With or Without Lula, Bolsonaro Is Toast in Brazil

Photo by Andre Kenji de Sousa

One of the biggest clichés of politics is “It’s the economy, stupid”, the catchphrase created by James Carville during Bill Clinton’s first presidential run in 1992. From time to time someone rephrases it as “It’s, stupid”, but the original phrase is the perfect cliché because it’s true. Politicians die or thrive on economic numbers. Employment numbers are one of the best predictors of politicians being reelected or not.

When someone asks me about the chances of Bolsonaro being reelected in 2022 I point out that since 1989 – the first general election after Redemocratization – Brazilian voters always went to the polls and punished the party of the president when the unemployment numbers were above two digits and when GDP growth was bellow 1%, not only by denying them the chance of a reelection or electing their successor, but by denying their candidate the chance of going to the runoff. In both 1989 and 2018 the candidates of the party of the incumbent president got less than 5% of the vote.

Bolsonaro was in part elected because of this dynamic. When President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016 the country was facing a recession happening under her watch and her successor, President Michel Temer, kept numbers that were at best mediocre. For Brazilians it made sense to vote for a weird backbencher in Congress that was an unknown quantity – at least for the average voter – instead of rewarding the PT (Worker’s Party) of Dilma or the traditional center-right parties that had brought Michel Temer to power.

The problem for Bolsonaro is that he is now the guy in the president’s chair with consistent unemployment numbers above 10% and with GDP growth in the 1% range. There is also a poorly handled pandemic. For whatever reason, journalists thought that Bolsonaro, with his inept Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, would be an economic reformer, but his economic indicators were awful even before Covid-19 hit Brazil hard.

Part of the narrative about Covid in Brazil was that the country was hit hard because Bolsonaro refused to enact a lockdown because he didn’t want to damage the economy. But I would argue that he could have avoided an out-of-control pandemic with relatively minor economic disruption. Brazil had a good head start with no detected cases while Italy already had hospitals collapsing and had experience with epidemics like dengue fever and zika virus. I remember when some monkeys with yellow fever were found in a municipality a few kilometers away, someone with Yellow Fever died in the municipality where I live; in a few weeks basically everyone here was vaccinated against yellow fever. The fact that the country was hit initially during the summer and that even during the winter outdoor dining is not a difficult recommendation for people to accept also made things easier.

The crisis was mishandled by the federal government since the beginning. There was no coherent policy coming from Brasilia. The nation’s public health care system, SUS – [em]Sistema Unico de Saúde[/em], loosely translated as Single System of Health – is very centralized in the federal government. It can thrive under a good executive; a bad executive can sabotage it.

Ironically, Bolsonaro’s approval numbers improved when Congress passed a generous cash support program for the pandemic over his objections. Pundits were astonished that Bolsonaro had increased his approval numbers and thought that like other leaders that also did a poor job with the virus (Mexico’s Lopez Obrador or Trump) he could avoid paying a political cost for mishandling it. The cash support program not only helped people that had been laid off thanks to the pandemic but temporarily improved the income of the poorest Brazilians. Even if Bolsonaro opposed the program the popularity of that cash transfer program improved his numbers. Now that these generous transfers have ended Bolsonaro’s numbers are sinking.

Approval polls are often misread, internationally. In Brazil these polls are very likely to overstate support for incumbent politicians. Former President Fernando Collor had reasonable approval numbers before being impeached after mass protests in 1992.

Even in approval polls – the only argument used to point out to the political survival of Bolsonaro – he is sinking.

When the news that the Brazilian Supreme Court had voted to vacate former President Lula da Silva’s conviction for corruption came down, allowing him to run for the fifth time – and maybe win a third mandate – the first thing that came to the mind of a lot of Brazilians and people outside of Brazil was that Lula would be the guy that could beat Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro seems to fear Lula: he is replacing the Health Minister after polls showing him losing to Lula were released.

Maybe Lula is the guy that will defeat Bolsonaro. But I think that, above everything else, with or without Lula, Bolsonaro’s prospects for reelection are very poor.

Lula is an interesting politician. We are all used to center-left politicians that are either academics or lawyers that have huge followings among middle class professionals but that fail to connect with voters without college degrees. Lula is the opposite: he does not have the equivalent to a middle school diploma; he speaks with speech errors in a very direct and straightforward manner. That style can be pretty effective, even when he is speaking to foreign audiences.

