Perry Bacon: Good morning. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Michael Paarlberg. He’s a political scientist at Virginia Commonwealth University. He’s an expert in politics in Latin America, and we’re going to discuss both the initial early round of the Brazil election and the upcoming October 25 runoff between Lula and Bolsonaro. So Michael, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.
Michael Paarlberg: Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Bacon: Let me start with where we are. The first round, Bolsonaro I think got 47 percent, Lula 45 percent. So we’re having now a general election runoff campaign. Is Bolsonaro—usually the person who’s ahead at the first round usually wins in most US elections, but is it possible Lula wins, or is Bolsonaro the heavy favorite right now to win the runoff?
Paarlberg: Yeah, it’s going to be an uphill battle. So Lula is—
Bacon: Uphill for Lula, right?
Paarlberg: Yeah, for Lula. He’s close, but all of those polls predicted that he was going to come out ahead in the runoff. Everyone had predicted there was going to be a runoff, because there were multiple candidates in the race, but the other third party candidates were all on the right, so they were going to split the vote from the right, from Flávio Bolsonaro. In fact, Flávio came out on top, and so that gives Lula a lot fewer paths to victory.
He’s not going to take votes from the smaller right-wing parties. His only real possibility is to convince some of the 33 million Brazilians who did not vote in the first round to vote for him in the second round. That seems to be his strategy.
It’s an iffy strategy, because the number of abstentions is pretty solid and doesn’t really change that much election to election, so it would be historically unprecedented for him to turn out a lot of non-voters in the second round.
Bacon: Interesting. We don’t know much about Flávio Bolsonaro. Talk about him. Most of the articles in the US, at least the Western press, are, he is the son of the former president. But he’s a politician himself, so talk about who he is and how he might be different than his father.
Paarlberg: So he’s definitely presented as a more polished version of his father. He’s obviously come from the same family, and so the same political movement of Bolsonarismo, which is generally characterized as far right. People generally think of the father, Jair Bolsonaro, as more vulgar, more combative, and Flávio is smoother. He’s the more palatable face of this both family and the political movement.
However, he’s still, in terms of policy, pretty much the same as his father, in terms of promising to free his father from house arrest for attempting to overthrow the government and possibly kill Lula in 2022. I was there for the election, monitoring the election in the state of Pará.
But he himself has also been caught up in corruption scandals, the Casilinha scandal, a kickback scheme in which when he was a state legislator for Rio de Janeiro he allegedly was taking kickbacks from government employee salaries. The evidence for that was suppressed by a higher court, no criminal charges.
He’s also been implicated in the Banco Master scandal, which is a scandal that has affected both the right and the left. But interestingly, the left, the Workers’ Party and Lula, have suffered more from that, despite that Flávio was directly implicated and Lula is only indirectly implicated.
So he’s definitely still a controversial figure. Both candidates have high negatives. Something like 51 percent of voters say they would never vote for Lula, and a slightly lower number, like 48 percent, say they would never vote for Flávio Bolsonaro, or probably any Bolsonaro.
Bacon: Why is Lula vulnerable? What are his main political problems?
Paarlberg: Number one, he’s 80 years old. He’s not exhibiting the signs of decline that former President Biden did, but it’s not just his physical vigor, which he has definitely played up, filming himself going to the gym and whatnot. It’s the fact that he is at this point seen as the establishment. He has been the defining figure of Brazilian politics for an entire generation. He would be running for his fourth term.
And so everyone who is dissatisfied with the direction that Brazil is going associates him and his government and his party with that. Which is much to the chagrin of Lula himself, who started his career in the ’80s as an anti-government activist, a labor union leader. But at this point, he is the most recognizable politician.
Now, Lula thinks it’s very unfair, because he is running on pretty much a bread and butter economic platform, that under his current term, his third term, the economy has improved. We’ve seen extreme poverty drop by 40 percent. We’ve seen unemployment drop by 40 percent. It’s the lowest unemployment rate Brazil has seen in decades. Real wages have gone up.
By any standard of economic voting, we would expect him to be running away with this. So the fact that he is not speaks to the fact that this is not primarily an election that’s based on economic voting and class-based voting, which is a presupposition that Lula and the Workers’ Party have had about the Brazilian electorate, which I would say is a little bit out of touch with what has happened to the Brazilian electorate shifting to the right, especially on social issues, in the last couple decades.
Bacon: So you did an interview with the Center for International Policy, and that’s what got me inspired to talk to you, and you said something pretty interesting. You talked about Brazilian unemployment rate is at an historic low. Poverty’s been halved.
