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When the polls closed on the evening of 7 October, the results of the Brazilian president's first-round vote left experts and experts in shock. Jair Bolsonaro swept the debate with 46% of the vote and took dozens of candidates to national and national legislatures. In the second round of voting Sunday, he is about to win the presidency.
The ascent of Bolsonaro seemed to surprise everyone. An obscure member of Congress whose extremist policy proposals and rogue style go far beyond what was considered acceptable by the Brazilian political class has led a campaign that will probably lead him to the driver's seat of one of the most great democracies of the world. More shockingly yet, it is that he will not win on the backs of a minority of radical lunatics, but on a wave of support from the majority of the electorate.
Despite his rhetoric and appalling actions, Bolsonaro has been able to seduce voters beyond his unconditional right wing. Millions of voters who would normally vote in favor of centrist candidates plan to vote for him this time.
Consider the results of the first round of the election in the state of São Paulo. Capturing 53 percent of the vote, Bolsonaro imposed a humiliating defeat on four-term governor, right-wing Geraldo Alckmin, who won 9.5 percent of the vote. After winning the governorship during successive landslides in 2010 and 2014, Alckmin found much of his base defect and voted for Bolsonaro.
Something similar happened to center-left candidate Marina Silva. In 2014, Silva, who is black, won the first round of elections in states like Acre and the Federal District. In 2018, Bolsonaro won both states at a wide margin (62% and 58%, respectively), and Silva only got 1% of the total votes.
The representation of Bolsonaro in the north-east of the country is also impressive. It is one of the poorest regions in the country and the central geographic base of the Workers Party (PT). Although the PT candidate, Fernando Haddad, won eight of the nine Northeast states in the first round of voting, Bolsonaro won in the five largest capitals of these states. The results surprised many observers, given Bolsonaro's repeated insults to black Brazilians, who make up a large part of the population.
Bolsonaro also won nearly 53 percent of the vote in Rio Grande do Sul, which, four years earlier, had allowed the left to win a clear victory in the first round. His call beyond the far right suggests a deeper transformation of Brazilian politics. In this election year, when the dominant popular sentiment is anger against the political class, it is riding a wave of popular discontent.
The Bolsonaro wave has four elements.
First, the electorate seems ready to adopt a more conservative set of policies than in the past, coinciding with the rapid growth of evangelical denominations across Brazil (representing 30% of the electorate in 2015, the most Pentecostals). Issues of ethnicity, gender and sexuality have emerged, with cultural wars raging in an unusual way in Brazil. Bolsonaro wants to regulate morality.
He says he will defend "family values" and that "homosexual propaganda" threatens the innocence of school children. He is a fervent opponent of the decriminalization of abortion and drugs. Strangely, his conservatism did not prevent him from expressing his problems through rude jokes about rape, LGBT people, blacks and native Brazilians, in a way that was unacceptable in the sphere Brazilian public it is not so long ago.
Secondly, the wave comes as economic decline and the growth of unemployment in recent years have created a brutal response against income redistribution and affirmative action policies for poor and black Brazilians, introduced by former administrations.
Third, the epidemic of violence that has made Brazil one of the most dangerous countries in the world has garnered widespread support for tighter policing. Bolsonaro supported the use of torture against criminals and spoke favorably of killing teams – and many voters do not seem to care. Memories of police abuse at the time of the dictatorship disappeared among voters too young to remember authoritarianism or direct experience with a police state.
Fourth, as in many countries, the populist thrust blossoms through misinformation, false news, and hearsay. This electoral cycle has been dominated by lies from both the right and the left via WhatsApp. And above all, WhatsApp, rather than Facebook or Twitter, is now the main vector of lively political debate between families and friends in Brazil. While Twitter and Facebook have made efforts to discover trolls, veterinary publications and repress false information, WhatsApp is totally unfiltered. There is no intermediary preventing users from sending lies to their loved ones.
