Far Right Makes Gains in Brazil in First Round of Presidential Race

Brazil’s presidential election is headed to a runoff between leftist incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and far-right Senator Flávio Bolsonaro after neither candidate cleared 50% in Sunday’s vote, in which the right made gains in Congress and in governor races across the country. Bolsonaro received 47% of the vote compared to Lula’s 45%. The second round of voting is on October 25. If elected, Flávio Bolsonaro has vowed to grant amnesty to his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest and serving a 27-year sentence for plotting a coup in 2022 to overturn Lula’s last victory. He has also vowed to strengthen ties to the Trump administration, which is accused of trying to influence the result in Bolsonaro’s favor.

“The momentum has been with the right since 2018,” says Brazilian philosopher Rodrigo Nunes, who explains that public disillusionment with politics is part of that shift. “Lots of people see the far right as promising them, ‘Well, if this is all there is, if all we can expect from the future is ever more dog-eat-dog conditions, an ever more competitive struggle of all against all, at least what the far right says is the state will get off our backs.’”

Nunes is author of Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organization and the new book Anatomy of Disintegration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right. He recently wrote about the stakes of the Brazilian election for North South Notes.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Brazil, where the presidential race between President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and far-right Senator Flávio Bolsonaro is headed to a runoff. During the first round of voting Sunday, Bolsonaro received 47% of the vote; Lula got 45%.

Bolsonaro is the son of Brazil’s former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, currently under house arrest serving a 27-year sentence after he was convicted of plotting a military coup in 2022 to overturn Lula’s win in that year’s election. If elected, Flávio Bolsonaro has pledged to grant amnesty to his father and others involved in the coup. Flávio has also vowed to strengthen ties to the Trump administration.

In Senate races, Bolsonaro’s party secured 19 of the 54 Senate seats up for grabs. In total, the right or far right won 34 seats. Flávio Bolsonaro spoke to supporters in the capital Brasília.

SEN. FLÁVIO BOLSONARO: [translated] I am very happy about the real possibility that three weeks from now Brazil will give a definitive answer that it wants a modern government, a government with fewer ministries, a government that will restore democracy. What I have to say is that Lula is fighting for power. He has already contested seven presidential elections. Seven presidential elections. He is concerned about power. I am concerned about Brazil’s future. I am fighting for Brazil.

AMY GOODMAN: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva addressed supporters in São Paulo.

PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] The result is unexpected. We never get everything we want. I must admit that I was convinced that I was going to win on the first round. … But we have the second round, and the runoff is the moment of truth. It’s time to show the true Brazilian picture, because today is the Brazil we want. So, starting tomorrow, we’re launching a new campaign.

AMY GOODMAN: Ahead of the elections, a group of 31 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, accusing the Trump administration of being engaged in a, quote, “sustained, multifaceted campaign of interference and destabilization in Brazil,” unquote.

We go now to Rio de Janeiro, where we’re joined by Rodrigo Nunes. His new book, out this week, Anatomy of Disintegration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right. He’s associate professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and a visiting fellow at the University of Essex, U.K.

Rodrigo Nunes, thanks so much for being with us. First, if you can respond to Flávio Bolsonaro coming out ahead, 47 to 45%, against President Lula, and Lula’s even expression of surprise, saying he expected to win this round? Of course, then it goes to the next runoff election on October 25th. Can you talk about what happened in Brazil and its significance?

RODRIGO NUNES: Well, I think anyone who’d been following closely the polls and the tendencies in this election would have thought it would be tight, both in the first and in the second round, but everyone really did expect Lula to come marginally ahead of Flávio in the first round. So that was a surprise.

Having said that, it isn’t a surprise that this is a victory for the right. Everyone could tell that they were going to have the majority in Congress, that they were going to come very close to an easy majority in the Senate, which puts them very close to being able to impeach Supreme Court justices, which is — which has been one of their main rallying points in this election.

So, yes, Flávio coming ahead is a surprise, but everything else, the Congress results, the results in the majority of states that the right has also carried, none of that is really a surprise at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us who Flávio Bolsonaro is, the son of the former far-right president.

RODRIGO NUNES: Sorry. Could you —

AMY GOODMAN: I want you to tell us —

RODRIGO NUNES: Could you come again?

AMY GOODMAN: I want you to tell us who —

RODRIGO NUNES: Because I lost you for a second.