So I was reading it and thinking, do people in Brazil appreciate this economic growth and so on? Because Joe Biden—the inflation was high, but Joe Biden would have said some of these things in the US. The feelings about the economy among US citizens were way more negative than the actual data was in 2023, 2024. Is it similar there, where the Brazilian electorate does not see the economy the way it might look objectively?
Paarlberg: Yeah, I say that Brazil is the country that is most like the US in terms of political trends. There’s a big evangelical Christian vote. There’s a big agribusiness footprint in the economy. There’s regional and racial differences. It’s a lot like the US in many ways. And I jokingly described this election in that interview as a vibes-based election, because it is kind of vibes-based.
But the point is that Lula, the government, and really the incumbents are unable to set what those vibes are. Those vibes are set by forces outside of their control: the media, social media, these churches, and particularly these social right-wing forces that have come to not only be turnout machines for the right but also really set the political narrative. And that’s something that Lula has struggled to make this election about.
He wants to make it about the economic indicators, and as you said, I’m sure people are happier than they were when he first came into office in terms of economics, but they still feel a certain dissatisfaction with the direction the country is going, and a lot of that has to do with issues that are not economic.
It has to do with perceptions of corruption, perceptions of crime, perceptions of divisive social issues around religion and gender. It has to do with national identity. And all these things are harder for a left-wing populist to take advantage of, and it’s easier for a right-wing populist to take advantage of.
Bacon: And you called it a vibes-based election, but these vibes come from institutions: media conglomerates, mega churches, Silicon Valley, Trump, none of whom are friendly to Lula. That also made me think there’s a US parallel here, as we talk about vibes a lot, but vibes are not just from anywhere. Some of these institutions are against Lula, is what you’re getting at, right?
Paarlberg: Yeah. To take one in particular, the growth of the evangelical churches. At this point, about a third of the country is evangelical Christian, which may surprise some viewers, listeners, because we think of Latin America, especially Brazil, we think Catholicism, right?
But there are many parts of Latin America where they’re equal to, and in fact in some parts of Central America they outnumber, the Catholics. And evangelicals, according to polls, vote 73 percent against Lula, so there is a strong correlation between that and voting with the right.
What’s notable too is that the evangelical, what are called Pentecostal churches—I don’t know if they’re literally the same as Pentecostal churches in the US, but the idea is taking the form of charismatic forms of worship, speaking in tongues, which in the US, where I’m at, would be associated with Appalachia and handling rattlesnakes and whatnot. They appeal specifically to Lula’s former base.
So Lula’s base, the Workers’ Party base, really shifted under Lula, because he’s such a defining figure. At one point it was the urban working class in São Paulo. That’s where manufacturing was, where the factory workers were. Lula himself came out of the Metalworkers Union, and that’s who voted for the Workers’ Party, the urban proletariat.
And then under Lula’s first term, he really shifted his base of support to the rural poor, particularly in the northeast, where Lula is originally from. And so his voter base became largely rural poor Afro-Brazilian voters in the northeast, some of whom did migrate to the cities, and they were solid PT voters for a long time, in part due to redistributive programs that Lula initiated under his first two terms.
That’s the exact population that the Pentecostal churches are capturing. A lot of the new shift to the right has been working class and Afro-Brazilian, and that’s something that the Workers’ Party really has not been able to counteract.
Bacon: Because it’s not about economics, it’s about social values issues. What are the issues there? Is it transgender rights? Is it gay rights? Is it abortion? In the US we’re having a big transgender fight, obviously. So are these same issues there too?
Paarlberg: You can trace direct trends from one to the other. In the election in which Jair Bolsonaro the father won, there were really quite comical rumors going around social media, particularly WhatsApp, through WhatsApp groups. Brazil is the world’s largest user of WhatsApp.
One was that there was a plan by then candidate Haddad, who was the left-wing candidate, to create a national gender board that would determine what gender everyone’s babies would be, and possibly even kidnap everyone’s babies and give them mandatory gender assignment surgery.
There was another one that all the government funded daycare centers were giving baby bottles with the nipples shaped like penises, to teach the little kids to become gay. And this is something that half of Brazil got on WhatsApp, and they believed it, and they voted for Bolsonaro.
I joke with my students that this is what we political scientists call low information voters, but the thing about low information voters is they’re still voters, right?
Bacon: They still get to vote.
