Brazil Votes: Lula Takes the Battle for His Nation's Soul
In Latin America's largest country, voters have chosen the former progressive president over incumbent Jair Bolsonaro with a far-right Trumpist agenda.
Continuing our pledge that Andelman Unleashed will chronicle every presidential or national leadership election around the world, the focus today is on Brazil—long a showcase for democracy in Latin America and much of the developing world.
Updates with final results, global reaction, and anticipation of Bolsonaro’s response.
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has won a narrow, bitter, closely-fought election to return to power as Brazil’s next president.
The nation’s Supreme Electoral Court declared the 77-year-old Lula the winner by 2.14 million votes out of 118.55 million cast. The vote turned toward Lula from a narrow, early lead for the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. The final tally showed Lula with 50.9% of the vote and Bolsonaro with 49.1%.
Not surprisingly it was hardly a clean vote. At least 500 buses carrying voters were stopped by federal police whose loyalties skew heavily to Bolsonaro in Lula’s northeastern strongholds. "What happened today is criminal. There is no justification for the (police) to mount roadblocks on Election Day," Workers Party President Gleisi Hoffman told journalists.
A record 156.4 million Brazilians were registered and eligible to vote—9.1 million more than in the last presidential election four years ago. Still, at least 20% did not vote at all.
It took Bolsonaro two days to admit that Lula had won and that a transition could begin. Still, in a brief televised address on Tuesday, he failed to concede and failed to urge thousands of his supporters—long-haul truck drivers—to lift their blockades of the nation’s highways that have brought commerce to a standstill. To many, he seemed to be biding his time, counting on the majority his party holds in both houses of parliament to block many of the key initiatives that Lulu has pledged.
Many of the comments of Bolsonaro in the course of his campaign have suggested a page torn directly from the playbook of Donald Trump—to the point of suggesting he might not accept the results of the vote as legitimate—if voters chose not to return him to office. Boasting the nickname, “Trump of the Tropics,” Bolsonaro forecast he would win with a 60% vote and that any lower tally he would consider suspicious. Trump has supported Bolsonaro throughout his campaign and indeed throughout his administration.
"Bolsonaro intends to settle any electoral disputes himself, in the wake of Donald Trump and the attack on Capitol Hill," said Odilon Caldeira Neto, a professor of contemporary history at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), in Minas Gerais (southeastern Brazil). A leading specialist in authoritarian, conservative and neo-fascist movements, he coordinates the Far-Right Observatory in Brazil. "Bolsonarists resort to 'fake news,' attacks on the press and typical Trumpist aesthetics to stir up anger and inflame the political world. Bolsonaro's threats to democracy are therefore not just the bravado of a man who lost the election in advance. They are part of a political project that establishes a dialogue between an authoritarian Brazilian political culture and the new methods of the global far right.”
"It was a very hard campaign," Lula admitted to the waves of cheering supporters massed in the pre-dawn hours in São Paulo's main street, Paulista Avenue, eager for a glimpse of the president-elect. "Lula has returned," the crowd chanted in celebration, as they set off red smoke flares, the color of his Workers Party. "It wasn't Lula against Bolsonaro, it was a campaign of democracy against barbarity," Lula himself told his supporters.
World leaders of democratic nations also celebrated Lula’s victory. Joe Biden saluted his win in an election that was “free, equitable, and credible.” White House sources said Biden would be dispatching his National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan to help insure a peaceful transition. French president Emmanuel Macron, who has had a blistering relationship with Bolsonaro over destruction of the Amazon, described the “election [as opening] a new page in the history of Brazil. Together, we will join forces to meet the many common challenges and renew the bond of friendship between our two countries." And a host of newly-installed liberal presidents in Latin America including Gabriel Boric in Chile, Alberto Fernandez in Argentina, Pedro Castillo in Peru, Xiomara Castro in Honduras, Luis Arce in Bolivia, Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador in Mexico added their voices. The presidents of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, joined the chorus of praise, as well as the ex-president of Bolivia Evo Morales. Lula has promised to work for Latin American integration and indeed a Mercosur-EU trade agreement between Europe and Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay. and Uruguay, now seemed more likely to break loose of a three-year freeze that had marked the Bolsonaro years.
Lula’s most immediate problem, however, may be one confronting President Biden after next week’s American elections. Right-wing parties allied with Bolsonaro emerged with a slim majority in both houses of Parliament and in control of several states including São Paulo, Brazil’s largest and wealthiest. Bolsonaro’s own party raised its tally of seats in the lower house of parliament to 99 from 77—a tribute to the enduring strength of the right in this profoundly polarized nation. Some observers believe that Lulu will need to move more toward the center and temper his more leftist priorities to have any success in governing effectively.
In the first round on October 2, Brazilian voters failed to give Bolsonaro or Lula 50% of the vote. Instead, with a host of candidates eliminated, the pair went head-to-head in round two in a battle each understood quite well—a simple knife-fight with existential stakes. The dangers in this, Latin America's largest nation and the world's fifth largest democracy, could not have been any larger.
"I have never won an election in the first round," Lula told his supporters after the first-round outcome was clear. "It seems like destiny has made me work a little harder. We will win because Brazil has need of us." As for Bolsonaro, his words were stark and simple: "In this second round, we are going to show them that the changes they are seeking will be for the worse." Moreover, he noted, his opponents "are demoralized." He was confident of victory.
Brazilian voters had a stark choice on Sunday—return to power Bolsonaro, an individual with a clear agenda of entrenching an anti-democratic, deeply nationalist, and increasingly violent agenda which has been growing in power and popularity far beyond its borders, or turn to Lula’s style of liberal populism the nation had repudiated, but that now seems to hold more answers to its deepening troubles.
