Show Me a Hero

Abstract

April 7, 2018, was a day of historical importance for Brazil. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) was arrested for corruption and money laundering. Aside from being immensely popular, the center-left former president was, up until that day, also the leading contender in this year’s national election. His arrest makes disqualification a near certainty. At the moment, there is no candidate on the left who comes close to his popularity or poll numbers. It is unclear how much of the goodwill toward his Workers’ Party (PT) will be transferred to a new candidate, and how much of it will flow elsewhere.Lula is an unique figure in Brazilian politics: He’s a charismatic leader associated with left-wing and progressive causes (though far from a radical), as well as an able politician who can work backstage to stitch up unlikely alliances when needed. An outsized figure in the political establishment, he has also been involved in several corruption scandals, including the one that resulted in his arrest, in which he was found to have accepted a luxury beachfront apartment as a kickback from a major construction company. This came to light thanks to Operation Car Wash, a sweeping police operation that began in 2014 and has revealed the deep roots of corruption entangling the federal government, powerful political parties (including Lula’s PT), the country’s largest private contractors, and the state-controlled oil company Petrobras, which embezzled billions of reais. The scope of the scandal fueled the perception that no single party is to blame, and that the political establishment itself is inherently corrupt. Lula’s arrest satisfies both right-wing voters and a much larger group: those who have simply had enough of politicians and are deeply cynical about all of the country’s parties and candidates.Like the U.S., Brazil has a presidential democracy in which people vote for local, state, and national leaders and elect representatives for the two houses of Congress. Unlike the U.S., there are no congressional districts, meaning that each state allocates a certain number of seats to the candidates with the most votes, and when a threshold is surpassed, votes are redirected to the next most popular candidate in that party. Brazil has 35 political parties; 28 currently have seats in Congress. Campaigns follow very strict rules: Political ads can’t be privately bought, and the state allocates primetime TV slots to each party according to the number of seats they hold in Congress. That same logic is applied to the distribution of public money for campaigning and party-building. Since 2015, there has been a ban on corporate donations to political campaigns, which makes it almost impossible for a candidate to win without forming alliances. During the presidential election season, a candidate’s ties determine their national base of support, the amount of money available to them, and the time they get for TV ads. With these incentives, even the most extreme politicians typically bend to the interests of moderates. At least, they did. Thanks to political disillusionment and the rise of social media, there is now more room for non-mainstream candidates.This is where Jair Bolsonaro comes in. Currently at second place at the polls, Bolsonaro is Lula’s diametrical opposite. Seen as a political outsider, he is a retired army captain with socially conservative values and a tough stance on crime. He favors a reactionary moral agenda, opposes abortion and adoption by gay couples (he’s said he would prefer a dead son to a gay one), and proudly rebuffs progressive causes. Not one to hold his tongue, Bolsonaro has made remarks in the recent past that have led to lawsuits against him, including one that could, in theory, cost him his candidacy. (The suit, for alleged racist statements made at a Jewish club in 2017, is making its way through the system but will certainly not be heard by the election in October.) Regardless, these incidents hardly matter for his base, who only see the political establishment persecuting a man with the courage to stand up to it.In the 90s, Bolsonaro took his explosive rhetoric to new levels. During a 1999 TV interview, he was asked, “If you were elected president, would you close Congress?” His answer: “Without a doubt, on my first day. The system doesn’t work. And I’m sure that at least 90 percent of the population would celebrate and cheer.” (He might be right about that.) Later, in that same interview, he opined that voting was useless, and that only civil war could really bring change. Any war, he added, would have to begin with something the country’s military dictators had neglected to do: killing “around 30,000 people, starting with Fernando Henrique Cardoso.” Murdering the then-president was a common theme in his speeches at the time.For an electorate that is fed up with “old-style politics” and its many vices, Bolsonaro represents a strong rejection of the system by someone who is more than willing to impose order, and if necessary, use force. This has earned him enormous popularity. In a video posted on April on YouTube, a woman in a shopping mall meets Bolsonaro and breaks down in tears. In other videos taken across Brazil, thousands of people wait to greet him in airports. Whenever he attends a public event, a security detail must separate him from enthusiastic supporters.It is surprising that Bolsonaro has come to be seen as an anti-establishment figure, as he is now in his seventh consecutive term as a congressman in the state of Rio de Janeiro. During his 27 years in office, he has been an unremarkable politician. His party from 2005 to 2016, the center-right Progressive Party (PP), was an ally of Lula and his successor Dilma Rousseff’s PT, and Bolsonaro