Brazil gets the election finale it didn’t need

For everyone else in Brazil, it’s an unwelcome portent of a more violent political future. Photo: Reuters

Brazil's famous soap operas thrive on outlandish plots and the final leg of the country's presidential race has not fallen short, a storyline liberally sprinkled with accusations of Faustian pacts and cannibalism. With the runoff vote approaching, prosaic reality may well be catching up with incumbent Jair Bolsonaro. His list of blunders is growing long and efforts to win over undecided voters appear to be faltering, not least after a former congressman and supporter threw stun grenades and shot at police to avoid being taken into custody.

Yet as every telenovela fan knows, nothing is final until the very last episode. Even the dead can come back, and frequently do. Challenger and former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is ahead in polls, but the numbers are tight, and factors like turnout could prove decisive — abstention, already high in the first round despite obligatory voting, tends to rise in the second.

Here's what is certain: The bitter fight of the last few months, culminating in the mud-slinging of recent days, has entrenched profound and lasting cleavages, with far more time spent debating smears than, for example, much-needed plans to improve the country's fiscal outlook. Deep-set enmity means that whoever wins, roughly half of the population in Latin America's largest nation will be left aggrieved. Political violence is on the rise. Brazil has rarely been harder to govern and its democracy harder to defend.

In Sunday's contest, the advantage still sits with Lula. Bolsonaro beat expectations in the first round but his leftist opponent came in ahead and has the backing of the third and fourth-place finishers. Lula is leading in Minas Gerais, the bellwether state won by every successful candidate. Crucially, the gap between the two candidates means the current president must woo the vast majority of swing voters to secure victory. He needs more women and poorer families, cohorts where he lags.

To tackle that, he's bet on cooling inflation, more generous cash handouts and tax cuts, put his evangelical wife on the campaign trail and ramped up efforts to increase voter rejection of Lula, loved by some for his poverty-reduction campaigns during the 2000s, but hated by others for his part in the mammoth corruption scandal that followed. Bolsonaro has portrayed the election as a fight of good versus evil so extreme that Lula's campaign denied the one-time labor leader was in cahoots with Satan. ("He has no pact and has never spoken with the devil.")

The combination isn't working well enough for Bolsonaro. Polls remain stable, while the same negative tactics are being thrown back at him. Social media has been flooded with the president's unsavory comments on young female Venezuelan migrants, old clips of visits to Masonic lodges and discussions on eating human flesh, none of which play well with his conservative evangelical base or with the family-man image the thrice-married president seeks to project. 

Then came last Sunday's police shootout with former congressman Roberto Jefferson, a vocal supporter of Bolsonaro accused of violating the terms of his house arrest by, among other things, posting a video insulting a female Supreme Court judge. Like the April presidential pardon for far-right lawmaker Daniel Silveira — sentenced to prison over his incitement of physical attacks against Supreme Court judges — it may generate sympathy among some core supporters. For everyone else, it's an unwelcome portent of a more violent political future.

Bolsonaro could yet win on Sunday anyway. If he does, it will be far less because of outright support than because of the strength of feeling against his leftist opponent and perceived graft. He will be carried over the line on a wave of anti-Lula sentiment. It means none of this toxicity, populism and anti-democratic rhetoric will ease, especially if Bolsonaro feels emboldened to take drastic steps like expanding the Supreme Court, giving him far greater room to threaten the balance of powers and to pursue divisive ideological campaigns.

Should he lose narrowly, perhaps the most likely outcome, the problem is different, but no less complex. Not because of outright efforts to grab power — an attempted coup remains at the extreme end of potential outcomes, even if Bolsonaro's senator son Flavio has already declared his father to be the victim of the "greatest electoral fraud ever seen." Ultimately, as Creomar de Souza of Brasilia-based Dharma Political Risk and Strategy puts it, a coup is a gamble that doesn't sit with Bolsonaro's risk-averse record in politics, given the extreme penalties if he fails.

Rather, because he will undoubtedly question the system and feed uncertainty, amping up misinformation and scare tactics at huge cost for the country — even without a coup, Bloomberg Economics puts the cost of post-election turmoil at $12 billion that Brazil can ill afford, weakening the currency and equities, while denting growth.

This toxic discourse is here to stay. The negative politics of Bolsonarismo (of which the campaign has been a manifestation) will persist, as Mariana Borges Martins da Silva, who researches Latin American politics at Oxford University's Nuffield College, points out, feeding anti-system, anti-elite sentiment that predates him, offering easy solutions to Brazil's complex problems, backed in particular by a lower middle class to whom he has offered a voice in politics.

A Lula win would put the brakes on authoritarian mission creep, but it doesn't resolve the larger issues facing the country. The toxic campaign and messy outcome of this election is a symptom, not a cause. His pragmatic record in government and initiatives like a letter pledging fiscal and social responsibility this week are encouraging. He has already called on plenty of high-profile centrist voices, and they will be in government or remain advisers. But this is a very different environment to the 2000s, a far harsher economic backdrop and a fragmented legislature. 

And if Lula falters in office, Bolsonaro — or a more capable incarnation of his politics — will be waiting.

Clara Ferreira Marques. Illustration: TBS

Clara Ferreira Marques is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and editorial board member covering foreign affairs and climate.

Disclaimer: This opinion first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.