TheEconomistSeptember 5th 2020 271J
air bolsonaro, Brazil’s president, ought
to be in trouble. His is one of the coun-
tries worst affected by covid-19. It has had
nearly 4m confirmed cases, second only to
the number in the United States, and
123,780 known deaths. That is largely the
president’s fault. He has downplayed the
pandemic, railed against lockdowns and
promoted unproven cures.
A crusader against corruption before he
became president, Mr Bolsonaro is sur-
rounded by scandal. One of his sons is the
target of a corruption investigation. The
justice minister, Sérgio Moro, quit in April,
accusing the president of interfering with
the probe. And yet Mr Bolsonaro is gaining
political strength. The share of Brazilians
who deem his performance “good” or
“great” is 37%, its highest since he took of-
fice at the beginning of last year, according
to Datafolha, a pollster.
This is a side-effect of covid-19. While
Mr Bolsonaro has done little to contain it,
he has spent generously to shield poor Bra-
zilians from its economic effects. At the
same time, he has strengthened his weak
position in Congress. His tiny Alliance for
Brazil, formed last November, has teamed
up with the centrão, a big bloc of centre-
right parties. That will help the govern-
ment pass legislation and, perhaps, shield
him from impeachment. The centrão is
blocking 49 impeachment motions stem-
ming from the scandals and the mishan-
dling of the pandemic.
But as Mr Bolsonaro grows stronger, his
commitment to keeping his promises be-
comes weaker. The alliance with the cen-
trãoemploys the grubby dealmaking that
Mr Bolsonaro once denounced. Friends of
centrão politicians have got plum govern-
ment jobs. Also in doubt is Mr Bolsonaro’s
pledge to reform the economy, which had
encouraged some bankers and business-
men to overlook his authoritarian views.
Mr Bolsonaro, a former army captain, is
not an economic reformer by instinct. Eco-
nomic liberals have put their faith in Paulo
Guedes, the economy minister (pictured
left), who favours small government and
free markets. He justified their confidence
last year by helping to reform the pensionsystem, whose lavish benefits would have
led to crippling debt. But Mr Guedes is vis-
ibly uneasy about the spending provoked
by the pandemic. In late August two of his
top aides quit, prompting a fall in the
stockmarket and pushing the real to its
lowest level against the dollar since May.
Whatever happens to Mr Guedes, Mr
Bolsonaro’s presidency has entered a new
phase. In its proneness to scandal, its cyni-
cal deal with Congress and its generosity to
poor voters, it is coming to resemble past
administrations. Mr Bolsonaro’s govern-
ment has “some similarities” to that of the
left-wing Workers’ Party (pt), which gov-
erned from 2003 to 2016, says Arminio
Fraga, a former head of the central bank.
No one would have said that before the
pandemic. The government had trimmed
Bolsa Família, the pt’s flagship welfare pro-
gramme, which transfers cash to families
that promise to send their children to
school and to clinics for check-ups. Last
year the Bolsonaro government cut the
number of families enrolled by 1.2m to 13m.
With the pandemic the penny-pinching
has stopped. The government has spent
213bn reais ($39bn), about 2% of gdp, on an
emergency handout of 600 reais a month
to Brazilians who earn the minimum wage
of 1,045 reais a month. That benefits 67m
people, a third of the population. The
payout lifted out of extreme poverty 72% of
families in that condition. Among the ben-
eficiaries are recipients of Bolsa Família,
who get a much larger sum than the pro-Brazil
An increasingly prickly partnership
RIO DE JANEIRO
The president’s pandemic spending unnerves the liberal economy minister
The Americas
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