duly voted along party lines on economic issues. Other than that, he has voted to increase army benefits and loosen gun laws, and has vocally opposed pension reform, especially if it were to affect the military. Though he now portrays himself as a free market defender, he was against the privatization of state companies and Plano Real, the 1994 plan that capped spiralling inflation. The only positive thing to be said of his political career is that he hasn’t been involved in any corruption scandals. (This isn’t to say that he is particularly scrupulous: He used to employ his former wife and her sister and father in his congressional office. When an anti-nepotism law passed in 2008, the sisters went to work for his sons from a former marriage, who are also politicians.)Though Bolsonaro purports to represent the armed forces, religious voters, and farmers, his ties to these groups are weak at best. To begin with, his religion is ambiguous: He was raised Catholic and still refers to himself as such, yet he frequents evangelical meetings and in 2016 was baptized before God and the press by Pastor Everaldo, a famous preacher-politician, in Israel’s River Jordan. As a military officer, he never rose above the rank of captain, and seemed to be concerned only with increasing officer pay and benefits. In 1986, he was briefly arrested after writing a scathing editorial about the sorry state of the armed forces. The following year, to publicize his grievances about military pay, he bragged to a reporter about a plot to detonate bombs in the barracks, going so far as to write down the details. He was found guilty by an army court, and was later exonerated. (Unsurprisingly, high-ranking officers tend to have a low opinion of him. Ernesto Geisel, a former general who governed Brazil during the dictatorship, once commented that “Bolsonaro is completely abnormal, actually a bad member of the military.”) And finally, the candidate has yet to gather substantial support among businessmen and farmers. After meeting last November with congressmen who defend the interests of the agricultural sector—usually against landless peasants, indigenous peoples, and environmentalists—Bolsonaro was seen as too radical, too inexperienced, and too isolated from other parties. Moreover, his proposal to arm farmers with assault rifles was criticized as counterproductive.So what accounts for Bolsonaro’s mass appeal? The first and most obvious reason is that he makes crime the center of his message, which no other candidate is doing. He advocates tougher punishment for criminals, openly defends torture, wants more freedom for police officers to act without fear of prosecution, has called for the castration of rapists, and argues for the right of citizens to bear arms on the street. This registers because Brazil is going through an unprecedented period of crime and violence, averaging around 60,000 homicides every year (in 2017, there were 29.9 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants). In the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, that number is 68.6 homicides per 100,000, a 20 percent increase from 2016. In Rio de Janeiro, where the federal government has deployed the military to deal with rising crime, fear is now the prevalent mood. In a poll taken last October, 72 percent of Rio’s residents said they want to leave the city because of the violence.The other main reason is Bolsonaro’s open disregard for the establishment. After years of corruption and scandal, the only thing that unites all Brazilians is general disillusionment with politics and democratic bodies. When asked about how much they trust various institutions, a 2017 poll found that Brazilians give the federal government, political parties and Congress the lowest scores (6 percent, 6 percent, and 7 percent respectively). At the top of the list are the armed forces and Catholic Church, with 56 and 53 percent, though levels of trust in these organizations have also declined.It is common to compare Bolsonaro to Donald Trump or Silvio Berlusconi. He is an irreverent and irrepressible right-wing politician who is proud to be politically incorrect. Yet his willingness to allow police and civilians to kill (suspected) criminals with impunity suggests a more chilling parallel: the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte.Brazilians inhabit a country in which almost nothing goes by the book. Laws are imperfectly obeyed, labor relations are informal, crime is rampant, dodging taxes is part of day-to-day life, politicians openly display their unbounded ambition and lack of ideological coherence, religion is often professed and celebrated but its moral code is rarely followed, sexual mores are conservative but sexual practice is not. On the one hand, the government runs sexual-education programs and freely distributes condoms with little objection from the majority Catholic population. On the other, there is a growing sentiment that the media and education system are pushing too hard to liberalize social mores. In 2011, an ambitious federal program to educate students about sexual diversity was blocked by conservative congressmen; Bolsonaro was one of them. Reacting to the perceived chaos of society, many voters embrace his decisive attitude toward order and traditional morality.There is a longstanding desire among the population for a larger-than-life leader who will solve all the country’s problems with his mere presence, preferably without requiring any effort or sacrifice. This is part of a larger mentality in Brazil called sebastianismo, after the Portuguese king Don Sebastian I. Along with most of his nobles, Sebastian I died in a disastrous military campaign in Morocco in 1578, the very moment when Portugal seemed set to rule the world. Since