THE stakes could hardly be higher as Brazilians go to the polls this weekend. Despite a mammoth effort by Brazil’s democratic forces narrowing the gap, Jair Bolsonaro’s lead in the polls has not disappeared — and the threat he poses is difficult to exaggerate.
A far-right thug who calls Chilean butcher General Pinochet one of his heroes, claims that Brazil’s 1964-85 military dictatorship’s biggest flaw was failing to kill enough of its opponents and promises to permanently wipe out the country’s “reds” is a horrifying prospect for leadership of Latin America’s largest country.
Bolsonaro’s pledge to “drain the swamp” of political and corporate corruption is, like those of other far-right demagogues, entirely dishonest.
He proposes extensive privatisation of Brazil’s remaining state assets — a process that will, as elsewhere, line the pockets of the rich at the public’s expense — while his enthusiasm for tearing up restrictions on logging, mining and other extractive industries and ending protections and rights for indigenous peoples make him a straightforward candidate of Brazilian big business.
A refusal to acknowledge the reality of climate change — expressed in a proposal to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on limiting global warming, although he appeared to backtrack on that this week — carries particular risks in the country that is home to 60 per cent of the world’s largest rainforest.
Shocking as his prospectus is, Bolsonaro is far from unique. From Turkey’s Erdogan to India’s Modi, aggressive authoritarian nationalists willing to tear up the rules of the liberal political playbook and deploy the full machinery of state repression against their opponents are becoming increasingly common.
The surge in far-right violence in Brazil, with left-wing activists, women and journalists falling victim to lethal violence from Bolsonaro supporters, is familiar from other countries.
His likely international aggression — he has suggested setting up camps on Brazilian soil where enemies of Venezuela’s elected government could train to overthrow it — would be disastrous for the region, with echoes of the high-risk recklessness that characterises Turkey’s intervention in Syria or Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen.
And Bolsonaro emerges in the era of Donald Trump: the most powerful country of all is led by an arrogant, irresponsible gambler, whose contempt for international agreements and arms reduction treaties of decades’ standing has already made the world a much more dangerous place.
The blame for Bolsonaro lies at the feet of Brazil’s political Establishment.
The crooked elite that used constitutional trickery to oust elected president Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and instal a privatising, welfare-cutting, deforesting administration led by a convicted criminal has done much to undermine Brazilians’ trust in the political process.
The outrageous stitch-up that saw former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva thrown in jail and barred from standing in this year’s election, which all polling suggested he would have easily won, has more directly paved Bolsonaro’s path to the brink of power.
The launch this week of the Brazil Solidarity Initiative could not be more timely. The Morning Star sends its solidarity to Brazil’s Workers Party candidate Fernando Haddad and his communist running mate Manuela d’Avila: the mass mobilisation by the left has been of heroic proportions and if they win on Sunday a new chapter will open for Latin America.
But the fates of Lula and Rousseff show that a socialist-led Brazil will not be accepted by Brazilian or international capital and will need all our solidarity and support as it seeks to heal the country’s wounds.
And if Bolsonaro wins, our solidarity will be needed too: with a left that will be subject to intense, violent persecution; with women, black people and gay people whose government will treat their rights with contempt; with refugees forced to flee for their lives, and with progressive neighbours like Venezuela, which will face even graver attempts at destabilisation and counterrevolution. Whatever tomorrow’s vote brings, we must be ready.
