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SÃO PAULO—Jair Bolsonaro, a combative ex-army captain, is projected to win Brazil’s presidency by a large margin on Sunday, joining the growing ranks of populists across the world and shifting Latin America’s largest economy sharply to the right.
Polls show Mr. Bolsonaro winning nearly 60% of Sunday’s runoff vote against Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers’ Party, the stand-in candidate for former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was jailed this year for corruption. That would give the nationalist, long considered a sideshow in Brazilian politics, one of the biggest wins for any president since the country returned to democracy three decades ago.
“We are the majority, we are the real Brazil, and together we will build a new nation,” the 63-year-old bellowed to supporters in a recent video address from his Rio de Janeiro home, where he is recovering from an assassination attempt early in the campaign.
Mr. Bolsonaro, center, is recovering from a stabbing earlier in the campaign.
Photo:
antonio lacerda/epa/Shutterstock
The blunt military man had just one message for his archenemy Mr. da Silva, a former political prisoner under the 1964-85 dictatorship that Mr. Bolsonaro served. “You will rot in jail!”
Mr. Bolsonaro has stunned opponents and political pundits over recent months by luring voters across class, racial and geographical divides.
Many here see Mr. Bolsonaro, whose middle name means Messiah, as a savior. He promises to restore order in a country riddled with crime and corruption, return the moribund economy to growth, and revive traditional family values in a society increasingly guided by evangelical Christianity.
But 30% of his supporters say they will vote for him simply to try something new, according to a survey last week by pollster Datafolha.
Despite representing Rio de Janeiro as a congressman for 27 years after leaving the army, Mr. Bolsonaro has positioned himself as an outsider to Brazil’s despised political establishment. Traditional parties aren’t only out of touch, voters say, but they’ve also been stealing from the electorate for more than a decade, according to the findings of the vast Car Wash corruption investigation, lavishing taxpayers’ money on everything from yachts to emerald sculptures.
Voters are so angry at the Workers’ Party, which also oversaw Brazil’s deepest recession from 2014-16, that some have taken to referring to Mr. Bolsonaro as the best available “pesticide” or “chemotherapy” Brazil now has to protect itself from the party’s return.
Mr. Bolsonaro’s likely victory Sunday would mark the rupture of a party system that was established after the return to civilian rule in the mid-1980s. It will be the first time since 1989 that neither the Workers’ Party or Brazil’s other political heavyweight, the centrist PSDB, have won the presidency.
Campaigning largely via social media, Mr. Bolsonaro is running for the once-tiny conservative PSL party, which had only 8 seats in Brazil’s 513-seat lower house of Congress before the first-round vote on Oct 7, when 52 federal deputies swept to victory for the party on the back of his success.
But, globally, Mr. Bolsonaro’s rise follows a now-familiar model of populist nationalism in countries such as Hungary and Turkey, independent of party ideology. Leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador also upended Mexico’s political status quo in July with a similar pledge to tackle crime and corruption.
Running under the slogan “Brazil above everything, and God above all,” Mr. Bolsonaro prefers comparisons with President Trump. “He wants to make America great, I want to make Brazil great,” Mr. Bolsonaro said in a recent diatribe against the media, complaining about being a victim of a torrent of “fake news.”
Mr. Bolsonaro’s critics fear his government may actually have more in common with Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte, whose ruthless war on drugs has killed thousands. Mr. Bolsonaro promises to make it easier for civilians to buy guns for self-defense and for police to kill suspected criminals—measures that security experts say will only lead to more deaths in Brazil, where almost 64,000 people were murdered last year, the highest yearly figure on the planet.
Professing to knowing nothing about economics, he has handed over control of the finance ministry to Paulo Guedes, a University of Chicago-trained economist. Mr. Guedes promises to cut Brazil’s bulging public debt by 20% via a series of privatizations, simplify the Byzantine tax system, and shrink generous pension benefits. That free-market economic agenda goes against the past statist tendencies of Mr. Bolsonaro and the army generals he plans to anoint as ministers, signaling the potential for conflict.
Presidential candidate Fernando Haddad, an ally of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, campaigned this week in São Paulo.
Photo:
Dario Oliveira/Zuma Press
Mr. Bolsonaro has vowed to open up Brazil’s economy by lowering import tariffs and signing new bilateral trade agreements, buoying financial markets. Since mid-September, Brazilian stocks gained 11%, the local currency strengthened almost 13% against the dollar, and the cost of insuring Brazil’s debt has also plummeted.
On the foreign policy front, he is likely to position Brazil as a strong ally of the U.S. in the region, and has long spoken out against China as a rapacious investor in South America.
His margin of victory on Sunday will have no direct impact on congressional support, but a large win will likely embolden him as well as his followers.
Human rights groups fear a spate of hate crimes may follow as his more radical supporters take inspiration from his comments defending torture, advocating beating children to stop them from “turning gay,” and telling minorities they must “bow to the majority or simply disappear.”
Opponents of Mr. Bolsonero projected the phrase ‘Not Him’ on the wall of a building in São Paulo.
Photo:
nacho doce/Reuters
His opponents say Brazil’s young democracy is also at risk from Mr. Bolsonaro and his sons, three of whom are also entrenched in politics. The candidate has brushed off his own suggestions in the past to shut down Congress, vowing to respect the constitution if elected.
As Sunday’s vote draws closer, millions of Brazilians say they cannot bring themselves to vote for either Mr. Bolsonaro or Mr. Haddad. The choice has sparked bitter and impassioned feuds, driving families and friends apart.
Like many others, Juliana Zamboni, a 30-year-old lawyer from São Paulo, is planning to go to the beach over the weekend instead of the polls.
“I’m scared, really scared to be honest,” she said. “Bolsonaro could be a kind of revolutionary and I like change, but anything that is extreme is bad.”
Write to Samantha Pearson at [email protected] and Luciana Magalhães at [email protected]
