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Bloomberg
World
Eduardo Porter

What Brazil’s Election Really Says About Global Authoritarianism

It’s at once astonishing and familiar. 

More than 51 million Brazilians voted to re-elect President Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist authoritarian who professes admiration for the military dictatorship that jackbooted the country until 1985. 

He has not won. Odds are he will lose in the second round of voting on Oct. 30 against former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who bested him by 6 million votes in the first round. But the chilling prospect remains on the cards: 

Brazilians may yet re-elect as president a man who has shown little patience for democracy; who has embraced the use of torture, and once asserted that the dictatorship should have killed many more Brazilians, including then-president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. As a member of Congress in 2016 he dedicated his vote to impeach President Dilma Rousseff to the colonel who ran the unit that tortured her in the 1970s. 

What’s most striking, though, is how unremarkable the story feels in the current political environment. 

Victor Orban’s Hungary, Narendra Modi’s India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey have all steered decidedly toward “illiberal democracy.” Italy is now governed by the political heirs of Benito Mussolini. Even Sweden’s new governing party has roots in Nazism. The V-Dem Institute estimates that 70% of the world’s population lived last year under some form of autocratic government, compared to 40% a decade before. President Donald Trump failed to get re-elected in 2020, but 74 million Americans voted for him. 

These millions of votes around the world require a closer examination. The idea that the masses of the 21st century suddenly decided to come out of the closet as fascists, reversing the shift toward liberal politics that characterized the second half of the 20th, is not an explanation. It will not help build the new politics the world apparently needs to push back against authoritarianism. 

Trump, characteristically, credits the shift to the themes that helped propel him to power. “It’s a very simple movement: Give us borders, give us safe streets, we don’t want crime, give us good education, give us dignity and give us respect as a nation. It’s not complicated,” Trump said in an interview last week, reveling in the strong showing of his Brazilian ideological clone. “The whole thing is a great movement that’s taken place and now it’s happening all over the world.” 

And yet Brazil’s experience suggests people’s disillusion with the liberal capitalist order comes from a complicated tangle of frustrations and disappointments that do not all originate from the same place. 

Bolsonaro, like Trump, drew a large share of support from Christian evangelical voters — fired up over similar themes, like opposition to transgender rights and abortion, which remains illegal in Brazil. He also profited from the “men should be men” theme, a surefire winner among insecure male voters in industrializing countries where women are bit by bit gaining power and prominence in the workplace and across the broader society.

And yet some of the most powerful forces driving illiberalism around the world proved less relevant to Brazilian voters. 

Immigration and demographic change have stoked xenophobia and racial hostility from Hungary through Sweden to the United States, offering an opening to political entrepreneurs promising to protect the volk from the rising influence of those on the other side of ethnic, religious, cultural lines. 

Yet while the desire for safe streets did play in Brazil’s elections — tinged with the same kind of racial hostility Trump tried to exploit when he promised to protect white suburban women from urban threats — immigration was not a critical issue. That’s probably because there isn’t much of it. 

Critically, Brazilians do not appear to see themselves as victims of the burst of hypercharged globalization after China entered the World Trade Organization just over 20 years ago, which spread despair across the American industrial heartland, helping drive blue-collar workers into Trump’s embrace.

As in many other disaffected democracies, millions of Brazilians are clearly disillusioned with the liberal order. But unlike voters in the US and other industrialized countries, the frustration of the Brazilian middle class is not quite born of loss — the sense that globalized liberalism bumped them from their longstanding, rightful place of privilege. It’s more about prosperity having never quite taken hold.

In Brazil, China’s rising clout was unvarnished good news, underpinning a decade of fast economic growth that it had not experienced since the advent of democracy. But China slowed, Brazil’s commodity-driven boom faded and millions of Brazilians just sidling up to the middle-class punchbowl saw it being taken away. 

The contrast between their fading prospects — average per capita income fell 8% in real terms between 2013 and last year — and the sight of politicians gorging themselves in a gargantuan corruption scheme, the third such scandal to have swept Brazil since the end of military rule, ignited a movement set on kicking the political establishment out. 

Here is where the thread of Brazilian history twines again with the broader worldwide embrace of illiberal authoritarianism. The specific causes of popular discontent may be idiosyncratic. The inability of liberalism’s political class to respond to voters’ frustration is the systematic regularity.

In Brazil, the political class was busy stealing. In the US, until Trump’s arrival, Democrats and Republicans wanted to believe that racism was no longer a problem – surely fixed back in the 1960s, or something. Both parties embraced globalization as a driver of average prosperity, but ignored the point that it also produced losers. Neither dared talk to Americans about immigration. 

In both countries, the establishment was way too comfortable. So entrepreneurial outsiders saw an opening and took the establishment by storm.

We are still a couple of weeks away from the presidential election’s second round, which will decide between Lula and Bolsonaro. The Brazilian media is flooded in anguished commentary about the impending risk to the nation’s democracy. 

Standing out among the tormented columns, a note from Roberto Mangabeira Unger in the daily Folha de Sao Paulo coaxed Brazilians, not particularly enthusiastically, to vote for Lula in round two. But the Brazilian-born Harvard law professor, who served as minister for strategic affairs under Lula and Rousseff, also pleaded the case of the tens of millions of Brazilians who voted for Lula’s authoritarian rival. They “are not protofascists and don’t want to liquidate our democracy,” he wrote. “What we are lacking,” he said, “is imagination.”

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

  • With Bolsonaro Down and Not Out, Buckle Up: Clara Ferreira Marques
  • Lula’s Second Go Will Be Made Harder by Commodity Markets: David Fickling
  • Brazil’s Democracy Needs More Friends in High Places: Editorial

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Eduardo Porter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin America, US economic policy and immigration. He is the author of "American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise" and "The Price of Everything: Finding Method in the Madness of What Things Cost."

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.

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