In part thanks to Lula, rural areas in Brazil vote to the left of large urban centers. In 2018, Bolsonaro won a majority of the votes in the state of Amazonas while only winning three municipalities, including the capital, Manaus, the largest city of Northern Brazil. Lula knows that working class people have aspirations that are bourgeoisie in nature: owning a home, sending their kids to college. He is an interesting contrast to the rest of his party that has lots of academic types in its ranks.

Yes, there was a criminal conviction. But it is interesting to note that Brazil has a problematic judicial system. Investors and businessmen complain about the lack of consistency in judicial decisions, full of “creative” interpretations of the letter of law. Judges are selected using a system of examinations that’s not so different from the one used in Amanda Knox’s Italy. There are no petit or grand juries for crimes other than homicides; judges have huge discretion to convict. Lula was not convicted by a jury and only convicted in two trials. He shouldn’t even have been sent to prison under a strict reading of the Brazilian Constitution.

There are stories where judges use their position to DUI – there was even a judge that used her position to free her drug trafficking son.

In this context is not difficult to see problems in the Operation Lava Jato (Car Wash), the large judicial operation that sent Lula to prison. The operation was supposed to look for graft on Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company. But it was soon going after people in all levels of government, basically everywhere, even for things that did not have any relation to Petrobras. And it was centered around Curitiba, a relatively small state capital in the South of Brazil, where Lula never lived and where Petrobras did not have headquarters.

It would be difficult to imagine Lula managing to be even indicted in the US, even before McDonnell v. United States. The Quid Pro Quo of the accusations was never clear and would be unlikely to withstand American jurisprudence.

The problems of Operation Lava Jato became clearer when Sergio Moro accepted the offer to be the Justice Minister of Bolsonaro, a politician with connections to organized crime in Rio de Janeiro, creating a conflict of interest. When a hacker handed Glenn Greenwald the contents of conversations between the prosecutors and the main judge of Operation Lava Jato then the something that was more or less well known became very clear: The judge – that here is also jury – and the prosecutors were conspiring among themselves to convict their political enemies and politicians that they disliked.

My main fear about democracy with the election of Bolsonaro was not Bolsonaro himself but precisely that the Judicial System and security forces – the institutions – would try to do things like using a creative interpretation of an old National Security law to go after youtubers.

I also think that the Brazilian Supreme Court got tired of Bolsonaro and his friends of Operation Lava Jato. They ordered the arrest of a Congressman aligned with Bolsonaro who recorded a video inciting violence against Congress. I wouldn’t bet money on them saving Lula and helping Bolsonaro.

What makes Lula such a formidable player against Bolsonaro is this:

Graphic by Andre Kenji de Sousa

In 2018, Lula’s anointed successor, Fernando Haddad, got 69.69% of the vote in the Northeast, the second largest region in Brazil. He lost only 23 of the 1791 municipalities there. Voters voted for a guy simply because Lula, who was in prison at the time, asked them to vote for him. It’s basically the same result that Dilma got four years earlier. Lula doesn’t necessarily need to be on the ballot to elect the president.

There are already polls showing Bolsonaro losing to a bunch of candidates in the run off not only to Lula but also candidates with less name recognition, always a very bad sign for an incumbent president. Last year, the left-of-center PSOL (The Party of Socialism and Liberty, imagine something like if AOC and the Squad could have their own party) elected the mayor of Belém, the second largest city in the North. Note that the Worker’s Party of Lula had an unexpected good showing in the municipal elections in the three states of Southern Brazil – all states that Bolsonaro won with over 60% of the vote. It would be difficult to imagine these results if Bolsonaro were still popular there.

Joe Biden is showing the virtues of boringness, like not having to worry with whatever the President is doing on social media and seeing people with the minimum qualifications on cabinet posts. A third Lula Presidency would mean that Brazil would have once again have this same type of boringness. It would mean that Brazil wouldn’t have an Army General without experience in health policy running the powerful Ministry of Health. Leftists in Brazil always complained about Lula, always willing to make concessions to people to his right. But I would argue that this pragmatism is a huge asset.

The idea about the need of reforms dominated the debate about politics in Brazil for decades. But right now, what the country needs is a good dose of boringness and of more of the same. Whether it’s Lula, someone from his party or someone from the center-right delivering this boringness and more of the same it won’t matter that much.

But after all the agitation of the Bolsonaro years the country is craving for a good dose of boringness.