Brazil's former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has his microphone adjusted, as he attends a news conference in Sao Bernardo do Campo, near Sao Paulo, on March 10, 2021.AMANDA PEROBELLI/Reuters
“First of all, I hope everybody is wearing a mask.”
As a way to open a political rally, those words would be a housekeeping formality in any other country. But uttered on Wednesday by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva – the former centre-left Brazilian president known simply as Lula – they were an explosive provocation that shook the country’s politics.
In fact, it’s not unreasonable to speculate that this tidal sentiment might signal an ebbing in the great strongman surge of post-2016 international politics.
Shortly after a justice in Brazil’s supreme court annulled all corruption charges against him and declared them ideologically biased and illegitimate, Lula – who’d spent a year and a half in prison in 2018-19 – burst out of the gate with what looked like the launch of a campaign to challenge President Jair Bolsonaro in the 2022 election.
Polls show the 75-year-old Lula would have a strong chance of defeating Mr. Bolsonaro, if the courts and the military are willing to defy the angry rhetoric of the sitting president, who often praises the military dictatorship that controlled Brazil until 1985, and if they allow the democratic process to proceed. That’s exactly what happened in the United States after Nov. 3, but a repeat in Brazil is far from guaranteed.
Among far-right strongmen, Mr. Bolsonaro has been the most slavish imitator of former U.S. president Donald Trump. He gained a broad following among middle-class Brazilians in the middle of the previous decade as the country’s largely extractive economy reeled from the global collapse of resource prices and Lula and his successor, former president Dilma Rousseff, became embroiled in corruption scandals.
Mr. Bolsonaro’s 2018 landslide victory drew on a broad tent of otherwise reasonable Brazilians. The business community was attracted to his promises to privatize state-run companies and deregulate the economy to restore growth; some in the military liked his appeal to rigid discipline and his promises to crack down on crime; his social-conservative base liked his attacks on minorities, immigrants, the LGBT community and his nods to “deep state” conspiracy theories.
There was a widespread sense among Brazilians, until a year ago, that “Bolsonarismo” was here to stay. Sure, he was a loudmouthed bigot prone to ridiculous statements and bizarre conspiratorial thinking, well-heeled Brazilians would say – but at least he was cleaning up the corruption and getting rid of gang crime.
Then the novel coronavirus arrived. Suddenly, Mr. Bolsonaro’s Trump-parroting style became a deadly liability. For months, he denied the pandemic even existed. He not only refused to wear a mask or stay at home, but ridiculed those who did as “sissies,” even after coming down with a case of COVID-19 himself. He has resisted distancing and isolation orders, has proudly said he won’t get vaccinated, has questioned the value of vaccines and promoted snake-oil remedies such as hydroxychloroquine.
On Thursday, Brazil announced it had surpassed 2,200 deaths every 24 hours, most of them to extra-infectious new variants – making the country of 211 million the most infected place in the world, with more than 300,000 deaths so far.
This human catastrophe seems to have drawn the attention of Brazilian voters to Mr. Bolsonaro’s other failures. He did not revive the economy, which remains weak and which suffered a horrendous plunge last year after he disparaged stimulus programs. He didn’t privatize state businesses; rather, he recently put an unqualified former army general in charge of Brazil’s critical state-run oil company. He stacked his cabinet with military figures, but generals have turned against him over his focus on far-right obsessions such as “gender ideology” rather than actual policy. Corruption is as rife as ever, including alleged payments to Mr. Bolsonaro’s wife and son.
Brazil’s middle class has lost its confidence in Mr. Bolsonaro. The question is whether they will turn back to the politicians who made them a middle class in the first place. Lula came to office in 2003 using the language of the populist left, but practising the pragmatic, pro-market policies of his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had turned Brazil into an export-driven success story. During almost 20 years of this centre-left rule, Brazil changed from a country of vast poverty and a tiny wealthy class to one with declining inequality, rising incomes and a large but vulnerable middle class.
Those middle-class insecurities, in many countries, fell prey to the temptations of far-right demagogues after 2016. The question is whether that was a lasting shift or a flash of temporary insanity that will end with the meltdown of Trumpism and, potentially, Bolsonarismo. That partly depends on whether Lula will return to his pragmatic politics of 2003 – but even more on whether the courts and military will side with the democratic process next year in Brasilia, as they did last year in Washington.