This October, Brazilian voters will elect their next president to a four-year term. The Lusophone giant stands as an anomaly among its Latin American neighbors. Other recent elections in the region, such as those in Peru and Colombia, have featured the rise of candidates whose movements have had little or no experience in national government. By contrast, Brazil is set to choose between two re-elections — granting a second term to its current right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, or a third term to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who led a center-left government between 2003 and 2010. Combined, these men command about 76% of the electorate according to polling aggregations, with Lula solidly in the lead at 45% against Bolsonaro’s 31%. All other candidates lie below the 10% threshold.
One advantage of this scenario is that both candidates have been tested against the realities of government, with track records for Brazilians to compare and contrast. Bolsonaro won the 2018 election as an anti-establishment figure, harnessing widespread dissatisfaction against Lula’s Workers’ Party in an asymmetrical campaign pitching change against continuity. After four years of the Bolsonaro presidency, Brazilians are set to choose between the known path on which they tread today and the familiar alternative once offered by the Workers’ Party. A careful look at both track records will reveal that while Lula is the more responsible choice, neither candidate will likely deliver the changes that Brazil needs to flourish.
To understand why, it is first crucial to understand the problems that persisted during both governments. Political corruption is perhaps the most glaring — between 2003 and 2010, when Lula was in office, Brazil’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) remained relatively constant, falling from 3.9/10 in 2003 to 3.7/10 in 2010, where a higher number implies lower levels of corruption. While corruption decreased slightly under Bolsonaro, with Brazil’s CPI rising from 35/100 in 2019 to 38/100 in 2021, this decrease does not represent a systematic break with the political corruption of previous years, since Brazil’s average score for the four years prior to Bolsonaro was 37.5/100.
Similarly, neither presidency oversaw the implementation of a sustainable and competitive economic model. The 2004-2014 commodity export boom largely overlapped with Lula’s time in office, allowing him to sharply reduce poverty from 42% in 2003 to 24% in 2011, according to World Bank Data, largely through generous social programs. Yet, during this same period, Lula failed to make the productive investments and institutional changes necessary to build a private sector capable of sustaining these programs. This prompted his successor, Dilma Rousseff, to borrow irresponsibly and impose punitive measures on businesses in order to prop up the Lula-era welfare state once the commodity boom was over. Thus, while other countries in the region, such as Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, continued to expand their economies between 2012 and 2018, Brazil’s GDP per capita stagnated, reaching just 95% of its 2012 level by 2018. Consequently, poverty reduction likewise stagnated. While 24% of Brazilians were poor in 2011, when Lula left office, 21% were poor eight years later, when Bolsonaro rose to power.
Much of Bolsonaro’s initial appeal to voters was rooted in his promise to transform “Brazil’s swollen and inefficient state,” as one piece from The Economist states. However, he failed to carry out any significant structural reforms in his first year in office. When the COVID-19 Pandemic struck, Bolsonaro sought to preserve his popularity by expanding the country’s anti-poverty benefits at a time of growing economic vulnerability. In the short term, this allowed Brazil to escape the regional trend of rising poverty associated with the pandemic — indeed, poverty fell sharply from 21% to 13% between 2019 and 2020. However, as this expanded aid system proved even more unsustainable than that of the Lula era, the Bolsonaro government quickly changed tactics in 2021, curtailing the aid package and drastically pushing millions back into poverty in order to avoid a debt crisis. According to some projections, poverty in Brazil will rise back to pre-2012 levels this year, and its economic growth is expected to be the second lowest in South America, at a mere 0.8%. With scarce resources to provide further aid to the poor and little political will to pursue economic reforms, it is hard to see how either candidate could solve these problems without drastically changing their approaches towards government, pursuing a kind of policy long-termism that would prove politically unattractive in the short run.
These issues notwithstanding, Lula is clearly the preferable candidate in terms of environmental conservation, a crucial issue for a country that remains the primary steward of the Amazon rainforest. Between 1995 and 2002, the Brazilian Amazon lost an average of 19,141 square kilometers a year. Lula brought this down to an average of about 15,687 between 2003 and 2010, showing a clearly decreasing trend from over 25,000 during his first year in office to 7,000 during his last one. Under Bolsonaro, while the average rate of deforestation has been lower than under Lula, there has been a clearly increasing trend from 7,536 in 2018, the year of his election, to 10,476 in 2021, the last year for which data is available. With a credible track record of curtailing deforestation, unlike his opponent, Lula recently announced that he hopes to achieve “net zero deforestation” by 2026, such that any further losses would be offset by forest restoration projects. At the same time, he has distanced himself from fiscally irresponsible non-solutions to the climate crisis promoted by more radical leftists elsewhere in Latin America, claiming, for instance, that he would not seek to abolish oil exploration, as Colombian president-elect Gustavo Petro promised to do in his country.
Moreover, while Brazil has not seen Lula handle a true crisis, its experience with Bolsonaro at the height of the pandemic raises serious concerns about the latter. Brazil pursued far less stringent measures than most of its neighbors and its people faced an onslaught of toxic misinformation from their head of state, who at various points minimized the consequences of the virus and undermined credibility in the vaccination process. Largely as a result, Brazil saw the second-highest cumulative death toll from COVID-19 in Latin America. With virtually no long-term benefits resulting from this highly intentional course of action, it can be attributed only to either political opportunism or ideological fanaticism, and neither are desirable qualities in a leader.
Just as crucially, Bolsonaro has repeatedly raised unfounded suspicions of electoral fraud against him and threatened that his defeat would result in a popular uproar worse than that of the events of January 6 in the United States. In a deeply flawed but firmly democratic country like Brazil, these practices are the mark of a demagogue, and place him solidly among the ranks of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, and the other demagogues of the far left that Bolsonaro claims to oppose. Lula, for all of his faults, is a committed democrat by comparison.
The road ahead for Brazil will likely be difficult, regardless of the choice voters make in October. Yet, for institutional and environmental reasons, a third term for Lula would be far less dangerous than a second term for Bolsonaro.