Lula’s triumph is a win for Brazil’s political center — not the left

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president-elect, in São Paulo after winning the runoff election on Sunday. (Tuane Fernandes/Bloomberg News)
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president-elect, in São Paulo after winning the runoff election on Sunday. (Tuane Fernandes/Bloomberg News)

To hear it on the Brazilian street, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s narrow win in Sunday’s presidential election was a catharsis. Nearly four years of errant government by the most rancorous right-wing leader since democracy returned in 1985 had left a country storied for its levity and grace embittered, diplomatically damaged and divided against itself. “Brazil is back”, the former president intoned in a victory speech to effusive crowds in downtown São Paulo and across the country.

It might seem impolitic to demur amid this public outpouring, but Lula bested President Jair Bolsonaro by the thinnest margin on record: slightly more than 2 million votes out of 124 million cast. Half the country didn’t want him. Only Bolsonaro showed higher rejection rates and, even then, he shaved about 4 million votes off Lula’s first-round win on Oct. 2.

Brazilians have always stood a little further to the right than assumed. Bolsonaro gave their conservative side a charismatic public face, with a twist of entitlement. And his followers are not going away.

Electoral democracy is a humbling business, a lesson Lula has learned well. In 2002, after running three failed presidential campaigns as a fiery labor leader, he realized he needed a makeover. He dropped his fists, softened his socialist growl, swore to honor Brazil’s debts and contracts — and won.

Twenty years on, Lula returned to the same script: Rather than careen left to counter Bolsonaro’s extremism, he yanked his campaign hard toward the middle. The result was an unlikely coalition that gathered under a single tent establishment economists, disillusioned centrists and the hard left.

Lula named as his running mate former São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin, a center-right social democrat. He reeled in Simone Tebet, a former presidential hopeful from the conservative Brazilian Democratic Movement Party who had long criticized Lula and the corruption that flourished during about 14 years of Workers’ Party (PT) governments. One by one, he won over market-friendly economists who looked askance at the PT’s legacy of fiscal profligacy, but came to see in Lula a play for pragmatism. They represent a resilient Brazil, where a recent poll found that 79 percent of those surveyed support democracy as the best form of government — the largest share since 1989.

This might sound counterintuitive. To hear it from the excitable Brazilian media, until yesterday Latin America’s biggest democracy was at risk. Hostility had spread, public debate had become a shouting match and Sunday’s family lunch table had turned into a minefield. More than a few dispassionate Brazil watchers fretted aloud about blood in the streets, if not a coup.

Yet the day after the vote, Brazil is not in flames. After months of spreading distrust in electronic voting machines and threatening to challenge any result other than his reelection, Bolsonaro and his entourage have fallen mostly silent.

This might be brooding rather than circumspection: Bolsonaro doesn’t do contrition. Yet while he may have the teeth for insurrection, he has always lacked the muscle. The armed forces to whom he had repeatedly pandered did not march. The judiciary has stood strong, especially the Supreme Court. Not even Stephen K. Bannon got much of a rise by flogging Trumpian accusations of a stolen election.

Lula knows the risks. Three years ago, he was behind bars on a corruption conviction in Brazil’s landmark Car Wash anti-graft investigation, facing a career-ending ban from politics. All of this unraveled at astonishing speed. Having reviewed Lula’s cases, the Supreme Court by 2021 voided all his sentences and censured the trial judge, Sergio Moro, as biased, enabling Lula to run for office again. He is now the first elected Brazilian leader to win a third term, another democratic milestone.

Lula’s return will not guarantee governability or the end of political loathing and conflict. The array of political forces he has coalesced will prove challenging to hold together, much less lead. Governing Brazil calls for power-sharing, which is too often a fast pass to corruption. It also demands fiscal sobriety — a challenge in a country recovering from the pandemic, where legislators are practiced in holding presidents to ransom.

Leftist partisans can rightly celebrate their unprecedented democratic coalition as a firewall against right-wing extremism. Yet to hold that compact together Lula will need to summon all his pragmatism and political acumen, both conspicuously absent in Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

In his speech on Sunday, Lula left little doubt about the task ahead. “There are not two Brazils. We are one country, one people, one great nation”, he declared to the roaring crowd. That may be the easy part. As of this writing, Bolsonaro has yet to concede.

Mac Margolis, an adviser to the Brazilian Igarapé Institute, writes frequently about Latin America. He is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier”.

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