At this point, there is a lot to be said against Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Yet Brazil’s president has surprisingly good chances of re-election.
Bolsonaro’s governing record is poor. This is the conclusion one must come to if one uses internationally recognized criteria. Since 2019, when he took office, the concentration of income and wealth has worsened, poverty has increased, the quality of public education and healthcare has deteriorated significantly, and environmental degradation has broken all records.
Certainly, the pandemic has helped complicate the situation, but Brazil’s situation is worse than most so-called emerging economies. For the pandemic years 2020 to 2022, the measured or projected annual growth of the Brazilian economy averages 1,1%, while the world average is 1,8%. The number of deaths from COVID-19, nearly 700 thousand to date, is also significantly too high. Independent studies show : proper management of the crisis could have prevented up to 300 thousand deaths.
Even the decline in homicides under Bolsonaro, repeatedly cited as a success, must be put into perspective, because the number of people killed by police has remained unchanged : the police, who are anchored at the state level, kill more than 6 thousand people in Brazil every year – 84% of whom are black. In addition, the murder rate is falling, especially in places where it is not the state but criminal organizations, militias, or drug traffickers who take command.
The same applies to Bolsonaro’s alleged successes in fighting corruption. After he took office, important control mechanisms of public spending were discontinued. Furthermore, he withdrew documents and evidence of corruption under his administration or associated with his family by subjecting them to one hundred years of secrecy.
This poor record of Bolsonaro’s, however, is not reflected in the results of the first round of voting on October 3rd. On the contrary, the president’s party and the other parties supporting him succeeded in significantly increasing the number of elected deputies, senators and governors. The already small opposition continued to shrink despite a slight gain for the Workers’ Party PT of the opposing candidate, Lula da Silva. The president himself received far more votes than the polls predicted, 43,3% of the valid votes. His main rival, Lula da Silva, received 48,4%, so a neck-and-neck race is expected in the runoff election on October 30.
This inconsistency between the quality of government and electoral success raises important questions not only for democratic theory, but also for those concerned about the future of democracy worldwide. Here, culturalist explanations that the electorate is uninformed and unable to make rational decisions clearly fall short.
Opinion polls show that the vast majority of the Brazilian population thinks Bolsonaro is a bad president. The explanation that there are no better options is also unsatisfactory. Even for those who did not want to vote for Lula on October 3rd – for which there were many justifiable reasons – there were nine other candidates of the most diverse hues to choose from.
To explain the good election results for Bolsonaro and his allies, one must look at the foundation on which the system of power he has built rests. To avoid the artificial separation between ideological and material foundations of support for Bolsonaro, we would like to refer to at least four dispositives of power deployed by Bolsonaro, following a term coined by the social philosopher Michel Foucault.
The first dispositive also adopted by Donald Trump is the sustained mobilization of his most radical supporters. As president, Bolsonaro continued to behave as if he were in opposition. At the beginning of his term, he criticized the legislature and the judiciary (especially the Supreme Court), which he accused of preventing him from implementing the sovereign will of the people. Against the threat of impeachment, he procured a parliamentary majority by handing over control of the state budget to conservative deputies : they distribute state investments as they see fit and do not even have to publish the result.
At the same time, the rhetorical battles against the Constitutional Court continued and continue to this day. This serves to shift responsibility for their own failures onto others : it is not he and his government who are to blame for everything that goes wrong, but those who supposedly prevent him from doing what is necessary.
Bolsonaro relies on resentment
The second dispositive relates to the predatory exploitation of nature, public goods, and the bodies of working people. Under Bolsonaro, there have been deep cuts in workers’ rights : brazilians now have to work longer, but for less money. Furthermore, environmental authorities have been crippled, so that existing environmental law often cannot be enforced. At the same time, public property has been legally or illegally privatized.
The economy minister’s latest idea is to privatize Brazil’s beaches, but already, under Bolsonaro, huge swaths of the Amazon rainforest, including indigenous reserves, public lands and parks, have passed into private hands. The individual steps involved are well known : forests are set on fire, the devastated territory is fenced off, and after livestock is moved there, legal recognition of the occupied territory is requested. The beneficiaries of this criminal model of land occupation defend Bolsonaro and his government stubbornly – if necessary by force of arms.
The third dispositif of power involves different strategies. Historian and political scientist Achille Mbembe has used the example of Cameroon to note how fundamental the staging of a rapprochement between rulers and ruled are for legitimizing the relations of domination there. Something similar can be observed for Bolsonaro’s system of power : through street demonstrations he convenes, his live-streamed broadcast conversations with allies, and the deliberate use of vulgar language in his communications, especially on social media, Bolsonaro and his family stage proximity and complicity with the less educated voters as if they were on the same level of social hierarchies. The popularity of Bolsonaro and his family on social media rivals that of major music and soccer stars and is cleverly used for electoral purposes.
Another discursive technique that Bolsonaro resorts to – similar to other right-wing radicals around the world – is to mobilize the resentment of those who have had to give up former privileges either due to the ongoing economic crisis or recent political transformations in Brazil. Accordingly, he blames the “corrupt left” for the fate of the traditional middle class, which can now no longer afford to hire a domestic help or buy a car.
The president stirs up fears
Similarly, he praises traditional masculinity, siding with men who feel overwhelmed and threatened by equality policies or diversity of sexuality patterns. It is therefore not surprising that the preference for Bolsonaro is particularly pronounced among male and white voters and sections of the middle class.
Finally, the power of Bolsonaro and his allies is based on stoking fears. Bolsonaro has a sophisticated communications machinery that relies on social media as well as the private television and radio stations he favors. This structure specializes in spreading positive news about Bolsonaro and fake news about his opponents. Currently, for example, it is spreading that Lula wants to close all evangelical churches if elected and that he will destroy the traditional family. The fears generated by this are hitting evangelicals, who make up more than 30 percent of Brazil’s electorate, particularly hard. Forcing Lula into a corner and to publish open letters and statements revoking those news. This benefits Bolsonaro.
The deployment of these power dispositives explains the electoral strength of Bolsonaro and his allies despite his government’s poor record. These are variations and “perfections” of power technologies used by (extreme) right-wingers in different parts of the world. On the evening of October 30, we will know whether these unconventional and not exactly democratic dispositions of power have the power to secure the re-election of the president of one of the world’s largest democracies.
By The European Institute for International Law and International Relations.
