101 - Another Critical Choice in the Contest against Fascism: Brazil
Yesterday’s presidential contest in Brazil proved much closer than nearly all of the country’s well-tried pollsters predicted. Incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump wannabe, finished only five points behind former president Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, forcing Lula into a second election on Oct. 30. Lula’s 48.4 percent of the votes was just shy of the 50 percent he needed to avoid a run-off. Polls had predicted that Bolsonaro would finish as many as fourteen percentage points behind left-leaning Lula.
Bolsonaro’s unexpected showing (and the victory of a number of his appointees in their races for Congress) demonstrates the determined clinging to hard-nosed right trending views across the globe -- Italy, Sweden, Germany, Spain, and our own hard core Trumpists in the United States. In Canada, the Conservative Party’s Pierre Poilievre also espouses views more rightward than Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party government.
Bolsonaro’s strong result in the first round also shows how influential it can be to lie outrageously in the Trump manner. Bolsonaro over the last four years has been venomous and pejorative in his appeals to those citizens who have felt alienated and rejected by “elites.” As in the United States, Brazilians have experienced painful status compression. Bolsonaro, like Trump, plays on those resentments and feelings of victimization.
Lula’s first two presidential terms delivered distinctive rises in social and economic outcomes for most Brazilians. His Bolsa Familia (family allowance) policy, with monthly payments to the least well off households in Brazil, uplifted millions from poverty. But such support for the poor was resented by those who missed out.
Bolsonaro campaigned against every kind of advance that had made the Lula era positive. Lula was an early advocate of sustaining the environment. Bolsonaro not only favored but actually encouraged clear-cutting large sections of the Amazon rainforest to provide cattle grazing and soy-growing opportunities for well-financed exploiters. He was no friend of the indigenous native Brazilians whom under Lula were given land and other rights in the Amazon basin. Bolsonaro systematically rolled back basic environmental protections, not only in the Amazon.
Bolsonaro appointed military officers to his cabinet, threatened the nation with a return to military rule, and tried openly to subvert the major political institutions of his country. He bad-mouthed opponents. Now, no matter who wins on Oct. 30, the Bolonarists, like the Trumpists, will have major allies in the new Brazilian Congress.
Bolsonaro became president in 2018 because Brazilians had learned, painfully, how corrupt their politicians had always been. Starting in 2014, with revelations in the Lava Jato (Car Wash) trials, a drum beat of testimony and confessions demonstrated that the country’s mighty state-owned petroleum company -- Petrobras – had padded contracts in order to give lucrative kickbacks to numerous politicians, many in high positions. South America’s largest construction firm – Odebrecht – had won inflated bids and paid off Petrobras officials as well as the national political leaders who appointed managers at Petrobras.
An obscure member of Brazil’s congress and former middling military officer, Bolsonaro won the presidency in 2018 by pledging to expunge corruption from Brazil. But, in office he, and especially his sons, profited by seeing that opportunities and contracts went to their supporters.
Lula had been jailed under the Lava Jato anti-corruption regime for accepting a beach-front apartment from Odebrecht, and for being an enabler of the Petrobras scandal. He served almost two years in prison but was released by Brazil’s electoral tribunal and then by its Supreme Court because of judicial and prosecutorial missteps.
The Brazilian electorate on Sunday cast more votes for a former president who, albeit implicated in the country’s major grand corruption imbroglio, was neither its architect nor its chief beneficiary. A plurality preferred to remember his earlier presidential accomplishments on the world stage – when Brazil became a key leader of the developing world, a well-praised member of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), a dominant actor in South America, and a favorite of American presidents. They also remembered how his policies led to living standards improvements at home. All parts of Brazil rose high on the tides of his presidency between 2003 and 2010.
Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s hand-picked successor as president of Brazil, was impeached for budgetary deceptions in 2016 by a Brazilian Congress that was displeased that she had cut off opportunities for continued influence peddling. Her presidency also suffered from a downturn in the global economy.
Thereafter, Brazil was governed by a legislature whose members were enjoying largesse from what became the Lava Jato revelations. And there were many other scams in which congresspersons and senators participated. At the head of the nation was President Michel Temer, who had been Rousseff’s vice-president; he had long been an arch-fixer in the Chamber of Deputies, Brazil’s lower house of Congress.
Lula’s chances of winning Brazil’s second round of voting on Oct. 30 will depend his gaining support from the followers of Simone Tebet, who obtained 4.2 percent of the vote on Sunday, and on his ability to enlarge his existing support base. Bolsonaro will continue to make outrageous false accusations about the accuracy of voting machines and about Lula. Bolsonaro accuses his opponent of being a Venezuelan-like leftist in the Nicolas Maduro mode, and that will doubtless alarm some of Bolsonaro’s evangelical backers, as well as rural voters who oppose “handouts” to the downtrodden.
Bolsonaro is a conspiracy promoter and a ranter. Lula has always been charismatic on the hustings, but calm and composed. Despite his now expunged conviction for corruption, he is by far the better choice for Brazil, for a Latin America that has too many current caudillo-style autocratic leaders, and for a world (including the United States) that is attempting (as I wrote recently) to resist the rise of fascism.