Why did far-right Bolsonaro do so well in Brazil? The centre-right’s complete disregard for democracy

His rise is inconceivable without the political jockeying that led to Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, and which severely undermined Brazilians’ faith in their democratic institutions. Desperate to oust a left-leaning party at any cost, they have paved the way for a demagogue

Bolsonaro, with no corruption charges of his own, has also capitalised on deeper, historic tensions in the ‘racial democracy’ of Brazil that never was (AFP)

With 46 per cent of eligible votes, a far-right demagogue known for his racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and dictatorship-praising comments nearly won the presidency of Brazil outright in last night’s first-round elections. Over 49 million Brazilians voted for Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain who rose from relatively obscurity throughout 27 years as a congressman for the state of Rio de Janeiro amidst the intertwined political and economic crisis that has recently mired the world’s fifth most populous country.

With scant economic and social policy proposals short of liberating gun ownership and bringing back Christian and family values, Bolsonaro has painted himself as the anti-establishment candidate, with many dubbing him the Trump of the Tropics. However, his praise of former dictators like Pinochet and his promise to allow police to shoot first and ask questions never, in a country that experienced over 60,000 murders last year, make Bolsonaro more similar to authoritarians like the Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte.

His runoff opponent, Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party (PT), received just 29 per cent of the vote. How has Brazil, the former darling of emerging economies and democracies, come to find itself joining the global rise of the far right?

Until early September, Bolsonaro had trailed in the polls behind PT’s former president and arguably Brazil’s most popular politician Luiz da Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula oversaw Brazil’s boom years from 2003-2011, when a combination of pro-market and welfare policies propelled Brazilian firms to the global spotlight and lifted tens of millions out of poverty. Now in prison, Lula was barred from running following a contested corruption conviction connected to the sprawling anti-corruption probe known as Operation Car Wash that has charged and imprisoned economic elites and politicians from nearly all of Brazil’s political parties. Lula picked Haddad, his minister of education and former mayor of Sao Paulo, to be his stand-in at the eleventh hour hoping his popularity – Lula ended his second term with an approval rating of nearly 90 per cent – would transfer to the little known centre-left academic.

This clearly hasn’t happened. But the question is, given that many have sought to portray their vote for Bolsonaro as a vote not so much against Haddad but against the entire political class and especially PT, how has anti-PT sentiment manifested as election success for an anti-democratic firebrand candidate like Bolsonaro?

Public dissatisfaction with the status quo became apparent in 2013, three years after the election of Lula’s PT successor Dilma Rousseff, when a protest initially against rising bus prices in Sao Paulo sprawled into mass protests throughout Brazil bringing millions to the streets to rally against corruption and misplaced funding (exemplified by the “white elephant” football stadiums left after the 2014 World Cup). On the eve of Rousseff’s 2014 election campaign, commodity prices plummeted in the lingering wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and the first allegations of Operation Car Wash emerged.

Rousseff narrowly won against the centre-right Brazilian Social Democratic Party candidate Aecio Neves in 2014, and the opposition party wasted little time questioning the authenticity of the results, laying the groundwork for Bolsonaro’s own claims on Sunday night that he would have won in the first round if not for irregularities at the polls. Rousseff’s poor fiscal policy deepened the economic crisis with unemployment reaching nearly 14 per cent. Though Rousseff herself was not implicated in any corruption schemes, her opposition seized on growing disillusionment to call for her to be ousted.

Anti-democratic sentiment was on full display when the lower house of congress approved her impeachment with a confetti-filled vote in 2016. Many members of congress, the majority of whom are themselves implicated in corruption cases, gleefully cast their vote in name of god, family and country, hardly mentioning the purported fiscal maleficence used to justify her downfall.

Bolsonaro dedicated his pro-impeachment vote to Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, who orchestrated the torture and death of dissidents – one of the tortured was Rousseff herself – during Brazil’s 20 year military dictatorship.

Following recordings tying him to a cash-for-silence corruption scheme, Michel Temer of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, who assumed the presidency, escaped impeachment by the same congress. With an approval rating of less than 5 per cent, Temer did however manage to pass a few deeply unpopular austerity measures, including a 20-year constitutional amendment freezing spending on health and education.

Bolsonaro’s rise is inconceivable without the centre-right parties’ political jockeying that has severely delegitimised Brazil’s democratic institutions. Desperate to oust a left-leaning party at any cost, they have paved the way for a far-right demagogue. Thankfully, these opportunistic parties paid the price at the polls last night, having lost the most seats in congress. PT now holds a slight majority over Bolsonaro’s once obscure Social Liberal Party.

However, Bolsonaro, with no corruption charges of his own, has also capitalised on deeper, historic tensions in the “racial democracy” of Brazil that never was. Brazil’s poorer, browner and blacker northeastern states were the only ones to put Haddad ahead. Bolsonaro’s whiter, wealthier supporters see this as a form of corruption itself, claiming they are only PT strongholds because of the social programs implemented under Lula to “buy” the votes of the poor. With his signature point – his hands in the shape of a gun – Bolsonaro is taking aim at a democracy already in disarray.