Roberto Casimiro/Fotoarena/Sipa USA via AP Images
The president-elect of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, makes a statement to the press in São Paulo, Brazil, on October 30, 2022, after the counting of votes.
In the runoff election for the presidency of Brazil on Sunday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva narrowly defeated the far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, by 51 to 49 percent. It’s an enormous victory and incredible comeback for Lula, his staff, and the thousands of ordinary Brazilians who worked themselves to the bone on the campaign.
But there is an international element as well. If Joe Biden had not won the U.S. election in 2020, it’s highly likely that Lula would not have been able to claim victory. Bolsonaro would have successfully rigged the vote, or simply attempted a putsch—and a second-term Donald Trump would have helped him do it. The danger of Bolsonaro and his movement remains, but they have suffered a major setback.
Here’s why. First, there is the recent context. Clearly inspired by Trump and the poisonous miasma of American right-wing media, Bolsonaro had for years spread conspiratorial insanity about Brazil’s electoral machinery (which in reality is famously efficient and reliable). This is becoming a classic political tactic of the extreme right around the world: spread disinformation about voting as preparation to discredit the election and seize power by force or fraud should you lose.
In July 2021, Biden’s pick for CIA director, William Burns—unusually, a career diplomat with decades of experience in the State Department—met with Bolsonaro face-to-face, along with his top staff, and told them to knock it off. Reuters reported: “Burns was making it clear that elections were not an issue that they should mess with,” and that this was widely understood to be a message carried from the White House.
Democratic members of Congress backed him up. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Tim Kaine (D-VA), and several other Senate Democrats sponsored a resolution supporting Brazilian democracy, which eventually sailed through the House and the Senate.
Then, after news outlets called the election for Lula, Biden helped orchestrate a quick international embrace of him as president-elect. Quickly afterward, Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak all released statements congratulating Lula—with a clear implicit warning of consequences should Bolsonaro try to cling to power.
Now, a few caveats are in order. After meeting with Burns, Bolsonaro did not actually stop telling lies about Brazil’s democracy. Worse, on the day of the runoff, police in heavily pro-Lula areas—Brazilian cops, just like many American ones, are violently right-wing—apparently attempted to suppress the vote by setting up roadblocks. It’s surely why Lula got numerically fewer votes in the state of Amapá in the runoff than he did in the first round, when there were six candidates.
That said, one shouldn’t underestimate the amount of hard and soft power wielded by the United States and its allies, particularly in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. controls the plumbing of the global financial system, the world reserve currency, and by far the largest military, and anyone who defies it risks sanctions, trade disruptions, espionage, or worse. There’s a reason why almost every country heavily prioritizes good relations with the U.S.
If Trump were president today, he almost certainly would have given Bolsonaro all the help he needed.
Meanwhile, the CIA and the U.S. military are justly notorious in Latin America for overthrowing left-wing governments (which is why it is more than a little rich to hear Burns lecture an elected president about democracy). That very record no doubt gave someone like Bolsonaro pause. He’s a guy who openly longs for the days of Brazil’s military dictatorship—but that regime was set up with the help of U.S. military and intelligence, and relied heavily on U.S. backing to maintain its grip on the country. Burns wasn’t just telling Bolsonaro not to overthrow democracy, but also that if he did, he would not get any Cold War–style backing from American forces.
All this likely helps explain why the Bolsonaro government’s efforts to cheat on Election Day were somewhat half-hearted, and the opposition so determined. The Washington Post reports that the police roadblocks were lifted by about 3 p.m., in response to a threat from the judge overseeing the election that the police director would be fined almost $100,000 per hour if he defied orders to lift them.
Conversely, if Trump were president today, he almost certainly would have given Bolsonaro all the help he needed. The two were close politically and personally—indeed, Bolsonaro is probably the only leader of a major country who is comparably mentally deranged. Instead of the savvy diplomat Burns, the CIA would be run by a literal torturer. All Trump would have had to do is provide enough encouragement and diplomatic cover for Bolsonaro’s police goons to swing the total vote count by a couple more percentage points. Without any fear of U.S. reprisals—in fact, with the loud encouragement of the American president—can there be any doubt that he would have succeeded?
Again, the fight is not over yet. Bolsonaro did not win, but he did get an alarming number of votes. Bolsonaro has yet to concede the election, but he has also made no move to call it into question or enlist the military to hold onto the presidency by force. That’s always possible. But seizing power will be dramatically harder than it would have been with American backing.
Now, it almost goes without saying that there were some cynical motivations for the Biden administration here. It’s probably the case that Bolsonaro’s wildly erratic behavior and efforts to burn the Amazon rain forest to the ground as part of a lunatic culture war crusade prompted Biden’s team as much as any respect for international democracy. (Recent studies have found the Amazon has become a net carbon source thanks to land use changes; should the whole region turn into grasslands for cattle, it would be a catastrophe for the climate.)
Lula, by contrast, is a much more appealing prospect for both American empire and global capitalism. His previous term in office showed him to be basically a moderate social democrat who won’t rock the boat much—someone who will expand welfare programs, raise taxation on the rich, and regulate business somewhat, but not conduct massive expropriations. He’s a guy who named Geraldo Alckmin, a center-right former opponent, as his running mate. One of Lula’s few actual radical proposals is to rapidly decarbonize Brazilian energy use and protect the Amazon, both of which are heartily welcomed in Biden’s Washington as obviously in America’s interests as well.
But even if the motivations of the Biden administration were less than pristine, their efforts to protect Brazilian democracy had genuine positive effects. The ability of Brazilians to choose their own leader in future elections is preserved, at least for now. A Bolsonaro dictatorship would not just be destabilizing to the climate and international trade, it would have been ferally abusive toward poor and minority Brazilians, as well as monumentally corrupt and despotic. It would have strengthened the international movement toward a quasi-fascist authoritarianism, including in the U.S.
As I have previously argued, it’s once again about as decent a foreign policy as one could reasonably expect from the United States—where the national interest is viewed in cautious and positive-sum terms where possible, and occasionally even a degree of actual human decency creeps in.
