<\/p>\n
S\u00c3O PAULO: He\u2019s sowed doubt about electronic voting machines, undermined election officials and dubbed his main challenger a corrupt thief. An unabashed fan of the former military dictatorship, he has prodded his adoring base to \u201cgo to war if the election here Sunday is \u201cstolen\u201d.<\/p>\n
In the process, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, trailing in the polls for re-election to a second term, has raised fears of the old ghost that haunts Latin America: a coup. Or, perhaps, a Brazilian take on the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a new type of thief, the ones who want to steal our liberty, Bolsonaro told supporters in June. He added, If necessary, we will go to war.<\/p>\n
Thirty-seven years after Latin America\u2019s largest nation threw off the military dictatorship, the presidential election is shaping up as a referendum on democracy.<\/p>\n
The vote \u2013 Sunday is the first round \u2013 is pitting Bolsonaro\u2019s supporters, the most radical of whom want a strongman in office, against Brazilians eager to end his Trumpian run. Since taking office in 2019, Bolsonaro has overseen the accelerating destruction of the Amazon rainforest, dismissed the coronavirus pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Brazilians and weathered allegations that he has encouraged excessive use of force by police.<\/p>\n
Critics say he has also deeply undermined democracy \u2013 filling key positions with present and former military commanders, picking a war with the supreme court and stacking the prosecutor\u2019s office and police with loyalists.<\/p>\n
The choice between former president Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva, 76, and Bolsonaro, 67, has put Brazil on the front lines of the global tug of war between democracy and authoritarianism. The contest here is being closely watched in the US whose politics and polarisation Brazil has seemed to mirror.<\/p>\n
Sunday\u2019s vote smacks of the Biden-Trump showdown in 2020. Bolsonaro, who has maintained links with Trump strategists including Stephen K Bannon, is polling around 10 percentage points behind Lula, a lion of the Latin-American Left who has moved to the centre and cast himself as a defender of Brazil\u2019s young democracy.<\/p>\n
What is at stake at this moment is democracy or barbarism, Lula told supporters during an August rally in the city of Belo Horizonte.<\/p>\n
When pressed on his plans, Bolsonaro has said he would honour transparent election results, and analysts say his appetite for and ability to incite an old-school coup with tanks in the streets are probably limited. After a supreme court judge warned of the potential for political violence, Bolsonaro pointedly told his supporters to not stage a new Capitol invasion.<\/p>\n
But given his charged language, which often parrots that of his political lodestar, former US president Donald Trump, critics in Brazil and beyond are warning of the potential for disruption or violence.<\/p>\n
President Bolsonaro\u2019s reckless and dangerous rhetoric about electoral fraud raise(s) serious fears that he will potentially impede a peaceful transfer of power if he loses, a group of 39 US lawmakers, led by Senator Patrick J Leahy, wrote this month to President Joe Biden. Having personally experienced the horrors of the January 6 insurrection, we know all too well the consequences.<\/p>\n
Polls suggest Lula is in striking distance of 50% of the vote \u2013 the margin required to avoid an October 30 run-off. Should he win outright, any attempt by Bolsonaro to cling to power would come up against institutions that are weaker than those in the US \u2013 and would be the biggest challenge to democracy here since the end of the dictatorship in 1985. Should he win four more years, critics say, the world\u2019s fourth-largest democracy could suffer a further erosion of institutions. It would also mark another victory for the global far Right, after major wins this month in Italy and Sweden.<\/p>\n
A peaceful transfer of power after a Bolsonaro loss could be a landmark moment of a different sort. Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly isolated in the world and coming under greater criticism at home over Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. Elected autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey could face a challenging re-election campaign next year, as will Poland\u2019s hard-right government in parliamentary elections. Bolsonaro\u2019s going gently into the political night could signal that the illiberal tide, built on populism, polarisation, voter disdain and mis- and disinformation \u2013 could be beginning to ebb.<\/p>\n
If Bolsonaro loses, that will be significant, said Richard Youngs, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The fact that Brazil has gone backward in terms of democratic quality is quite a large part of the story in explaining these negative overall trends. I think a number of autocrats could very well be put on the back foot.<\/p>\n
Frederick Wassef, Bolsonaro\u2019s lawyer, said there had been flagrant manipulation of opinion polls and warned that various national and foreign forces were organising a coup against his client.<\/p>\n
Bolsonaro, he said, would take all legal measures\u201d to challenge any victory by Lula, and he suggested that the right wing would protest or stage national strikes if its candidate lost.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t believe in anything serious, in terms of violence, Wassef said. But the people are not going to stand by quietly as the chair is stolen from a president who everyone voted for and loved.\u201d<\/p>\n
