Sao Paulo: On Sunday, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro went to a local school in Rio de Janeiro to cast his ballot in the second round of municipal elections. Speaking to reporters there, he said he had voted for Rio’s sitting mayor Marcelo Crivella and then, without giving any evidence, claimed that the country’s electoral system is not secure.
“I hope the Brazilian electoral system in 2022 will be secure,” said the president, referring to the year when he will be up for re-election. Then in response to a question about why he has not yet congratulated Joe Biden, president-elect of the US, Bolsonaro said, again without any evidence, that “there was fraud in the (US) election”. “The press does not disclose it, but I have my sources…there was really a lot of fraud there, nobody disputes it,” Bolsonaro said.
In a matter of minutes, the Brazilian president shred to bits the integrity of the Brazilian and American electoral systems, thus becoming the only politician in his country to question the results of local polls and the only world leader to back up US president Donald Trump’s claim that he was robbed of a victory.
It is a sign of how isolated – and desperate – Bolsonaro is, as he loses all battles at home and abroad.
On Sunday evening, when the results of local elections came out, Crivella was routed in the worst defeat ever for a serving mayor of Rio, and almost all candidates supported by Bolsonaro bit the dust one after another. Brazil went to polls in two rounds – November 15 and November 29 – to elect mayors and councillors for the country’s 5,570 cities and towns. Across the country, Brazilians rejected candidates who ran as a “Bolsonaro candidate” with their negative campaign, extremist views and anti-science stances.
A woman wearing a protective mask attends to cast her vote at a school during the municipal elections in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, November 29, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Pilar Olivares
Municipal elections are a serious business in Brazil. Unlike India, the municipalities here have real powers and funds to run public services. Sandwiched between two presidential elections – four years apart – the local polls are a good indicator of the national mood, just like the mid-term elections in the US. In 2018, Bolsonaro grabbed the presidency by running a virulent campaign that branded “old politics” as corrupt, as his troll army launched a cultural war against the Left. That election turned Brazilian politics upside down.
Two year down the road, Brazil appears to be in a different place as Bolsonaro’s rhetoric seems to have lost some of its appeal. In the first round of municipal elections, of the 13 mayoral candidates supported by Bolsonaro, nine were defeated. Of the 45 councillors supported by the president in 27 cities, only 10 got elected. Carlos Bolsonaro, the president’s second son, was re-elected as a councillor in Rio de Janeiro, but received 30% fewer votes than he had in 2016. In addition, some 78-odd people who ran in the election using the surname “Bolsonaro” were defeated.
It was a disaster for the brand Bolsonaro.
Polls amid pandemic
On November 14, on the eve of the first round, Bolsonaro had published a post with the names of candidates he supported. After the fiasco, he deleted it. There was more humiliation in store for him in the second round held on November 29, when 57 cities, including several state capitals like Rio and Sao Paulo, voted to elect their mayors. Bolsonaro supported 13 candidates in the second round. Only two made it.
This was no ordinary election as it was held in the middle of a pandemic that has so far claimed 173,817 Brazilian lives and taken the jobless figure beyond 14 million. With more than 30% of voters abstaining from municipal elections (voting is mandatory for every citizen above the age of 18), it is clear that the majority of people had COVID-19 and its impact on their mind. As per the election data, five of the mayors of state capitals who were re-elected had some of the best performances in fighting the pandemic. In other cities too, candidates who took the virus seriously fared better than those who didn’t.
Also read: More Loyal Than Trump: Is Bolsonaro Ready for Joe Biden in the White House?
Just like Donald Trump’s response – or the lack of it – to the pandemic flattened his presidency, the Brazilians too have given a warning to Bolsonaro, who has openly fought with his own government officials for taking measures to check the spread of the virus. The country also seems to be tired of the far-right rhetoric coming from the president who has shown little leadership in such difficult times.
