minimum, the race appears much more competitive than widely assumed just a few days ago. The two candidates will now labor to keep their existing supporters onside, win over the millions who backed third-party candidates, and court the growing share of Brazil’s electorate who abstained from voting in the first round altogether.
Going forward, I see three primary risk areas worth focusing upon.
Risk one: Bolsonaro secures reelection—much to the delight of his supporters and powerful allies in the business community—and, feeling vindicated, doubles down. Rather than tacking to the center, pursuing meaningful structural reforms, addressing corruption, or embracing the role of an inclusive statesman, the president leans ever-harder into the role of demagogic culture warrior.
The quality of Brazil’s information environment—already saturated in misinformation, fantastical thinking, and violent rhetoric—further deteriorates against the weight of Bolsonarismo's aggressive and conspiracist communication style. Polarization, distrust, and pessimism magnify further as Brazil’s democratic culture coarsens and becomes more overtly illiberal. Governance remains highly dysfunctional. Faith in the country’s institutions erodes while support for autocracy spikes upwards. The president continues his withering assault on Brazil’s system of checks and balances. Brazil drifts further and further away from being a healthy liberal democracy.
On the international front, Bolsonaro finds himself deeply at odds with leftwing governments across South America. Despite growing alarm over the effects of climate change, Bolsonaro continues unapologetically backing mass-scale deforestation projects in the Amazon—casting Brazil as an international pariah on arguably the most important issue of the day. Relations between DC and Brasilia plunge to their worst point in decades due to incompatible positions on climate and ecological preservation, basic social values, and Bolsonaro’s warm relations with Donald Trump and the American far right.
Risk two: much as in the United States across the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, Brazil’s democratic institutions face a massive stress test that risks lasting damage to the country’s political fabric. As Oliver Stuenkel notes, “the next four weeks are likely to be shaped by intensifying polarization and high risk of increased political violence” as Lula and Bolsonaro wage a pitched battle for Brazi’s future. The two sides have cast one another as existential threats to the nation and the outcome is framed as an existential, all-or-nothing struggle. Disinformation and alarmist, conspiratorial narratives have crowded out any meaningful debate over policy direction in a race defined by the clash of hyper-polarizing personalities.
As a recent report on Brazil’s election from SumOfUs points out, the principal worry here revolves around Bolsonaro—who is widely expected to reject the election results if they go against him :
Recently, Bolsonaro said that he would only leave the Republic’s Presidency dead, because it was God who put him there to fight communism. He has also fiercely attacked electronic ballot boxes, electoral courts and judges, and justices of the Supreme Court as well as repeatedly casting doubt over the upcoming election results and threatening to refuse to recognize the results. He has explicitly threatened to launch a coup and insinuated support from the Armed Forces.
Toward that end, the failure of Brazilian pollsters to accurately gauge the depth of support for the president is noteworthy and troubling. Whether the misleading polls can be pinned down to a prevalence of “shy” Bolsonaro voters, flawed modeling, or some degree of bias, the delta between expectations and pre-election narrative versus the end result on Sunday was simply massive.
This matters tremendously. Brazilan social media is already awash in election lies, conspiracies, and “pro-coup extremism” amongst Bolsonaro’s core supporters. The first round’s polling failures lend credence—at least superficially—to Bolsonaro’s claim that the entire process is rigged against him. In the event he ultimately loses and then tries to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, Bolsonaro will need widespread buy-in around his preferred narrative of victimhood and electoral conspiracy. A super-tight election race—already punctuated by shaky polling and volcanic levels of public distrust—significantly enhances the risk that Bolsonaro pushes events to the brink. Given that backdrop, it’s possible that Brazil sees a wave of post-election violence and risks plunging headfirst into a full-blown constitutional crisis.