AMY GOODMAN: I want you to tell us who Flávio Bolsonaro is. But first, let me go back to the current president, Lula, speaking last night, criticizing Flávio Bolsonaro.

PRESIDENT LUIZ INÁCIO LULA DA SILVA: [translated] We only have uncertainties, with a murky biography and a shadowy past. Nothing suggests a promising future for Brazilian society, either in the biography of the father or the son, and we do not know the details regarding other relatives’ biographies. It is a murky biography. There are publications and evidence pointing to very serious suspicions linked to militia, organized crime and Rio de Janeiro’s murders. All of this will become clear, as will his involvement in the founding of Banco Master, which led not only to the biggest corruption case in this country, but also in the biggest orgy involving this country’s authorities.

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AMY GOODMAN: If you can respond, Rodrigo Nunes, to what Lula said? And give us the background of Flávio Bolsonaro.

RODRIGO NUNES: So, when Flávio was chosen by his father to be the candidate of the far right, not even people in the right expected him to catch as a candidate. Everyone thought he was too weak and inexpressive as a candidate to actually run against someone, a figure as strong, a figure of the stature of Lula. So, even for the right, it was a surprise that his candidacy did become a real thing in the course of the last months. He is the oldest son of the Bolsonaro clan, and he is the more traditional figure among his brothers, who are all also in politics. He is more of an old-style politician rather than a culture warrior like his other brothers, and even, to some extent, his father.

And in particular, whereas his dad had very strong ties to the military and dependent on — depended on the military a lot for his government, what is most worrying about Flávio Bolsonaro is that there are very well-documented stories connecting him not only to various corruption scandals, including the main corruption scandal that is being talked about in Brazil at the moment, which involves a failed bank that helped, among other things, fund a film on — a biopic of Jair Bolsonaro’s that many people suspect was actually used as a way of channeling funds into the campaign and into the lobbying operations that the Bolsonaro family has been doing alongside the U.S. government since last year, but — so, basically, not only he’s got several ties to several corruption scandals, but, more worryingly, he’s got a well-documented history of ties to organized crime in Rio, not only to the paramilitary militias that occupy several parts of Rio, but also lots of people in his political group in Rio are connected to the drug trade. So, obviously, a victory for him worries several people in Brazil that it would be a victory for organized crime, bringing organized crime to the very top of Brazilian politics.

AMY GOODMAN: And if you can talk about not only the fact that Flávio Bolsonaro came out ahead, but the fact that the far-right and right parties also came out ahead, and what this means, and where you think this runoff election will go, who the other candidates were who will now be not part of it, who might throw their support to, or simply their voters will go to, either Flávio Bolsonaro or Lula?

RODRIGO NUNES: So, another sign of how strong the right is in Brazil at the moment is that the only candidate on the left was Lula. Everyone else contesting this election is broadly in the right-wing camp, or even far right, even farther to the right of Flávio. The tendency is, of course, that most of those votes are going to go to Flávio now. Certainly, the momentum is with him at this moment. He’s leaping ahead in the first round, and I would expect him to go even farther in the first polls that will come out this week. Certainly, the momentum is all with him.

And it has to be said, in a certain way, the momentum has been with the right since 2018. The right wing has managed to — if we understand a cultural revolution to mean shaping the way in which most people understand reality, in which most people see what’s happening around them, then you could say that the far right has managed to produce a cultural revolution in Brazil, especially in the south of Brazil, in those areas in which agribusiness is strong, or what you could call the extractive frontier, where you have agribusiness, mining and so forth, and even in the south — the southeast, and even in the peripheries of Brazil, where lots of people see the far right as promising them, “Well, if things — if this is all there is, if all we can expect from the future is ever more dog-eat-dog conditions, ever more — an ever more competitive struggle of all against all, at least what the far right says is the state will get off our backs. We won’t have to — we’ll pay less taxes. There’ll be less regulations stopping us from doing what we need to do in order to survive. And even at the end of the day if I remain hyperexploited, at least there won’t be anyone telling me that I can’t make jokes about gay people, or there won’t be anyone meddling with my private life if I beat my wife up.” So, there’s a very complex portfolio, let’s say, of material and psychological compensations that the far right offers. And it has to be said, it’s a message that has been working.

