Brazil Elections: Back to the Lula
As Lula stages a comeback, Harri Adams looks at what this razor-tight Presidential election could mean for Brazil.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wondered if there were no second acts in American lives; as it turns out, there are in Latin America. On Sunday, the leader of the left-wing Workers’ Party Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – known as Lula – secured the presidency of Brazil for the second time and his third term overall, defeating his political and ideological opponent Jair Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party. Lula claimed 50.9% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 49.10% on a platform of progressive policies including ending hunger, which afflicts 33m Brazilians, and the deforestation of the Amazon.
Originally serving Brazil as president from 2003 until 2010, Lula’s victory on Sunday is being viewed as a historic comeback, following a conviction for corruption and money laundering in 2017 that was ultimately thrown out by a court in 2021. There is hope that the progressive leader, who oversaw growth and poverty-ending measures in Brazil and left office with record-high approval ratings, will provide a corrective to the erosion of human rights and disastrous mishandling of Covid-19 under right-wing leader Bolsonaro.
While the mood amongst Lula’s supporters is reportedly jubilant, the thin margins of Sunday’s results and the results of the first round of voting early in October are a reminder that this was no easy victory for Lula. They are also a sign of the challenges he faces as he assumes leadership of a very different Brazil from the one he presided over a decade ago; one split in half by the election and four years of rule by his predecessor.
Much has been made of the Brazilian president as an analogue to Donald Trump; the former US president even urged Brazilians to support Bolsonaro’s re-election on Friday. Just as Trumpism looms large in post-Trump America, an ever-present threat to the US Democrat Party, Lula and his supporters will have to reckon with a Brazil underneath the long shadow of ‘Bolsonarism’.
Lula’s victory may be seen as a course correction now after the wrong turn of Bolsonaro in 2018, but the current president was once seen as the candidate who promised change for the better, and like Trump, he maintains a devoted supporter base. Bolsonaro has taken a page from the former US president’s playbook and primed his base to reject Sunday’s election results, only the latest in a string of anti-democratic manoeuvres that include attempts to change Brazil’s electoral process to his will. Bolsonaro may have hoped to consolidate far-right power and bring many Brazilians’ worst nightmares of a return to dictatorship to reality. While Lula’s victory may have averted this, he will still have to find common ground with voters who have been influenced to reject his leadership and emboldened to engage in violence against their political opponents by a president who argued that leftists should be “eradicated from public life.”
Governing those in positions of corporate and political power will be equally challenging. While Lula was able to form an ideologically broad coalition to defeat Bolsonaro, now that this common goal has been achieved, any sense of comradery may have already dissolved. An anonymous Brazilian banker quoted in the Financial Times has promised that now that Bolsonaro is out of the way, they will immediately assume the role of opposition to Lula. The leftist leader also faces dissent from the representatives of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party, who have increased their numbers in Congress from 76 to 99; a military with ideological sympathies to Bolsonaro and which he massively empowered during his office; and Brazil’s powerful agricultural sector, closely allied with the president who allowed deforestation to run rampant while in office.
In his victory speech, Lula argued that the population of Brazil “doesn't want to fight anymore.” It is difficult to envision the path to healing Brazil as, ironically, anything other than a fight; any victories by the Workers’ Party will inevitably be hard-won, in the circumstances. Perhaps a leader who gave a renewed sense of hope to Brazil before can, against these high odds, do it again. Only time will tell.
By Harri Adams, Junior Associate at Audley