The squaring off of the two giant figures of Brazil’s politics in advance of October’s hard-fought, sometimes violent, and deeply polarised presidential election make it a contest of continental, if not global, significance. The face of waning Trumpian populism is taking on a resurgent icon of the left.
Like Donald Trump did, hard-right president Jair Bolsonaro is preparing for his likely election defeat this October by claiming the presidential vote is rigged and has already been stolen. The 67-year-old former army captain, threatened with, though apparently evading, multiple corruption charges, is seeking a second four-year term, and has also borrowed from his hero’s playbook in trying to enlist, so far unsuccessfully, the army to intervene and put things right. Times have changed, however, and the army, although barely wedded to the democratic system, is less enthusiastic about military rule and coups these days.
Meanwhile, Brazilian senators are calling for an investigation into one of the country’s top prosecutors after she shelved several charges against the president over his egregious mishandling of Covid-19. Bolsonaro constantly downplayed the severity of the pandemic, initially calling it “a little flu” and telling Brazilians to man up because “we are all going to die anyway”. More have died from Covid-19 in Brazil (676,964) than in any other country, except the US.
The many signs of Bolsonaro’s increasing desperation reflect not only his likely defeat, but, particularly, ignominious defeat at the hands of arch-nemesis Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The left-wing former president and Workers’ Party leader “Lula” left office in 2010 with an approval rating above 80 per cent, but served a term in jail for corruption that had embroiled and discredited his whole party, saw the economy tank and the impeachment of his handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff. His revival — polls give him a clear lead — is little short of what the Financial Times has called as “the political comeback of the decade — if not the century”.
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“Bolsonaro is someone who bluffs,” Lula told a recent interview. The president may want a coup but “he would be on his own”, he predicts, somewhat optimistically.
It is a comeback not only for Lula in Brazil, but continentwide for the left. After a decade or more of leaning to the right, Latin America is veering sharply to the left, a turn that began in 2018 with Andrés Manuel López Obrador winning the presidential election in Mexico, and has seen the elections of a radical former student activist in Chile, the son of poor farmers in Peru, a former guerrilla rebel in Colombia, and a leftist in Argentina. The region’s six largest economies will be run by leaders elected on socialist platforms, and in most cases far more socially progressive than their predecessors.
But, while the last surge to the left in the early 2000s was assisted by a commodities boom that paid for significant social reform and the substantial widening of the middle class, now economies are sliding into recession, budgets have been battered by Covid and inflation fed by the war in Ukraine. Lula, like his comrades across the continent, will face into far more difficult challenges in the face of greater than ever expectations from the poorest and indigenous and expanded middle classes in some of the world’s most unequal and divided societies.
Extreme poverty in Brazil jumped by more than a third last year to 14 per cent, and polls report some 36 per cent of the population did not have enough money for food in a country that is one of the world’s biggest agricultural exporters. “I am very sad because 12 years after I left the presidency, I find Brazil poorer,” Lula says. “I find more unemployment, more people going hungry and Brazil with a government that has very low credibility at home and abroad.”
During his first term bulging state coffers allowed him sharply to reduce poverty through radical social welfare programmes such as Bolsa Familia — a cash transfer programme for the poorest. Generous state spending promises will now be even more difficult and open his campaign to charges of fiscal irresponsibility, but Lula has gone a long way to reassure a business community rattled by Bolsonaro’s recklessness that, as he told the Financial Times recently, he is “more experienced, more seasoned and with a much greater desire to get it right”. More the economic pragmatist of his first years than the more ideological interventionist who emerged during his second term.
His commitment to sharply reduce deforestation of the Amazon will be welcomed worldwide.
It looks like Brazil is about to give this former shoeshine boy and metalworker a second chance.