his body was never recovered, a folk religious belief took root in what is now the Brazilian state of Bahia claiming that Sebastian I will emerge from his hiding place and guide his empire to glory. This mindset has since been secularized, and continues to be a part of Brazilian culture.One effect of this thinking is the belief that Brazil’s fate is out of its hands. A period of rapid economic growth that lasted from 1968 to 73—when the country’s GDP grew over 10 percent per year on average—was referred to and is still remembered as the “economic miracle.” In 2006, then-president Lula dubbed the discovery of gigantic oil reserves deep under the ocean “our winning lottery ticket.” While Lula is sometimes referred to as “Don Sebastian” by critics, not even he has broken this spell. Judging by the degree of support that he has in polls, one would have expected that a large part of the population would be ready to fight—or at least protest—on his behalf when he was arrested. What happened, however, was that a small group of hardcore followers camped out near his prison, while the rest of the country seems not to care at all—even voters in regions where he was projected to win by a landslide.There is a lot of “give and take” in any political system. Matters are never as simple as voters would like to believe, and politicians must be willing to make concessions. Still, in a functional system, at least some issues are treated as non-negotiable, and politicians try to seem as if they are motivated solely by a belief in the public good. In Brazil, however, because of the way the system is designed, “give and take” (toma lá, dá cá) has become the only principle of politics, and no one pretends there is anything else. Take, for example, the matter of TV campaign ads. Because political parties are allowed to share their government-allotted airtime, campaigns produce unlikely bedfellows. Communists ally with conservatives. Sworn enemies from one election reemerge as partners years later. In this political culture, change, when it happens, is painstakingly slow, and reforms only pass when larded with exemptions and clauses. Legislation must be designed not to rattle the status quo. Radical transformation is all but impossible.At the same time, there are signs of hope. Since 2014, the federal police, public prosecutors, and judges have begun to successfully investigate, try, and condemn elites involved in illicit activities. More than 100 elected officials have been investigated and many have been charged, including the former speaker of the lower house and head of the Senate. It looks as if, for the first time, Brazil’s politicians might be held responsible for their crimes. Lula’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment—in April, he began serving a 12-year sentence at a prison he opened more than a decade ago—is a part of this process. Moreover, Car Wash has made ripples throughout Latin America. In March, the president of Peru resigned after he was accused of accepting bribes from a company implicated in the scandal, and the vice president of Ecuador has also been sentenced.During these dramatic times, those going after political heavyweights have become heroes in the public imagination. Policemen and judges are portrayed as saviors, while politicians—with their shady dealings and moral flexibility—are seen as a cancer threatening society. The popular Brazilian Netflix series O Mecanismo (The Mechanism), which covers the early years of Operation Car Wash, uses cancer and rats as metaphors for the country’s corrupt political class. Yet members of the judiciary are far from paragons of moral rectitude. The media has uncovered that many judges and public prosecutors collect housing subsidies even though they own their homes. Sergio Moro, the star judge of Car Wash, is among them.Bolsonaro embodies an attitude of unflinching rigor toward corrupt politicians. In that regard, he has the will of the people behind him. However, worrying as the prospect of a Bolsonaro presidency is, and as high as his numbers might be, it is unlikely he will win. Executive elections in Brazil take place through a two-round system in which, if no one person secures a majority, the two leading candidates compete against each other in a run-off. This works against any highly polarizing figure, as the person who moves closest to the center always wins. Therefore, even if Bolsonaro earns an impressive first-round result, the most likely scenario will be something like the 2017 French election, in which centrist Emmanuel Macron prevailed over far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in second-round voting.Finally, even if Bolsonaro does win, it is unlikely that he will be able to govern effectively. Given the sheer quantity of political parties with seats in Congress, any Brazilian president must constantly negotiate with legislators across the ideological spectrum to get measures passed. This often involves dangling offers of pork-barrel spending and lucrative government positions. If the president does not have the support of a strong parliamentary base—which will enable them, for instance, to get a congressional ally elected speaker of the lower house—he or she will be at the mercy of Congress, unable to achieve much alone. This is what happened to former president Dilma Rousseff in her final years, and, given the heavily fractured nature of Brazil’s Congress, it is what will likely happen to any president without a strong base. Bolsonaro’s ideological divisiveness, difficult temperament, and lack of experience are likely to conspire toward this end.Our maddening political system, in other words, cuts both ways. It landed Brazil in its current situation, but it may just save us from an even more dangerous future.