If anything, Sunday’s surprise campaign for Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has revealed a greater-than-expected appetite for his divisive brand of conservative “God, Home and Family” politics, analysts say.
Bolsonaro received nearly two million more votes on Sunday than he did in his 2018 election and garnered 43 percent of the vote, compared to 48 percent for his opponent, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The incumbent president went into the first ballot with about 36 percent of voters polled intending to vote for him.
But instead of trailing Lula by 14 percentage points as pollsters had predicted, Bolsonaro ended Sunday just five points, or about six million votes, behind and with a real shot at a second term.
“A demonstration of the strength of Bolsonarianism,” the daily Folha de S. Paulo announced on its front page – referring to the incumbent’s mix of pro-god, anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion, anti-left and anti-establishment political rhetoric.
“Bolsonarianism is growing more and more, and this is a reflection of a very conservative country,” voter Mateus Alcantara, a 26-year-old publicist, told AFP in Rio de Janeiro after Sunday’s vote.
His country, he added, is experiencing a moment of “enormous polarization”.
Bolsonaro was believed to have entered the race damaged by a controversial four-year tenure marked by a shocking death toll from a pandemic, due in part to his Covid-skeptical approach, increasing destruction of the Amazon rainforest and a strong rise in the number of Brazilians suffering from hunger.
He is frequently criticized for racist, homophobic and sexist remarks, as well as for his hateful, combative approach to the media and critics.
But Bolsonaro’s “Bibles, Bullets and Beef” base — evangelical Christians, security hardliners, and the powerful agribusiness sector — now seems larger than he thought.
“This election shows how deeply rooted the conservative movement is in Brazil,” wrote sociologist Angela Alonso of the University of Sao Paulo in a Folha de S. Paulo opinion piece.
– ‘More to the right’ –
Bolsonaro also boasted better-than-predicted performances by many of his allies in congressional and gubernatorial elections on Sunday.
With its election in 2018, Brazil experienced an unprecedented wave of ultra-conservative votes, which analysts at the time attributed to dislike of Lula’s Labor Party and its connection to a series of corruption scandals.
Now it appears that this wasn’t just a reactive vote.
More than half of the senators elected in Sunday’s first round (15 out of 27) are Bolsonaro allies, and his Liberal Party was on track to become the largest party in the lower house of Congress.
Among the victors were highly controversial Bolsonarists like Eduardo Pazuello, who headed the health ministry during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic from May 2020 to March 2021.
Pazuello, who won a seat for Rio de Janeiro, had appeared before a Senate committee investigating a medical oxygen shortage that was causing the deaths of several dozen patients in the northern city of Manaus.
“The polls have failed to recognize the strength of Jair Bolsonaro and his candidates,” commentator Vera Magalhaes noted in an editorial for the daily O Globo.
The results, she added, were “more right than predicted.”
– Shared touch –
For Jairo Nicolau, political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, “some Brazilians are far-right, but Bolsonarianism is more an expression of the country’s conservative movement.”
His movement had replaced centre-right parties like the PSDB that were in power in the 1990s.
“The PSDB was a party of the elite… This is where Bolsonaro makes the difference: he really is a leader with the common touch, something the Brazilian right hasn’t had for a long time,” added analyst Mayra Goulart.
Commentator Jamil Chade from the UOL website drew parallels with populist movements in Viktor Orban’s Hungary or in the US under Donald Trump.
As there, “the Bolsonarists’ strategy is to delegitimize the press, civil society or any external control body by creating direct channels of communication with the population to spread lies,” he said.
