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How Bolsonaro Changed the Brazilian Right
Sunday’s election cemented the far-right president’s dominance of a formerly moderate camp.
foreignpolicy.com
How Bolsonaro Changed the Brazilian Right
Sunday’s election cemented the far-right president’s dominance of a formerly moderate camp.
By Catherine Osborn, the writer of Foreign Policy’s weekly Latin America Brief.
OCTOBER 7, 2022, 8:00 AM
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Analysts have speculated that polling errors could be due to last-minute changes in opinion, the phenomenon of a “shy” Bolsonaro voter, Bolsonaro supporters’ distrust of pollsters, or difficulty predicting turnout. Roman said data from the pollster Futura showed men interviewed by male pollsters more often said they would vote for Bolsonaro than men interviewed by female pollsters.
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Since the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship, the country’s politics has generally included a “left pole” organized around Lula’s Workers’ Party and a “right pole” organized around the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), as well as several other ideologically ambiguous parties that often supported whoever was in power, State University of Campinas political scientist Andréa Freitas told Foreign Policy. The PSDB’s focus was “economic issues,” especially “controlling state spending and pushing for more efficient state spending,” she said, calling the party a “very responsible right.”
In 2018, when Bolsonaro was elected president as a member of a tiny right-wing party called the Social Liberal Party, the PSDB shrank to around half its size in the Chamber of Deputies. On Sunday, it dwindled by half again. Now, Freitas said, it is Bolsonaro who serves as the “pillar” and “organizing force” of the Brazilian right.
“Brazil turned to the right [in 2018] and stayed there [in 2022],” Nicolau said.
Bolsonaro achieved this in part by building alliances with conservative elites in Brazil’s ideologically ambiguous parties—known as the “Centrão,” or “big center,” Nicolau said. Bolsonaro even joined a Centrão party, the Liberal Party, ahead of this year’s election.
The president’s continued dominance on the right is also partly due to a communications strategy that is heavily reliant on social media, where he often denounces criticism as fake news. In these forums, Bolsonaro has emphasized his proclaimed Christian values, touted gun ownership as a solution to Brazil’s insecurity, and played up the idea that he is a clean politician while Lula is corrupt, a reference to Lula’s trials in connection with the Operation Car Wash scandal. (Lula’s cases related to Operation Car Wash have all been closed or suspended.)
“Practically all of the [Bolsonaro] voters I interviewed considered Lula and the Workers’ Party corrupt,” political scientist Camila Rocha, who has for years conducted qualitative interviews with Bolsonaro supporters, told Folha de São Paulo on Monday. “People repeated verbatim Bolsonaro’s discourse on livestreams and social media.”
Bolsonaro’s electoral performance Sunday cemented a new status quo. Unlike in decades past, the core of Brazil’s right now holds positions that are “anti-science,” heavily focused on social conservatism, distrustful of the press, and pro-gun, Freitas said. Economic liberalism appears to matter much less: In the weeks leading up to Sunday’s vote, Bolsonaro’s government spent more than $2.3 billion not approved in Brazil’s 2022 budget to give an economic boost to poor Brazilians, Poder360 reported.
For now, what Freitas called the “responsible right” has been voted out of office in large numbers. José Serra, one of the PSDB’s founders, lost his Senate seat on Sunday. Former Bolsonaro Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello, whose department ordered supplies of chloroquine for hospitals to administer to COVID-19 patients during the pandemic, was elected to the Chamber of Deputies.
On Tuesday, Serra announced his endorsement of Lula for president, as did his fellow PSDB founder, former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Lula’s running mate, Geraldo Alckmin, hails from the party, too.
The lasting consequences of Bolsonaro’s dominance of the Brazilian right are still unclear. In the past, Freitas said, Centrão politicians often made alliances with other political forces—left or right—while being careful not to embrace all their positions. That may be harder with Bolsonaro. Centrão lawmakers might find themselves calculating that “they will not get reelected if they don’t ally with the whole package,” she said.