The following article is reprinted from Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, a publication from the Jacobin Foundation. Right now, you can subscribe to the print edition of Catalyst for just $20.
In 2022, Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right president of Brazil, went all in on a strategy of sowing doubt about his country’s ability to conduct a free and fair election. Fuming at the Federal Supreme Court (STF) for investigating him and his allies for antidemocratic words and deeds, including their participation in a vast conspiracy to disseminate fake news during the 2018 presidential election, Bolsonaro urged his supporters to publicly challenge the highest court of Latin America’s largest nation on September 7, 2021, Brazil’s Independence Day. The intended show of strength largely fell flat. Consistently trailing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the polls, Bolsonaro spent the campaign all but announcing his intentions to subvert Brazilian democracy, resorting to openly debasing his country’s electoral integrity in the hopes that there would be real questions about who won in October 2022. In Brazil, like in the United States, the idea that the voting system is routinely manipulated by corrupt officials and unscrupulous partisans became a delusion of the right-wing information ecosystem. Bolsonaro frantically kicked up dust to throw the race into disarray.
As expected, however, Lula, the former factory worker who governed Brazil from 2003 to 2011, won with sixty million votes to Bolsonaro’s fifty-eight million. Some interpreted his narrow victory as a sign of weakness. After all, despite presiding over a calamitous response to the pandemic and earning universal condemnation for…
Auteur: Andre Pagliarini
