Brazil Votes: The Battle Continues for a Nation's Soul
Voters fail to choose between a far-right incumbent and a liberal former president seeking new values. So, now it's on to Round Two….Meanwhile in Bosnia, another contest for a nation's soul.
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….And then there’s Bosnia…..
Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's demagogic leader will live to fight another day. Brazilian voters failed to give his opponent, liberal former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, 50% of the vote in Sunday's first round. Instead, after a dozen candidates battled it out in the first round, on October 30 Bolsonaro and Lula will go head-to-head in round two. Only now it's a battle each understands 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 be any larger.
"I have never won an election in the first round," Lula told his supporters after the 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." Now, he is confident of victory.
Indeed the outcome was startling. After weeks showing Lula with an apparently unbridgeable lead, even passing the 50% threshold that now requires a second round, the final tally was Lula 48.4% and Bolsonaro 43.2%. The polls, Bolsonaro puffed, were simply unreliable. Indeed, they did seem to miss vast pockets of Bolsonaro strength, or failed to capture any number of the president's supporters who just didn't want their view known. In this and so many other respects it's not unlike results in the Trump era in the United States—an analogy Bolsonaro has rarely failed to invoke.
Still, Lula has one clear, though rarely appreciated, advantage. There were a dozen candidates on the ballot this time around. The third and fourth place finishers, Simone Tebet with 4.2% and Ciro Gomes with 3.0%, either could have put Lula over the 50% threshold in the first round. And neither has much sympathy at all with Jair Bolsonaro.
Brazilian voters had a stark choice on Sunday—return to power an individual with a clear agenda of implanting an anti-democratic, deeply nationalist and increasingly violent agenda which is growing in power and popularity far beyond its borders, or a return to a liberal populism it had repudiated four years ago but that now seems to hold more answers to the nation's deepening troubles. “We don’t want more discord; we want a country that lives in peace. This is the most important election," Lula said when he voted Sunday morning with his wife Rosangela at a school in Sao Paulo. In 2011 when he last left office, he had a 90% approval rating. When Bolsonaro appeared at his local polling place in Rio, he sported a shirt of Brazil's national soccer club, over a bullet-proof vest.
More than just the stewardship of this nation of 215 million is on the line. Rather the stakes 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."
Then there is covid-19, the epidemic that Bolsonaro largely dismissed and that has killed more than 686,000 Brazilians. Above all, there is the question of whether democracy can be maintained in a country where the military and its brutal practices long held sway.
At stake, more broadly, is Brazil as a showcase of democracy in Latin America, across the developing world, and beyond where this concept of governing has been under desperate attack. Bolsonaro 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 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. "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 in a coalition with the army."
Indeed, many of the comments of Bolsonaro in the course of his campaign, as it became increasingly clear that his popularity was collapsing under the attacks from Lula, suggest a page torn directly from Donald Trump's playbook. He might not accept the results of the vote as legitimate if voters choose not to return him to office. Bolsonaro forecast he would win with a 60% vote and that any lower tally he would consider suspicious. In an effort to curb the vote for Lula, Bolsonaro even went to court to prevent free public transportation on election Sunday. He was denied. Still, Bolsonaro has any number of other tricks up his sleeve.
"Bolsonaro intends to settle any electoral disputes himself, in the wake of Donald Trump and the attack on Capitol Hill," Caldeira Neto continues. "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.
Indeed, as Gilberto Menezes Côrtes, editor of the 130-year-old Rio daily Jornal do Brasil observed, "the 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 has not made much headway among those earning two minimum wages." The same newspaper published a list of those weighing in with endorsements: the Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban; Donald Trump Junior whose endorsement, following on the coattails of his father, took 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 echos of 'Make Brazil Great Again'?
By contrast, Lula has run a rather low-key campaign, grounded on his pledge "to take care of the people," returning to the themes of his first two terms leading the country when he sought to eradicate hunger, which had some successes, but has since largely run aground. "An idealist but pragmatic," a profile in Jornal do Brasil described him. The 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 crumbling in the face of crumbling economies and runaway inflation—precisely the same problems Bolsonaro has been unable to correct, and that Lula as pledged to deal with.
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And then there's Bosnia. In the heart of the Balkans, it's no surprise that a complex stewpot of ethnic identities and ancient hatreds has combined to install a government that has bucked recent trends in Europe and beyond. The full name of this nation, born from the breakup of Yugoslavia—itself an artificial nation conceived by statesmen at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 with little appreciation of what they were creating—is Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its modern iteration was created from the crucible of the Bosnian Wars pitting Serb against Bosnian against Croat—Christian versus Moslem—and the Dayton Accords, which sprang from the fertile mind of American diplomat Richard Holbrooke.
On Sunday, the people went to the polls to choose three presidents, a tri-partite Bosnian presidency. Surprisingly, this will include moderate Bosniak and Croat leaders who must somehow find a way to coexist with the designated successor to strongman Milorad Dodik's right hand and planned successor as the Serbian member, indeed the first woman to hold office as a ruler of this unruly corner of Europe. Going down to defeat was the veteran Bosniak leader, Bakir Izetbegovic, son of the nation's first president, who observed early this morning: “How can you expect to win when 11 parties are against you? If there was nine of them, I could easily win, but with 11 I couldn’t.
What is still unclear is just how a last-minute intervention by the High Representative to Bosnia, Christian Schmidt, might work. Schmidt, who still functions as overseer, effectively godfather, of the entire region under the Dayton Accords, used his executive powers to impose controversial changes to the country’s election law—and this after most of the nation's polls had closed. As British ambassador Julian Reilly observed, “It is a source of regret that the powers of the High Representative continue to be needed in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” The American embassy put it more starkly. "This action was both urgent and necessary."
Where it leaves the three new presidents, the parliament, and the entire ruling system in Bosnia and Herzegovina remains to be seen. But as the Central Election Commission observed, only 50% Bosnians even bothered to vote. It remains, as it was when I first reported there from Belgrade for The New York Times in the late 1970s, a dark, remote and highly tribalized region—extraordinary people with a long history and long memories.
For the the past year, Andelman Unleashed has been chronicling the new power centers and the forces that oppose them as a central theme in elections across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and now Latin America. We'll be back for the denouement in Brazil four weeks from today. Stay tuned
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