Rising Violence and the Risk of Democratic Rupture: the 2022 Presidential Elections in Brazil - 8/25/22

By Vanessa Maria de Castro

In Bolsonaro’s Brazil, words, debates, and ideas are not the most salient political weapons. Instead, there is a prevailing appeal to brute force and violence, such that political differences acquire a new level of dispute that often breaks with the institutional order.

This has been the tone of the Bolsonaro administration, and this institutional climate has also reverberated within the Armed Forces. Brazil has a civilian government, but it is effectively coopted by the military.

The struggle for those who want to protect Brazilian democracy is to preserve it in the face of the serious risks it faces this presidential election year, especially if Bolsonaro is reelected. The incumbent has been unable to campaign effectively for reelection. All electoral polls so far have shown that former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from the Workers' Party, will win the elections in any scenario, and may even be elected in the first round of voting, held on October 2nd. Still, the challenges are many, and the struggle to guarantee a democratic election is constant.

The radicalization of hate speech that was the hallmark of Bolsonaro's 2018 campaign emerges again, placing the nation on alert for what could happen between August and December 2022. Afte all, even if Lula is elected, he would not be sworn in until January 1, 2023.

If candidate Bolsonaro did so much to deconstruct the minimal civilizing ties of electoral grammar in a democracy during the 2018 campaign, we can expect an even more aggravated and violent scenario on the part of him and his supporters this year. The memory of September 1, 2018 is still strong, when, in a campaign speech in the state of Acre, in the Northern Region of Brazil, Bolsonaro held a camera tripod as if it were a machine gun, and while simulating shooting he said: "Let's go shoot the Petralhada here in Acre.” The “Petralhada” he was referring to were Workers' Party (PT) voters, at the time aligned behind their presidential candidate, Fernando Haddad.

This fact is emblematic for understanding what has been happening in Brazil in 2022, a process that culminated in the July 10 murder of Marcelo Aloizio Arruda, a municipal guard and treasurer of the Workers' Party in Foz do Iguaçu, Paraná, by a Bolsonaro supporter. Arruda was celebrating his 50th birthday, and the theme of the party was associated with Lula's presidential campaign. A supporter of Bolsonaro, irritated by the theme of the celebration,  stormed the party shooting at Arruda, shouting “here, it’s Bolsonaro”.

It seems that Bolsonaro's wishes have found an echo in some of his followers. The gravity of this violent attack unfolded in the president's comments days later as he reduced what happened to a casual fight.

Bolsonaro's political agenda is anchored in hate speech, fake news, and the construction of untruths.

Data on lethality show that Brazil is bleeding. Indigenous people are experiencing a war in defense of their territories. Under Bolsonaro, there has been a 61% increase in the number of murders of indigenous people between 2019 and 2020, as shown by the Report on Violence Against Indigenous Peoples in Brazil CIMI - 2020. In a survey I conducted in 2018 with Bolsonaro voters, I presented the thesis that “Bolsonaro’s rhetoric legitimates the right to kill”, with an analogy to the idea of ​​an enemy. Since then, data has shown that this is happening.

In Brazil, there is a climate that fosters gun ownership mediated by Bolsonaro's arms policy, and the data are alarming. The 2022 Public Security Yearbook shows that there was a 473% increase in the number of firearms licenses between 2018 and June 2022. Another datapoint that reflects the increasingly armed civilian population in Brazil is the 575% increase in individuals with firearms registered between 2018 and June 2022

The politically motivated assassination of Marcelo Aloisio Arruda may be just the beginning of the escalation of violence that we will witness during these months of electoral campaign. Every day there are threats to progressive candidacies made by Bolsonaro supporters in different parts of the country. Furthermore, the Bolsonarista discourse that delegitimizes the electoral process through electronic voting machines, which culminated in a meeting with several ambassadors convened by Bolsonaro to decry electronic voting machines and the Federal Supreme Court (STF).

On October 2, 2022, 154,454,011 million voters will vote to decide which Brazil we will have beginning in 2023.

With a political base embedded in the increasingly armed civilian population and the structural alignment of the Armed Forces with President Bolsonaro, Brazil could experience disruptive moments in the democratic order. Brazilian democracy is riven by fissures due to a government that seeks daily to unravel the country’s democratic fabric, and on January 1, 2023 we will know how our democracy will behave, in the hope that better days will come.

Vanessa Maria de Castro is a professor at the Graduate Program in Human Rights at the University of Brasilia