On Sunday, Jair Bolsonaro won the runoff of the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections with 55 percent of the vote and became the 38th president of the country. He defeated Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party.
Most of the coverage coming from international media has been simplistic and is almost only repeating cliches such as calling him the “Brazilian Trump” or comparing him to right-wing candidates from other parts of the world. Although there are certainly some similarities to other candidates, these comparisons must be drawn with prudence.
Just like Trump, Bolsonaro is also perceived as someone that doesn’t behave the same way or say the same rehearsed lines as every other politician. He is perceived as an outsider, as he is breaking the standard polarization of the Brazilian elections between the Workers’ Party and the Social Democratic Party. On the other hand, Bolsonaro has been a member of Congress representing the state of Rio de Janeiro for almost 30 years. He is not a newcomer running for his first political experience, as Trump was.
If you have been following or at least read a piece or two about how “terrible” Bolsonaro is, you might be wondering how he managed to win by such a wide margin. Here are five common arguments that his voters have used to explain why they supported Bolsonaro — some stronger than others, but all well-known within the electorate and key to understanding Bolsonaro’s victory.
1. Government Corruption
After 13 years of Workers’ Party administration, most of its leadership went to jail after the corruption scandals of Mensalao in 2005 and Petrolao this spring, when Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato) managed to send its main leader and former Brazilian president, Lula da Silva, to prison. Many other Brazilian political parties and top-ranked politicians were hit by the operation as well, including Eduardo Cunha, former president of the Brazilian lower house of Congress and a member of current President Michel Temer’s party. Lava Jato has sent more than a hundred people to jail. Even Temer himself will be investigated the day after he leaves office and loses his presidential privileges. He might soon share the prison cell with Lula in the city of Curitiba.
In this context, Bolsonaro stands out as being one of the few politicians not involved in any scandal. He was never a member of the main political parties, so he is viewed as an outsider despite his long congressional career. He is also one of the few who is openly supporting the institutional fight that the prosecutors and the Judiciary are carrying against corrupt officials. He said he will appoint Judge Sergio Moro, the one in charge of Lava Jato, to the Supreme Court, if there is any vacancy on the court during his term.
In contrast, Haddad’s slogan was “Haddad is Lula,” and a presidential pardon for Lula as a key proposal from his party. This increased ill feeling among the electorate.
2. Law and Order
Violence in Brazil has risen, with murders reaching 29 per 100,000, one of the highest levels in the world and more than five times that of the U.S. Bolsonaro took a tough stance on crime, in contrast to the other candidates. He said he will push Congress into changing the law that now allows some criminals to leave prison after serving only one-sixth of their sentence. His opponent, Haddad, had said he will continue to release criminals from prison.
Bolsonaro stood out as a law-and-order candidate who would support tough laws to criminals, from thieves to corrupt politicians, while Haddad was seen as someone who would be soft on them — especially because some of his closest friends, like Lula, could benefit. This is one of the first issues that made Bolsonaro popular and helped him build his legion of followers, the so-called Bolsominions.
3. The Economy
In the last four years, Brazil has been in a deep economic crisis with double-digit unemployment and low confidence that the recovery is coming. The crisis began in 2014, when former President Dilma Rousseff (of the Workers’ Party) mismanaged the budget and the nation’s economic policy, using a fraud that helped her get reelected but ultimately led to her impeachment in 2016, with almost 70 percent popular support. Michel Temer, the VP who ascended to the presidency, passed some important reforms such as the spending cap amendment and the labor law reform that helped bring some recovery and small growth.
Bolsonaro, who has free-market University of Chicago economist Paulo Guedes on his team, supports these reforms and wants to expand on them. Haddad, on the other hand, has proposed to repeal Temer’s reforms and increase government spending and taxes. This drew many business owners and investors to support Bolsonaro. With most Brazilians supporting Rousseff’s impeachment and disapproving of her economic policy, Bolsonaro’s opposition to it has been a big vote-winner.
4. Controversial Lines
Bolsonaro has many absurd quotes from his term as a member of Congress. Some of them should definitely be condemned. His supporters, though, say most of them are old, from the 1990’s, and don’t represent his current beliefs. Other quotes, they say, are out of context to the point of distortion. Most of the Brazilian people seem to see it that way, as Bolsonaro always polled well among almost every group, including women, despite Haddad and Workers’ Party campaigners denouncing him as sexist on a daily basis.
5. The Alternative
Brazilian law requires absolute majority — more than 50 percent — in order for someone to get elected as president. If no candidate gets this in the first round, the two candidates who got the most votes participate in a runoff.
As Bolsonaro got 46 percent of the votes and Haddad got 29 percent, they went to the runoff last Sunday. Although most of the average Bolsonaro supporters focus on one of the first four arguments to justify their support, many focused on this one for the runoff: The alternative, Haddad, was much worse. As Americans know, when there are only two options, sometimes you pick the lesser of two evils.
This is where mainstream international media reported poorly. They focused on all the arguments against Bolsonaro while ignoring the reasons against voting for the other side.
Haddad’s proposals were genuinely radical. They included “democratic control” over the media (i.e., censorship) and “democratic control” over the prosecutors and the Judiciary (i.e., an erosion of judicial independence and the rule of law). Haddad openly argued that Rousseff’s impeachment and Lula’s corruption trial and conviction were both illegitimate, equivalent to a coup d’etat. But the majority of Brazilians supported both the impeachment of Dilma and the conviction of Lula, which led many who believe in freedom and democracy to vote for Bolsonaro or else abstain.
Polls also show that Bolsonaro was more popular among the college educated, especially in the cities. For instance, Sao Paulo, the largest and wealthiest city in the country, delivered 60 percent of its vote to Bolsonaro. Sao Paulo is a global city, with many international businesses and organizations, not some kind of nativist place.
With that context, it’s lazy just to think of Bolsonaro as a Brazilian version of Trump, even if there are some facile similarities. He became the political equivalent of what author Nassim Taleb calls “antifragile.” The more he was attacked, the stronger he became.
As 38th president of Brazil, he must now be evaluated on his policies. He has a good team of people who believe in freedom, the rule of law, and the reforms that Brazil needs to start growing again. The main concern Brazilians have right now is whether he will be able to deliver what he has promised.
Mauricio de Freitas Bento is a specialist in public policy and a freelance writer in Brazil.