Bolsonaro, sporting a yellow and green t-shirt of the national soccer team, voted early on Sunday at the military base of Vila Militar in Rio de Janeiro, emphasizing his close ties with the nation’s security forces that once ran Brazil before the return of civilian government. "God willing, we’ll be victorious later today," he told journalists after voting. “Or even better, Brazil will be victorious.”
Bolsonaro’s wife Michelle chose to wear a blue-and-white Israeli t-shirt with the Star of David. Her husband has been a major supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu who will be trying for his own comeback as prime minister in Israel’s national elections on Tuesday.
Lula voted at a school in São Bernardo do Campo, in São Paulo, kissed his voting certificate, then told reporters, “Today is possibly the most important day of October of my life and I think it is a very important day for the Brazilian people, because today the people are defining the model of Brazil they want, the model of life they want." He was accompanied by running mate Geraldo Alckmin, who served for 12 years over two terms as governor of São Paulo, and several members of Lula’s entourage.
More than just the stewardship of this nation of 215 million people was on the line. Rather, the stakes have run a broad gamut from the future health, or even continued existence, of the Amazon rain forests—described by conservationists as "the world's lungs"—to the well-being of the 58% of Brazil's people classified as "food insecure," its most deeply impoverished.
Then there is covid-19, the epidemic that Bolsonaro has largely dismissed and that has killed more than 686,000 Brazilians and that the outgoing president has done little to control.
At stake, too, is Brazil as a showcase of democracy in Latin America and more broadly in the developing world and beyond where this concept of governing has been under desperate attack. A host of pundits share my view that this was one of Latin America’s most truly epiphanal elections in decades and, if the results do lead to a peaceful transition of power from right to left, as recent ballots did from left to right, then Brazil can truly emerge not only as a model for Latin political frameworks but more widely as well in the coming years. Brazil, with its deeply polarized electorate and its tottering economy that was once the world’s sixth largest and now ranks 12th, but 70th in per capita income, desperately needs such a transition.
The vast and growing economic disparities also need urgently to be addressed. Forbes has Brazil with the seventh largest number of billionaires in the world. But 40% of the country is living on $10 a day or less, 20% on less than $5.50 a day with a poverty rate, according to the World Bank, greater than that of Tanzania and Tajikistan.
Moreover, Bolsonaro who has shown little interest in addressing any such disparities, comes from a long tradition of Mussolini-style fascists who have at various periods in the nation's history held this nation hostage to their agenda of "God, fatherland, family" but that has found its expression in repression, arrest, and torture of opponents or any who do not recognize their power and legitimacy.
"Historically, the fascist movement of the Açao Integralista Brasileira (AIB), the "Brazilian Integralist Action") [1932-1937] and its "green shirts" constituted the first mass political expression of the Brazilian far right," says Caldeira Neto. "The AIB was also the largest and most structured fascist organization outside the European continent."
Caldeira Neto observes that "the agenda and speech of Bolsonaro, a former captain of the army, are also deeply rooted in the tradition of the military far right. Hence the daily celebration of the exceptional regime of the dictatorship and the place given to the military in his administration. The fact is that the Bolsonaro government is a coalition with the army."
Indeed, as Gilberto Menezes Côrtes, editor of the 130-year-old Rio daily Jornal do Brasil observed, "the [Bolsonaro] government's topsy-turvy 'Robin Hood' package has given more gains to the rich without giving enough relief to the poorest. This explains why Bolsonaro had not made much headway among those earning two minimum wages." The same newspaper published a list of those weighing in with endorsements of Bolsonaro, from the autocratic Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, to Donald Trump Junior whose endorsement followed on the coattails of his father, taking the form of a 13-second video, proclaiming "Bolsonaro is…the only person who can stop the spread of socialism and communism in South America." Orban described Bolsonaro as having "the courage to put Brazil first." Do we hear 'Make Brazil Great Again' (Fazer o Brasil Grande Novamente)?
By contrast, Lula ran a rather low-key campaign, grounded on his pledge to "to take care of the people," returning to the themes of his first two terms leading the country of beginning to eradicate hunger, which had some successes then, but has since largely run aground. He might be called “a Brazilian Biden,” though his deeply socialist ideas probably put him sympathetically closer to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). "An idealist but pragmatic," a profile in Jornal do Brasil described him.
The firebrand son of an illiterate farmer, who began working at the age of 12, losing a finger seven years later in a factory accident, Lula was the first worker without a college degree to have ascended to the presidency of Brazil. At the peak of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, he helped organize the Workers Party whose banner he carries today and to which former president Dilma Rousseff also belongs.
Brazil's military rule served as a blueprint for other military dictatorships across Latin America, many of which began collapsing in the face of crumbling economies and runaway inflation—precisely the same problems Bolsonaro has been unable to correct, and that Lula has now pledged to deal with.
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We’ll continue to follow the Brazil elections to the finish. Be sure to check back regularly for updates that will be noted in boldface.
Then, in a new series of posts, we’ll be back early Wednesday morning with returns from Israel and Denmark. Will Benjamin Netanyahu achieve his dream of a return from political purgatory? Will Denmark’s prime minister survive her widely-condemned decision of terminating all 17 million of her nation’s minks at the peak of the covid menace? Will the right-wing gain traction, the latest nations to shift to starboard? Stay tuned!
This has been quite clearly the playbook that Andelman Unleashed has been chronicling this year as the global—at times corrupt—right has been swept into power or accumulated powerful positions, even leadership roles in such disparate nations as Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Kenya, the Philippines even France…. And corrupt incumbencies with roots in these such forces have managed to retain power in other nations. We will continue to chronicle these new power centers and the forces that oppose them as a central theme of Andelman Unleashed.
The legislative branch, which was not up for election, remains right-leaning?
A luta continua!! Well done.
Robert Rotberg