Brian Winter to The New Yorker on Brazil's Elections and What They Mean for the U.S.
Brian Winter to The New Yorker on Brazil's Elections and What They Mean for the U.S.
Latin America's right-wing leaders have pivoted to a more neutral posture "when it comes to the China-versus-U.S.competition," said AQ's editor-in-chief.
In the final days of his final campaign, supporters of the Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva turned to a British classic. David Bowie and Queen’s 1981 hit,“Under Pressure,” became the soundtrack of a viral video showing scenes from the eighty-year-old Lula’s half century in politics. [...]
The first round, which took place on October 4th, was grim for Lula. In a surprise result, the incumbent placed two points behind Bolsonaro, who is currently a senator, while right-wing parties and candidates surged in congressional and state ... supporters the belief that his incarceration had been engineered to keep him out of an election cycle that he would have won. (The charges were completely annulled in 2021.)
Instead, Jair Bolsonaro, a hard-right former Army man who looked approvingly on the days of military rule, was elected. As President, he slashed Lula's protections for the environment, cut funding to universities and to urban-housing programs, and badly mismanaged the pandemic. In 2022, Lula summoned his old populist magnetism, built a coalition large enough to defeat Bolsonaro, and won a third term. But Bolsonaro, styled in ... , "because my wallet could be stolen." Lula called Bolsonaro a "thug," an apparent allusion to alleged ties to a host of paramilitary organizations in Rio de Janeiro. (Bolsonaro has previously denied any such connections and dismissed the allegations as "smears.") In the vein of El Salvador's President, Nayib Bukele, Bolsonaro has promised a ruthless crackdown on crime, with expanded maximum-security prisons to detain more suspected cartel members and chemical castration for convicted rapists. Some in Bolsonaro's camp want him to follow the lead of the Argentinian President, ... owners mostly back Bolsonaro, need the Chinese market and often compete with U.S. exporters. "You've seen versions of this all over Latin America, with leaders on the new right who have very quickly pivoted to a more neutral or nonaligned posture when it comes to the China-versus-U.S. competition," Brian Winter, editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly, told me. "But it's especially true of Brazil."
