After four long years of Jair Bolsonaro, four years of serial insults, crass incompetence or extreme ideology on central subjects such as the fight against the pandemic or the deforestation of the Amazon, after a multiplication of putschist calls unveiled, the outgoing president of Brazil obtained 43.4% of the votes cast in the first round.
The test of power and the failures of these four years, illustrated by the 700,000 deaths of COVID-19 (second total in the world, and one of the highest rates per million, apart from a few countries in South America and Eastern Europe), did not prevent this exceptional score.
It is still possible, even probable, that the left-wing ex-president Lula da Silva will finally win on October 30. But there won’t be the technical knockout that many on the left were hoping for: something like 50% to 35% in the first round.
It will be tight. Lula won in 14 states, while Bolsonaro won in 12 and in the Distrito Federal (Brasilia). But he lost to the current president in two of the country’s most important electoral colleges: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Admittedly, unlike the archaic United States, which remained electorally in the 18e century, Brazil has pure universal suffrage (one person, one vote), and Lula garners huge majorities in the populous Nordeste. Moreover, the electronic electoral system is the most reliable, the fastest and the most efficient in the world: enough to put many electoral commissions in the “first world” to shame.
However, what is looming in Brazil is no less terrifying. Beyond the presidential election, a whole series of “Bolsonarists”, in Parliament, in the Senate or in the States, have won impressive majorities.
General Eduardo Pazuello, a Minister of Health so incompetent that he left COVID patients to die of suffocation in Manaus, when he had oxygen stocks available to save them… triumphed at the ballot box in Rio.
Another triumphant election: that of Ricardo Salles, the Minister of the Environment, who presided over a catastrophic rise in deforestation in the Amazon. He had told the cabinet that the government should take advantage of the press being busy with the pandemic…to “get the cattle in as much as possible”, by repealing environmental defense laws. He had three times more votes than Marina Silva, ex-minister of Lula and famous ecologist.
Brazilian journalist Eliane Brum speaks of “villanocracy” to describe the electoral successes of these incompetent, corrupt and violently reactionary “villains”.
Is it fascism? It has been said, after the victory of the Meloni-Berlusconi-Salvini triumvirate in Italy, that the words “fascist” or “post-fascist” are no longer relevant to describe their conservative or reactionary nationalism. And that anti-fascism is nothing more than an anachronistic “theatre” for European leftists who are in the wrong era.
Maybe. But in the Americas, it’s different.
Jair Bolsonaro, under the claimed inspiration of Donald Trump, exalts law and order, calls on the military to “play its part against the forces of evil”, says that “only God can take power away from me”, and that “history could repeat itself” (referring to the 1964 putsch). He praised a famous torturer, who according to him should have “finished the job” in 1970, when he had under his expert hand a certain Dilma Rousseff (ex-president, with a guerrilla youth).
This man based his power on the “evangelical” sometimes mafia networks, on the white middle classes full of resentment after the years of social promotion of the poor under Lula and Rousseff. What he can look for: less a classic military putsch than a “revolutionary right” taking up arms and taking to the streets, in a kind of big “January 6” Brazilian style.
It looks furiously like 21st century fascisme century. A narrow victory for Lula, by 52 to 48, on October 30, would not change much.
François Brousseau is an international business analyst at Here Radio Canada. [email protected]