Another populist falls: Brazil ditches Bolsonaro takes a turn for the left
Lesson summary
Hi everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English lesson number 522 on Monday, November 14, 2022. JR is the producer and he has uploaded this full lesson to PlainEnglish.com/522.
Coming up today: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as “Lula,” defeated incumbent Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, in a closely-watched election in Latin America’s biggest economy. If you’re not from Brazil, I’ll give you everything you need to know about the election in the biggest country in Latin America. If you are from Brazil, I hope you find this to be a fair summary of what happened—I know passions run high on things like this. In the second half of the lesson, we’ll talk about the English expression “on a technicality.” And we have an election-themed quote of the week, which involves breakfast cereal. Stay tuned for that.
Lula returns to Brazil’s presidency, defeating incumbent Bolsonaro
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was president of Brazil for two terms from 2003 to 2010. When he was first elected, many wondered whether he would steer Brazil radically to the left: he was a former union organizer with a penchant for wearing Che Guevara t-shirts. In government, however, his policies, while definitely left-of-center, were much more moderate than many in the business community had feared. Lula benefitted from a boom in commodity prices and he used the proceeds to expand the size of the state. To his credit, he instituted a cash-transfer program that brought many people out of poverty.
Then things fell apart after he left office. His successor was Dilma Rouseff, an economist who had been Lula’s chief of staff. While she was president, an investigation revealed high levels of corruption among government, big private businesses, and state-owned companies. The scandal touched almost all levels of government, going back many years, and even reached eleven other countries. Dilma Rouseff was impeached and removed from office. Lula, the former president, was convicted of money laundering and corruption and he was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Jair Bolsonaro is a former army captain and was a backbench legislator from the state of São Paulo. In 2018, he won the presidency on a wave of frustration over corruption and a general sense that all of society was rigged against the average voter. He promised to tackle corruption, jumpstart the economy, and get crime under control.
His presidency had some successes. In his first year, his proposed constitutional reform of public pensions passed. It was a significant victory. He also presided over a partial privatization of the state electricity company. But these accomplishments were overshadowed by other controversies.
During his time as president, deforestation in the Amazon accelerated, as his rancher supporters encroached on what should have been protected forestland. He dismissed COVID-19 as a minor illness and he undermined the effort to vaccinate the population. His foreign policy was incoherent; he felt a personal affinity with Donald Trump, and signed onto many Trump-led causes. In a case of unfortunate timing, he visited Russia right before the invasion of Ukraine. And he let Brazil’s more important relationships in Latin America wither.
What’s more , his own family was under constant investigation for corruption themselves; a recent newspaper report showed that Bolsonaro family and friends had bought 51 properties in cash, without explaining how they, as public servants, paid for it all.
That was the backdrop of the 2022 election in Latin America’s biggest country. The country was deeply divided; the campaign was nasty. Bolsonaro had the support of socially conservative voters, evangelical Christians, farmers, ranchers, and gun owners. However, he had lost the support of business-focused voters, turned off by the multiple controversies of his presidency.
He squared off against Lula, who had been president during much better times. But the deep corruption exposed during Car Wash didn’t start the day Lula left office. Lula’s conviction for corruption was overturned after he served 18 months in jail. That’s why he could run again. Lula maintains his innocence. But his conviction wasn’t overturned because he was found innocent; it was overturned on a technicality . Still, he was able to remind voters that their lives were better when he was in office.
Brazilians deserved a better choice, but this was the choice they got. Initial polls showed Lula with a double-digit lead over Bolsonaro, but those polls proved to underestimate the incumbent president’s support. In the first round of voting on October 2, Lula won 48.4 percent of the vote, to Bolsonaro’s 43.2 percent. This was much closer than polls had predicted.
Since neither reached fifty percent, they went to the second round on October 28. In that head-to-head vote, Lula won by a razor-thin margin, gaining 50.9 percent to Bolsonaro’s 49.1 percent. It was the closest election result since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985; it was also the first time an incumbent president lost a bid for re-election.
Prior to the vote, Bolsonaro had said that the only way he could lose is if his opponents committed election fraud. Many worried he was laying the groundwork to contest the election results and hold onto power. However, after the results were released on election night, all of Brazil’s institutions, including many Bolsonaro allies, lined up to acknowledge Lula’s win.
Bolsonaro waited two days to speak. In his first comments, he did not concede or congratulate his opponent, but neither did he offer any resistance to the election results. Instead, he focused on his own party’s gains in Congress. His chief of staff acknowledged the inevitable—that Bolsonaro’s government would work with Lula’s team to ensure a smooth transition on January 1.
Congratulations to Lula. However, he will find his third term will be quite different from his first two. For one thing, he won both his previous terms with over sixty percent support and he had strong majorities in Congress; this time, he won just over 50 percent in the presidential vote, he will have a narrower majority in Congress, and the country is deeply divided. He acknowledged that in a speech after his victory, saying he was half happy and half worried.
Second, Lula won’t have waves of commodity cash to spend like last time. And third, he needs to win back trust and show that the corruption of Car Wash won’t come back in his third term.
Two related lessons
If you want to travel back in time a little, you can listen to Lesson 100 , which we did when Bolsonaro came to power. And in Lesson 34 , we talked about the Car Wash scandal and a related Netflix series—the Netflix series is good, you can still watch it, I think.
Learn English the way it’s really spoken