It is a bit early to predict what impact these polls will have on the general elections of 2022, but the result of two of Brazil’s biggest cities – Sao Paulo and Rio – is a sure bad sign for Bolsonaro. In Sao Paulo, the city which contributes 10.6% to the country’s GDP, the candidate supported by Bolsonaro came in fourth place in the first round. The second round (an election goes to second round if no candidate manages to win 50% plus votes) was fought between Bruno Covas, the current centre-right mayor, and Guilherme Boulos of the leftist Socialist Party. With both the candidates viscerally rejecting Bolsonaro’s politics, the country’s biggest and richest city has turned its back on the president. To make it worse, Covas won the election with the backing of the Sao Paulo state governor, Joao Doria, who Bolsonaro sees as his main challenger for 2022 elections.
Bruno Covas, mayor of Sao Paulo, holds hands with Sao Paulo state governor Joao Doria as they celebrate Covas re-election during the municipal elections in Sao Paulo, Brazil, November 29, 2020. Photo: Reuters/Amanda Perobelli
The loss in Rio de Janeiro was even worse, where Crivella, an evangelical bishop who is most aligned to Bolsonaro’s far-right ideology, was badly beaten by a centre-right candidate. In 2018, it was the city and state of Rio de Janeiro which basically created a Bolsonaro wave that swept through the country’s populous southern and south-east regions, handing him the presidency. In 2020, even his own city rejected Bolsonaro’s most-favoured candidate.
It was a crushing defeat.
Fire and fury
The month of November was pretty harsh to Bolsonaro. In the first week of November, Trump was defeated in the US presidential election. In the second week, municipalities across Brazil rejected Bolsonaro’s candidates. At the end of the month, Brazil’s biggest cities not just dumped Bolsonaro-backed politicians, they largely chose mayors who are opposed to his brand of far-right politics.
This was a huge blow on all fronts – domestic and foreign.
Weeks have gone since Biden was declared the president-elect, but Bolsonaro has yet to accept the defeat of Trump, who he sees as his idol, guide and mentor. There is a method in his denial. He knows what is coming. With a climate change denier like Trump no longer in the White House and Biden putting it on the top of his agenda, Bolsonaro is likely to face a lot of heat over the non-stop burning of the Amazon jungles.
On November 10, when leaders from around the world were calling Biden to offer their congratulations, Bolsonaro launched a frontal attack on the former US vice president at a public event, threatening to use force if the incoming US administration imposed economic sanctions on Brazil. “We have just seen a candidate for the head of state [Biden] saying that if I don’t put out the fire in the Amazon, it will raise trade barriers against Brazil. How can we cope with all of this? Diplomacy alone is not enough, right, Ernesto?” he said, directly addressing the minister of foreign affairs, Ernesto Araújo, who was in the audience. “Because when you run out of saliva, you have to have gunpowder,” he said, using a Portuguese saying to threaten the US with a war over the Amazon rainforest.
Even by Bolsonaro’s standards, the statement was reckless – an indication of how Brazil stands isolated today. Former Brazilian ambassador to the US Roberto Abdenur feels that Biden’s victory will “further increase” Brazil’s isolation in the world. Speaking to BBC Brasil, Abdenur said the Brazilian foreign policy is now “based on fantasies, conspiratorial theories, Manichaeism, and rejection of multilateralism, firmly rooted in Bolsonaro’s extreme right ideology”.
Also read: COVID-19 Has Shown Why Latin America Needs Active Non-Alignment
A conflict between Brazil and US is inconceivable, but a serious friction in relations is very much on cards as the Biden administration will not only take the US back to the Paris climate pact on day one, it will pay special attention to the Amazon fires. By naming John Kerry, an old hand in the world of diplomacy, to his cabinet as a special envoy for climate with a seat on the National Security Council, Biden has given a clear message to all climate skeptics around the world.
While Biden may still go easy on oil and gas industry at home, there is nothing to stop the next US president from going after more visible destroyers of global climate, such as the destruction of the world’s biggest rainforest. On Monday, figures released by the Brazilian Space Institute showed that more than 11,000 sq km of rainforest was razed between August 2019 and July this year – the highest figure since 2008.