This is particularly worrying as it comes at a time when traditional media institutions in Brazil are in crisis. The once influential media group, Abril, has declared bankruptcy this year, and other major national newspapers are accumulating growing deficits or relying on sister companies to make ends meet. Media companies have also struggled to adapt to online news and new technologies and seem to be developing a serious problem of credibility. In the last weeks of the campaign, abuses and violence against journalists are commonplace and Bolsonaro has fueled anger against the press.
Bolsonaro is campaigning on a handful of promises that reach the majority of the Brazilian electorate: hardening of crime, radical economic reform aimed at reducing unemployment and falling incomes, conservative reversal of social mores and unconditional support for measures of corruption.
Of all the candidates proposed, Bolsonaro is the only one to have shown its commitment to keep these promises. The style and content of its signals are obnoxious, but they demonstrate an unwavering commitment to change. Take, for example, his pledge to fight crime: he highly appreciated the squads of extrajudicial executions and told the security forces that they would find protection under his watch to unleash violence against criminals .
In terms of economic reform, he named Paulo Guedes, an economist educated at the University of Chicago, who made terrible promises about a neoliberal maximalist agenda. On social issues, he attacked minorities and shouted on more than one occasion that they had to bow before the majority. Bolsonaro has also provoked a kind of homophobic hysteria that seems to test Brazil's acknowledged tolerance to the difference. And with regard to the rule of law, one of Bolsonaro's sons threatened to abolish the Supreme Court at a rally for the campaign. (He then retracted the statement.)
In a country where support for political parties and democratic norms has fallen to its lowest level, Bolsonaro has cleverly adapted a message that challenges the few institutions that still demand the respect of the people: the family, the church and the local people. armed forces.
The democratic regime of Brazil was conceived in the 1980s by a generation striving to weaken extremes and strengthen the center. Convergence to the center has ultimately reduced inflation and economic instability, laid the foundation for a minimalist welfare state and even generated modest growth here.
But not everything was positive. A series of scandals have shed light on the political system. Brazilians now know that voice buying, patronage and favoritism are essential features of the existing system. Collusion between political dynasties, party leaders and interest groups is the rule of the game. To make matters worse, representatives to the lower house of the National Congress are elected in proportional list elections. open, which greatly reduces accountability to their constituents.
Things began to deteriorate in 2013, when millions of people took to the streets to protest a series of corruption scandals involving politicians from all over the political spectrum. Prosecutors unveil bribe system for large commercial conglomerates to buy political favors through bribes and $ 10 billion secret campaign funding the country was plunged into a polarizing political crisis. The investigation on Lava Jato (Car Wash) revealed that former presidents of Brazil had bought the support of Congress to pass a law and incarcerated several politicians, including former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula.
Then came the divisional dismissal of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. Her detractors accused her and her party of concocting a large-scale corruption ploy to steal public coffers. The factions that were working to remove her took advantage of popular discontent with the government to come to power and implement policies that did not get popular support during the polls. Finally, in early 2018, Lula was sentenced to prison for corruption.
Taken together, these events paved the way for a more ideological and militant policy. Economic difficulties, corruption scandals and the government's lack of accountability paved the way for an anti-system message. And Bolsonaro did the trick with his polarizing populism.
Bolsonaro turned out to be a cunning activist who knows how to occupy the empty space that opened when the old Brazilian order imploded. Like Donald Trump in the United States, he is not the cause of popular anger but his symptom.
It is not certain that Brazilian institutions can curb the authoritarian instincts of Bolsonaro. Indeed, according to pollster Latinobarómetro, the percentage of Brazilians claiming that "democracy is always better" is weak.
If Bolsonaro wins, he can try to overthrow the old system by abandoning the concessions that have characterized the country's political culture. In that case, he will have to appeal directly to the people, or he can try to restore old ways of doing things and face the consequences. Whatever the case may be, Brazil is facing a depressing and bumpy road.