Risk three: Lula secures victory in the second round and successfully takes office—which I believe remains the most likely outcome—but then struggles mightily in the face of a drastically more challenging environment than 19 years ago. As Brian Winter pointed out earlier this year in a piece for Foreign Affairs, absent many of the favorable macro conditions present during his initial spell in office, there’s a high-risk Lula's nostalgic, backward-looking campaign fails to translate into a successful presidential redux. As Winter writes:
Today’s Latin America is struggling to emerge from an especially troubled period that saw some of the world’s highest death rates from COVID-19, its worst rates of homicide and inequality, and a lost decade of lackluster economic growth and social unrest. Given the scale of these challenges, it is fair to worry that Lula’s rise may be symbolic of what the Venezuelan intellectual Moisés Naím calls “ideological necrophilia,” a historical preference during times of crisis for nostalgia and shopworn ideas instead of fresh leadership and forward-looking policy.
Layered on top of that is the political clout of Brazil’s far right. As the always-excellent Latin America Risk Report takes note of, it’s clear from Sunday’s results that a reinstalled Lula will be forced to navigate a hostile Congress stocked with Bolsonaristas:
While Lula is likely to win the election, the first round results have left the political situation even more difficult for him. Brazil’s right was expected to do well in the Congressional elections, and they did. They overperformed in certain state and municipal elections, leading in key local races. Lula will need centrists to govern, but even with them, he’ll face serious checks on his power from a strong opposition in the Congress and at the local level.
While some politicians on the right may secretly understand that Bolsonaro is particularly unfit to govern, they’re stuck with him, and they will govern according to that reality. Bolsonaro will continue his Trump-like path as ex-president, haunting the political system and making life difficult for both the new administration and his own political allies.
For now, the “President Lula 2.0 whose leftwing ambitions are constrained by a rightwing legislature” narrative is playing well with the markets. It remains to be seen, however, whether the road ahead will be defined by moderation and compromise or gridlock and intense partisan warfare. Given Bolsonaro’s desire to shield himself from legal peril, visceral hatred of Lula and the Brazilian left, and (likely) refusal to accept the legitimacy of an electoral defeat, it’s a virtual certainty that he will not play the role of elder statesman and fade into the background of post-presidential life. Much as was the case with Donald Trump in the aftermath of his 2020 election loss, Bolsonaro will likely embrace the notion that “the game was rigged” by a corrupt cabal of globalists and radical leftists who unfairly deprived him of victory. In the years ahead, I see that narrative—victimization, grievance, electoral corruption—serving as a powerful mobilizing mythology for the Brazilian right.
Bolonaro is part of a new normal shaking up Western democracies
Regardless of how the second round shakes out, it’s clear that Bolsonarismo remains an incredibly potent political force. Brazil’s right is significantly more organized, disciplined, and overtly ideological than four years ago. Its potency is underpinned by an increasingly influential “beef, bible, bullets” coalition of farmers, evangelical Christians, and gun owners, a “digital army” of fanatical netizens who eagerly amplify far-right messaging while harassing and threatening critics, and a roster of powerful allies across the military, the National Congress, and state governorships. Even if removed from power, it’s a virtual certainty the president will continue exerting a powerful influence on Brazilian politics and be well-positioned for reelection down the road.
Zooming out a bit, I‘d argue Bolsonaro’s enduring popularity—despite myriad governance failures—is very much of a piece with the global direction of travel. From Trump’s continued stranglehold on the Republican Party, to Giorgia Meloni’s electoral success in Italy, to the resiliency of support for leaders like Putin and Orban in a more overtly authoritarian context, we see again and again how a hyper-personalized “strongman” brand of populism—often wrapped in the flag and the bible—that is equal measures crass, combative, conservative, and conspiratorial has firmly entrenched itself across the Western world.
While no two countries are perfectly analogous, I think there’s some powerful connective tissue here. You see it on full display in the burgeoning linkages between the various leaders and movements as they respond to/feed off of one another in a manner that’s wholly distinctive from more traditional right and center-right political figures like Angela Merkel, Liz Truss, Scott Morrison, or George Bush. The extensive and well-documented ties between MAGA World and the Bolsonaroistas—and their shared fixation on electoral fraud—strike me as particularly emblematic of what has become an increasingly transnational political phenomenon.
Bolsonaro’s “over-performance” on Sunday is the latest in an increasingly long line of data points reinforcing my belief that this brand of combative reactionary politics—ideally suited to capture and hold attention in the digital age of mass distraction—remains a dominant force throughout the democratic world. This is not a passing phenomenon but rather the new normal.