Notwithstanding Bolsonaro’s threat of using the gunpowder, Biden will have enough ammunition against him when he tells Brazil to put out the burning fires.
Playing Chinese checkers
In global affairs defined by rivalry or conflict between two great powers, small countries or regional players generally conduct a tricky balancing act or extract favours from both or openly thrown their lot with one of them. No country has ever tried to annoy or confront both the powers at the same time. Brazil, under Bolsonaro, is going down that slippery slope. In the middle of a changing world order, where the US and China wrangle with each other for the top-dog slot, Brazil has achieved the impossible: rubbing both the powers on the wrong side. In addition, Bolsonaro has taken the relations with Argentina, Brazil’s third-largest trading partner, to an unimaginable low. He has also managed to fight bitter battles with Europe’s two biggest economies: Angela Merkel’s Germany and Emmanuel Macron’s France.
Most of these squabbles have happened over the climate issue. But in two years of his rule, Bolsonaro, blindly following in Trump’s steps, has taken Brazil to a place where it has few friends.
On November 17, at the virtual summit of the BRICS leader, Chinese president Xi Jinping and Bolsonaro engaged in a veiled criticism of each other. While Xi defended the Paris agreement, called for multilateralism and urged top priority to health in the veiled criticism middle of pandemic, Bolsonaro launched an all-out attack on the World Health Organisation. The distance between Brazil and its biggest trading partner was clearly visible at this summit.
A few days later, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s third son who also heads the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Congress, went ballistic on the Chinese company Huawei, accusing it of spying in an explosive Twitter post. In response to Eduardo’s offensive tweet, which he later deleted, the Chinese embassy in Brasilia threatened Brazil “with negative consequences” and even targeted the president’s son. “We urge these personalities to stop following the rhetoric of the American extreme right, to stop the misinformation and slander about China and the Chinese-Brazilian friendship, and to avoid going too far along the way… Otherwise, they will carry the historical responsibility of disturbing the normality of the China-Brazil partnership,” the Chinese embassy said in a statement.
Eduardo Bolsonaro. Photo: Reuters
Historically, Brazil never had had any conflict with China. In past two decades or so, Brazil commodity economy has become largely dependent on China, with which it has a trade surplus of $30 billion. In the middle of a pandemic when Brazil is projected, as per the International Monetary Fund, to drop out of the list of world’s top 10 economies (from the ninth place to 12th), an open fight with China makes little sense to seasoned observers of world affairs. Abdenur, who was Brazil’s ambassador to Beijing between 1989 and 1993, fears that Brazil may face serious problems due to Bolsonaro’s fight with China for ideological reasons as the Asian country may seek other countries for commodities that Brazil supplies to the world’s second biggest economy.
Brazil can hardly afford such high-risk gamble with China when its economy is just hobbling along and the virus is surging again. Hit by COVID-19 as early as February, the country never managed to subdue the first wave even as some infectoligists talk about the arrival of the second wave. In terms of number of cases, Brazil stands at number three (after the US and India); in terms of fatalities, it is at second place, just behind the US. But Bolsonaro is busy playing his political games. In the middle of November, when the country’s drug regulator suspended the tests of CoronaVac, a Chinese vaccine being tested by a world-recognised institute in Sao Paulo, Bolsonaro shared the news on social media with the comment that he “defeated” Doria, the Sao Paulo governor who has placed an order of 46 million doses for the state.
Brazil, the only emerging country with a free and universal healthcare system with presence in all municipalities across the country, has a very sophisticated vaccine development and distribution system. But, largely because of Bolsonaro’s diabolical politics, the government is yet to reveal its concrete plan with dates for vaccinating 210 million Brazilians. The entire month of November, which saw a big spike in coronavirus cases and ICU admissions, the president was busy ranting about election fraud at home and in the US, denying the pandemic and threatening Joe Biden with gunpowder.
Rejected at home and isolated globally, Bolsonaro doesn’t seem to have a plan to change the course, if he has a plan at all.
Shobhan Saxena and Florencia Costa are independent journalists based in Sao Paulo, Brazil