Brazil’s Problem Is Bigger Than Bolsonaro
New York Times · LC · trust 55/100
Credit... Adriano Machado/Reuters Listen · 8:30 min Share full article 47 By Elizabeth McKenna
Dr. McKenna is a political sociologist at Harvard and the author of “The Paradox of Participation: Organizing Authoritarianism in Democratic Brazil.”
The race pitted President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the 80-year-old leftist incumbent known almost universally as Lula, against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president, who is serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup in 2022. As it has consistently since 2014, the right outperformed its final polls in the vote, with Mr. Bolsonaro winning 47 percent to Mr. Lula’s 45 percent, and Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies winning a majority of seats in the Senate. The two will head to a runoff on Oct. 25, with Mr. Bolsonaro looking poised for a victory.
How is Flávio Bolsonaro — the son of a convicted coup plotter who is himself under criminal investigation for corruption — now the favorite against Mr. Lula, a global icon of the social democratic left?
Economic grievance, backlash against cultural change, polarization and the erosion of democratic guardrails are all among the reasons voters around the world are turning to far-right leaders. In Brazil, Mr. Lula and his supporters add foreign interference to that list, pointing to the Trump administration’s efforts to tip the scales in Mr. Bolsonaro’s favor through tariffs , visa revocations and State Department funding for groups that oppose Brazil’s Supreme Court. A Flávio Bolsonaro presidency would give Washington another subordinate partner in Latin America. It could also bring a pardon for his father and amnesty for the rioters who stormed Brasília on Jan. 8, 2023.
Another crucial answer lies in how Brazilians take part in civic life. A democracy’s health depends on whether and how its citizens participate, and in Brazil, the trends are discouraging. I’ve been conducting fieldwork on Brazil’s political movements since 2013, and what I’ve seen is that even though Brazilians vote and take action in large numbers, they increasingly do so in ways that strengthen authoritarian politics.
Until this past weekend, a casual observer could be forgiven for thinking of Brazil as a rare beacon of progressivism and democratic stability in a region that has recently swung hard to the right . Since Brazil’s transition to democracy, the country’s most marginalized groups, including peasant, Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities, have experienced improbable economic and social gains. From 2003 to 2014, Mr. Lula and his handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, made huge strides in reducing poverty , illiteracy and hunger and increasing college enrollment . Mr. Lula, a former lathe operator with an elementary school education, left office in 2011 with the highest approval rating ever recorded for a Brazilian president. So activated was its citizenry that at one point during the mid-2010s, Brazil saw more protesters take to the streets than in the rest of the world combined.
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