For month, Bolsonaro has laid the groundwork to blame a loss on electoral fraud. In July, he called dozens of foreign diplomats to the presidential residence to hear his claims that the electronic voting system, deemed reliable by election specialists, was easily manipulated. He cited a 2018 police investigation into an incident in which a hacker broke into the national electoral authority\u2019s internal system. The authority has said the hacker did not gain access to voting machines or source codes, and could not alter the data or compromise results.<\/p>\n
The alleged electoral vulnerabilities \u2013 dismissed by independent experts \u2013 have been echoed by members of Brazil\u2019s military. Bolsonaro also has pressed for the military to conduct a vote count in parallel with election officials. A compromise with election officials will allow the military to audit a small sampling of the ballots cast on Sunday.<\/p>\n
With many military commanders in Bolsonaro\u2019s administration and other government posts, as many as 37% of Brazilians believe Bolsonaro might attempt a coup, according to a Datafolha poll in July.<\/p>\n
Brazil\u2019s right-wing dictatorship, which controlled the country from 1964 to 1985, tried to maintain a veneer of democracy. During its tenure, at least 434 people were killed or disappeared. Techniques for torturing dissidents included mock crucifixions. Congress remained open, but it operated largely as a rubber stamp. Elections were rigged, and most political parties were abolished.<\/p>\n
The military is seen as lacking the ambition to run the country, and few believe it has the stomach or interest for action that almost surely would lead to swift US and European sanctions.<\/p>\n
They don\u2019t respect democracy, they don\u2019t respect congress, and they don\u2019t respect the judiciary, said Jo\u00e3o Roberto Martins Filho, a professor at the Federal University of S\u00e3o Carlos and a former president of the Brazilian Association of Defence Studies. But they do respect the American generals. So they may have listened to all the messages the US has been sending them. They know that a traditional coup isn\u2019t going to work.<\/p>\n
That has not stopped coup chatter among some Brazilian power players, who worry about a return of the left-wing Workers\u2019 Party, which ran the country for 13 years until 2016 and saw one president impeached, and the other, Lula, jailed for a year and half for alleged corruption (the conviction was overturned eventually and Lula was released).<\/p>\n
In August, police, acting on warrants issued by the supreme court judge who heads Brazil\u2019s election authority, searched the homes of several pro-Bolsonaro business executives who allegedly had mused on a possible overthrow in a private text group.<\/p>\n
Analysts say the greater threat is a scenario from the Trump playbook, in which Bolsonaro alleges fraud and refuses to recognise the election result.<\/p>\n
He could summon his supporters to take to the streets and cause turmoil, especially if there\u2019s a second round, said Guilherme Casar\u00f5es, a political analyst at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in S\u00e3o Paulo. He could try to subvert the results or force a state of emergency so he could postpone the second round until next year.<\/p>\n
Bolsonaro, protected by his attorney general, has sidestepped official investigations of alleged wrongdoing. But various accusations, including a bloated coronavirus vaccine deal at the health ministry, could embroil him once he leaves office. A show of force could serve as a warning to Brazil\u2019s political establishment to back off.<\/p>\n
Uncertainty has put the country on edge. Former presidential candidates across the political spectrum have thrown their support behind Lula for the sake of \u201cdemocracy\u201d. In August, thousands of Brazilians gathered at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s law school, site of an anti-dictatorship protest in 1977, to rally for the rule of law. Activists drafted a new \u201cmanifesto\u201d, decrying the risk of a break with democracy.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve been through a hard time, very polarised, just like in the US, said one of the manifesto authors, Thiago Pinheiro Lima, a public prosecutor who works with election authorities. \u201cWe want to avoid an episode such as the Capitol invasion.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m afraid, he added. We have a fragile democracy, and we have been under strong and aggressive rhetoric of discrediting the institutions and the voting process for some years now. This makes us fear institutional rupture.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bolsonaro, who often speaks in contradictions, has sought to reassure and threaten.<\/p>\n
If it is God\u2019s will, I will continue, he said in an interview with a pool of evangelical podcasters this month. If it is not, we will pass on the sash, and I will retire, because at my age, I have nothing more to do here on Earth.\u201d <\/p>\n
Five days later, he had a message, telling a TV reporter, during a visit to London for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, that if I get less than 60% of the vote, something abnormal has happened.<\/p>\n
Some analysts caution that a loss for Bolsonaro should not be read as an endorsement of democracy but rather the rejection of a leader who did not deliver and has left the country with high inflation and a poverty rate roughly unchanged since the day he took office.<\/p>\n
This not about democracy; it\u2019s about the economy, said the Brazilian political analyst Matias Spektor, a visiting fellow at Princeton University. \u201cIt\u2019s because Bolsonaro failed.<\/p>\n