And even though Lula has been in power for the last four years, he was — he was always dealing with a Congress that was in its majority of the right and far right. He didn’t manage to do anywhere near enough to counter the strength of the far right in Brazilian society. And what we see is basically a continuous growth. Even though Bolsonaro lost the last elections to Lula, what you can see is just a continuous growth from 2018 until now. And you see that in the way that they’ve carried most states, that they carried the majority of the Congress, and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: So, last week, a group of 31 U.S. Democratic lawmakers, led by Congressmembers Delia Ramirez, Pramila Jayapal, Jesús “Chuy” García, along with Senator Bernie Sanders, sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio accusing the Trump administration of interfering in Brazil’s elections, the letter saying, “Over the course of President Trump’s second term, we have seen U.S. officials engage in a sustained, multifaceted campaign of interference and destabilization in Brazil,” and then goes on to outline the diplomatic, economic and political pressure wielded by the Trump administration leading up to the elections. What do you know of whether there was U.S. interference there? Of course, both Flávio Bolsonaro, his father Jair Bolsonaro, very close to President Trump, and you have Flávio also promising to pardon his father, who’s under house arrest for decades for involvement in the attempted coup against Lula.

RODRIGO NUNES: So, Amy, I belong to what is called in Brazil the redemocratization generation, i.e. the people who were born in the very last years of the military regime. And I have to say, I didn’t expect, in my life, to see the level of U.S. interference that we’ve seen in these elections.

If in the last elections the U.S. played a very positive role when it very clearly signaled to Jair Bolsonaro that it wasn’t going to support any coup attempts to overrule the result of the elections, in these elections and since last year, there’s been a clear pattern of U.S. interference, starting with the tariffs imposed on Brazil at the time of the coup trials that came to an end in September last year. And there was a very open, very explicit activity on the part of one of the Bolsonaro brothers to lobby the U.S. government to impose those tariffs on Brazil. So, we’ve had more tariffs imposed on Brazil this year.

But on top of that, there is another thing that was an object of lobby from the Bolsonaro family, the fact that very recently the U.S. named the two major drug factions in Brazil as terrorist organizations, which we understand from the pattern that we’ve seen in places like Colombia, Venezuela, etc., is always a first step in the direction of more intense interference, including potentially military intervention, which is supposed to be fighting the war on drugs, but, in effect, is actually interfering in domestic policy, in domestic politics, and picking sides in domestic politics in countries of the region.

Finally, there’s also been a pattern of funds being invested both from supporters of President Trump or supporters of the far right in the U.S., but also from the State Department, funds that have been directed to political activity in Brazil, which has systematically been political activity on the right, to support the candidacy of Flávio Bolsonaro and his supporters.

AMY GOODMAN: Flávio Bolsonaro asked Trump to designate two crime groups as terrorist groups. Does this open, as you’re talking about, U.S. — more of a U.S. military presence in Brazil if Bolsonaro wins? Also, Flávio Bolsonaro is vowing to build more maximum-security prisons similar to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, which the U.S. used to send hundreds of migrants to, until a judge ruled they had to be released.

RODRIGO NUNES: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the model here — one of the models here is very clearly Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, both in the sense of the public security policies of Nayib Bukele, so, you know, an intensification of the militarization of social conflict, and with absolute disregard to human rights, but also in the sense of a policy of automatic alignment with U.S. interests. So, we could see — we could end up seeing Brazil, like El Salvador, becoming a first line of support for Trump’s migration policies in the U.S., but also Flávio Bolsonaro has spoken very openly and very clearly about the fact that he intends — and, obviously, this is part of the bargain that he’s making with the U.S., the present U.S. government — he’s spoken very openly about the fact that if he wins, Brazil’s rare earths will be — will be entirely dedicated to, and other resources, like oil and so on, will be entirely dedicated to U.S. interests, which, obviously, in the U.S.’s present situation in its competition, international competition, with China, Brazil would be a major asset. Brazil has the second-largest reserves of rare earth in the world, one of the largest reserves of oil, as well, so this would be a major asset for the U.S. in the coming years.

AMY GOODMAN: Rodrigo Nunes, I want to thank you for being with us, Brazilian philosopher, author of Anatomy of Disintegration: What Brazil Reveals About the Global Far Right, out this week from Haymarket Books.

Coming up, “I am Jane Doe.” The rallying cry of outrage grows over Cornell University’s handling of allegations of a female student who says she was raped by seven fraternity members in 2024. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: The great Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso performing in New York City years ago.

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