Brazil Braces for High-Stakes Vote
As Brazil’s presidential election looms, there are widespread fears that current President Jair Bolsonaro will borrow tactics from the Trump playbook in the likely event that he loses his re-election bid.
His main challenger—and the favorite to win—is former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, widely known as Lula, a leftist leader who has maintained a steady lead in the polls. As Lula’s popularity grew, Bolsonaro appeared to lay the groundwork to contest an unfavorable outcome, by questioning voting machines, engaging the military, and making unfounded claims that government workers could “manipulate election results.”
Brazil is facing “the moment of truth” over how Bolsonaro voters respond to the outcome of the election, said Oliver Stuenkel, an associate professor of international relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo.
“The big question is whether this election is a moment of turning the page, or if it’s a traumatizing event which will lead Brazil to continue the downward spiral it’s on right now,” he added.
Brazilians will head to the polls on Sunday for the first round of voting, where they have their choice of 11 candidates—though polling suggests that eight out of ten Brazilians will back either Lula or Bolsonaro. If nobody receives at least 50 percent of the vote on Sunday, the two politicians will head to a runoff on October 30.
When Lula’s presidency ended over a decade ago, he had an 87 percent approval rating and Brazil had lower poverty rates. He was later mired in a corruption scandal that left him facing a 12-year prison sentence.
After a year and a half behind bars, his conviction was overturned on procedural grounds—amid reports of judicial bias and prosecutorial misconduct and a Supreme Court finding that the initial prosecution had been motivated by political animus—paving the way for his potential return to power now.
As Lula took a commanding lead in polls, Bolsonaro urged his supporters to prepare to take radical action in the event of an election loss. “There’s a new type of thief, the ones who want to steal our liberty,” he said in June, adding that “if necessary, we will go to war.”
In recent months, violence has gripped Brazil while gun ownership has also surged. This year, Brazil’s Observatory of Political and Electoral Violence has recorded over 200 instances of politically-driven violence. More than two-thirds of Brazilians said they are afraid of facing attacks over political differences, according to the polling organization Datafolha.
This rise in violence, as well as Bolsonaro’s efforts to cast doubt on the country’s electoral systems, has further fueled uncertainty over what could happen after the election.
“If Bolsonaro loses and leaves power … the democracy will essentially survive,” said Stuenkel. “But if he wins, I would be very pessimistic about the future of Brazil’s democracy.”