42 The Americas The Economist April 2nd 2022
“T
his is nota fight of left against
right,” Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s con
servative populist president, told a rally
in Brasília on March 27th. “It’s a fight
between good and evil.” His opponents
see the election on October 2nd, in which
Mr Bolsonaro will seek a second term, in
similarly apocalyptic terms. Many worry
that Brazilian democracy would not
survive another four years of Mr Bolso
naro, an avowed authoritarian who is
contemptuous of the judiciary and the
separation of powers. With the stakes so
high, Brazil is on the threshold of a dirty
and divisive campaign in which disin
formation will be the norm and, some
fear, violence a possibility.
Mr Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018 was a
surprise. Long an obscure backbench
congressman, he turned that contest into
a referendum on the leftwing Workers’
Party (pt), which had governed Brazil
between 2003 and 2016, and its leader,
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was barred
from running by a prison sentence for
corruption. Mr Bolsonaro, a former army
captain, also won votes by appealing to
traditional values, by espousing a harsh
line on crime and by exploiting social
media. Chance helped, too: he was
stabbed by a deranged individual a
month before the vote, which brought
him sympathy and kept him quiet when
he had much to lose by talking.
Mr Bolsonaro ended “the kleptocratic
state” and is the “best president since the
military government” of 196485, claims
Frederico D’Avila, a soya farmer from his
party in the state legislature of São Paulo.
Mr D’Avila displays a poster in his office
extolling Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s
former dictator, and Margaret Thatcher, a
deregulating British prime minister. He
shrugs off the president’s mishandling of
the pandemic, which involved denyingboth the seriousness of covid19 and the
value of vaccines.
This is a minority view. Mr Bolsonaro’s
approval rating is just 24%. And this time
around he is no longer a novelty. Corrup
tion and social conservatism may carry
less weight as election issues than in 2018.
The president faces an uphill battle
against Lula, whose sentence was an
nulled by the Supreme Court on procedur
al grounds last year. The latest polls give
Lula around 45%. Though many Brazilians
would prefer a third option, no other
candidate has more than 8%.
The election will mainly be about the
economy. Mr Bolsonaro’s economy min
ister, Paulo Guedes, promised privatisa
tions, plus radical reform of taxes and
spending. He has achieved little of that.
Emergency payments to 68m Brazilians in
2020 helped the economy bounce back
from the pandemic. But it has since
stalled. Income per person has not in
creased under Mr Bolsonaro and un
employment stands at 11%, as it did before
the pandemic.
Ahead of the election, Mr Guedes hasabandoned fiscal prudence. The govern
ment has cut taxes and is giving a re
newed dollop of aid this year to 18m
poorer Brazilians. That is a factor in a
modest recent rise in Mr Bolsonaro’s
support. But inflation, running at 10.5%,
is quickly eroding the value of the aid.
“The economy will get worse between
now and the election,” thinks Zeina Latif,
a consultant.
Meanwhile Lula, with no rivals to his
left, is moving to the centre. He is poised
to name Geraldo Alckmin, a former
governor of São Paulo from the centre
right, as his running mate. Investors,
disillusioned by Mr Guedes’s failures, are
giving Lula the benefit of the doubt, says
Ms Latif, recognising his pragmatism.
But many analysts expect a closer
result than the polls suggest. That is
because Lula, skilful politician though he
is, has many vulnerabilities as a candi
date. He and his party are still associated
with corruption in the public mind.
Though many poorer Brazilians remem
ber the economic growth and social
progress of his presidency in 200310,
others recall his chosen successor, Dilma
Rousseff, driving the country into its
deepest slump in a century.
Mr Bolsonaro could still win, in other
words. But a bigger worry is how he
would react to his probable defeat. Im
itating Donald Trump, his role model, he
has tried to undermine confidence in
Brazil’s electronic voting system, despite
its impeccable record. He has vowed not
to leave quietly. He has many supporters
in the police and army; his loosening of
gun laws means there are now more
firearms in the hands of farright groups
and gun clubs. Degraded though they
have been by Mr Bolsonaro, Brazil’s
democratic institutions have survived so
far. Their biggest test is to come.Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is ahead but Jair Bolsonaro is still in the runningBelloThe battle for Brazil
Giammattei’s predecessor got rid of a un
backed body which, for over a decade, had
helped the attorneygeneral to investigate
politicians and businessmen suspected of
corruption, including two former presi
dents. Mr Hernández and Nayib Bukele, El
Salvador’s president, have scrapped simi
lar bodies in the past few years. (Xiomara
Castro, the president of Honduras, wants
the unto set up an anticorruption unit.)
Politicians and criminals constantly
seek ways to influence the courts. Last year
Mr Bukele forced all judges over the age of
60 or with more than 30 years of service toretire, rendering a third of posts vacant
overnight. This allows him to stuff the ju
diciary with loyalists. Over the eight years
that Mr Hernández was in power Hondu
ras’s legal system was infiltrated by drug
money, claims Lester Ramírez of the Asso
ciation for a More Just Society, an ngo. He
has documented cases of criminals paying
off paralegals and magistrates’ drivers.
If money does not work then criminals
or corrupt officials often resort to intimi
dation, instead. In Guatemala many law
yers, facing threats of prison or death, are
fleeing north. Some 15 legal officials havebeen forced out of the country over the past
year, including Juan Francisco Sandoval,
who headed the office of special prosecu
tor against impunity, and Erika Aifán, a
judge who had presided over cases involv
ing bigwigs. She fled to the United States
and resigned on March 21st after receiving
death threats and lawsuits. The attorney
general, a friend of the president, tried to
strip her of the immunity from prosecu
tion she enjoyed as a judge. Speaking in her
cramped office last year, she described
how, “gradually, the barriers ofprotection
around us are being dismantled.”n