The Meaning of 2022 by Andre Pagliarini - 04/02/22
In 2022, the last year of his presidential term, Jair Bolsonaro will preside over official commemorations of Brazil’s bicentennial anniversary. Various government agencies and institutions—including the National Archives, National Library, and the Chamber of Deputies—have already announced plans to mark the occasion. This will be a momentous opportunity to reflect on the achievements and shortcomings of Brazilian society in the two centuries that it has governed itself.
But this year is not only important for symbolic reasons. Less than a month after Brazilians mark the bicentennial, they will head to the polls for the first round of voting in the presidential election. It is no exaggeration to say that this will be the most important election in the world in 2022 and arguably the weightiest of Brazil’s recent history. The stakes of the race are clear: a second term for Bolsonaro would represent a hard-fought victory for Brazil’s most conservative elements while deepening the country’s international isolation. His defeat would signal an attempt to turn the page from what has been, by various objective measures, a calamitous tenure. As political winds shift in Latin America, favoring progressive forces in recent years from Bolivia and Peru to Chile, what happens in Brazil will have an outsize influence on the region’s trajectory.
If the election were held today, every poll indicates that former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who governed the country from 2003-2011, would win handily. Bolsonaro remains in second but consistently trails the former president by double digits. This dynamic is telling. While they are by no means the only candidates in the running, the endurance of Lula and Bolsonaro at the top of the polls suggests the race will share several broad features with the 2018 election. The first is a general and often irrational hostility toward the left and center-left from important establishment voices. The president and his allies in particular will undoubtedly go to great lengths to reanimate the rabid anti-Workers’ Party sentiment—antipetismo—that propelled an outspoken bit player in Congress like Bolsonaro to the top job in 2018.
Once again, social media will be a key battleground after it was used relentlessly four years ago to push fake news about Fernando Haddad, the Workers’ Party candidate handpicked by Lula. But even if rightwing hysterics reemerge with the prospect of a Lula victory, it is important to recognize that 2022 is not 2018. Four years ago, Lula was imprisoned on corruption charges and deemed ineligible to seek a third term in office. Haddad’s candidacy was a hasty improvisation. Now, the trial that disqualified Lula has been vacated due to the egregious ethical violations of the presiding judge and Bolsonaro is the incumbent. It is not clear Bolsonaro will manage to make antipetismo the dominant refrain of this campaign.
Another similarity between this campaign and the last one is the center-left’s pursuit of a broad front with centrist forces to counter a coalition anchored by the far right. Haddad tried but failed to get public expressions of support from the likes of former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Henrique Meirelles, appointed by President Lula in 2003 to head Brazil’s Central Bank. Already things look more promising for Lula. Former São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin, who just left the center-right Party of Brazilian Social Democracy, his political home for decades, is eagerly moving behind the scenes to be Lula’s vice presidential nominee. Alckmin has gone so far as to set aside a gubernatorial run in which he would have been the favorite in order to leave himself open to run alongside Lula, who defeated Alckmin in the 2006 presidential campaign. It is largely a given that figures like Gilberto Kassab, who commands the centrist Social Democratic Party (PSD), and former House speaker Rodrigo Maia will support Lula in an October 30 runoff in no presidential candidate wins a majority in the Oct 2 first round of the elections. Unlike 2018, important establishment figures are moving into Lula’s orbit seemingly of their own volition, a promising sign not only for Lula’s campaign but for his ability to govern should he win.
Finally, like 2018, this campaign is shaping up to be a referendum on the forces of incumbency. Last time, of course, Bolsonaro was not running against a sitting Workers’ Party president. Indeed, the outgoing president, Michel Temer, had been the tip of the spear that ousted the Workers’ Party with the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016. But Bolsonaro, by riding a rising tide of antipetismo, framed the race as a crusade against the Workers’ Party’s thirteen years in power. Bolsonaro, now the incumbent, faces the incredibly difficult challenge of defending his administration, especially his policies on Covid-19. He is no longer the plucky outsider taking on the political juggernaut that the Workers’ Party had become in the decades since its founding. Bolsonaro and his family are now the powers that be. If the 2022 campaign is a referendum solely on their stewardship, the outcome will not be close.