Paarlberg: Yeah. But obviously that’s to say, sure, maybe some people are tricked. But it’s also, I think you can take another argument, contrary to the whole what’s the matter with Kansas argument, that these people are being tricked into voting against their economic self-interest.
There’s a lot of voters who determine that these issues are their self-interest. They’re more important to them than the minimum wage or unemployment, and maybe they can count on the minimum wage being high enough and unemployment being low enough that they can focus on these other social issues.
Bacon: Now I want to ask about Trump and the US. I assume Trump and Rubio and the administration in Washington would prefer Bolsonaro win. Obviously the US has played a very active role in Venezuela, but how much of a role is Trump and his administration playing to actually help Bolsonaro win?
Are they very involved, not involved? Because your allies can win without you boosting them, but are they trying to boost Bolsonaro and ensure he wins?
Paarlberg: Yeah, the Trump administration’s definitely trying to boost Bolsonaro. It’s been quite blatant election interference. A lot has been done at the behest of another Bolsonaro, Eduardo Bolsonaro, another one of Jair Bolsonaro’s sons who’s in the US and actively lobbying the US on very specific things.
He got Trump to impose tariffs, selective sanctions on the judiciary, specifically for having convicted and jailed his father. And this has been very controversial in Brazil because, of course, tariffs hurt the average Brazilian consumer. So there’s this attitude that Eduardo Bolsonaro is willing to crash the Brazilian economy to save his father.
But Trump has done other things. He has given a visa sanction to the Brazilian ambassador to the US, and he has most concerningly suggested that if Lula were to win, he would question the integrity of the electoral process. And this is something that Jair Bolsonaro, the father, did when he tried to initiate a coup in 2022, ‘23, and nearly succeeded.
Bacon: And do we think those efforts by Trump are affecting the election results, or do you think the election results are more about this anti-incumbent thing that’s happening both in Brazil and everywhere?
Paarlberg: Yeah, no, I think it’s mostly about domestic issues, like any election. I think it does signal that if Flávio were to win, he would be on the good side of the United States, and so that bolsters his claims that he would be a good steward, or he would attract more investment, or things like that.
But no, it really is about the anti-establishment feeling within Brazil, which revolves around a lot of things. Which is a little bit ironic, given that both Flávio Bolsonaro and Jair Bolsonaro are very much the establishment. They were both career politicians, spent basically their entire careers almost in office in Congress.
So, to go back to the vibes-based analogy, it’s not an accurate representation of who is the establishment and who isn’t. But Bolsonarismo has been able to position itself as an anti-establishment movement.
Bacon: Jair Bolsonaro, when he was convicted a few years ago and got the 27-year prison sentence, I know I and other people wrote, “Look, Brazil did it right. We let Trump off. Our courts did not get in. Biden didn’t prosecute him, or Merrick Garland didn’t prosecute him aggressively enough. Brazil did it right.”
I don’t want to make too simplistic of it, but I think we would see it differently if Ivanka or Donald Trump Jr. became president in 2024. So do we in the US need to rethink how we saw Brazil’s punishment of Jair Bolsonaro, considering his son might win? Because on some level, Flávio was not actually leading the government and didn’t do the coup himself.
So on some level, did Brazil get it right and we didn’t, or do we need to rethink this if Flávio wins the election, as it looks like he will?
Paarlberg: I wouldn’t tell Brazilians what to do in terms of voting or prosecutions. But I will say that there’s a general argument for rule of law just on the face of it. If you try to overthrow the government and invite the military to intervene contrary to the expressed democratic wishes of the people, then maybe that does deserve a response, even if there might be a backlash effect.
Bacon: Let me ask you something. I guess your son being elected is not the same. The actual coup person was not elected. His son is a different person. Should we think about it that way, maybe?
Paarlberg: Yeah, although the consequence is going to be that he’s going to release his father from house arrest. But there was still a message sent that the military should stay at its barracks. Obviously this is an important lesson for a country that was under a military dictatorship starting 1964.
Now, Brazil does have a history of politically motivated prosecutions. Lula’s jailing, you can draw a direct line from that to probably the motivation of his allies to go after Bolsonaro. That’s certainly what the Bolsonaro family says, in addition to the actual coup attempt. And so I think there probably is a certain degree of cynicism among the Brazilian electorate about these prosecutions, seeing them as political tools.
Certainly, the Supreme Court in Brazil is even more politicized than the US Supreme Court. Justices are quite clearly political figures, and on the left or the right, they give interviews. They select prosecutions too.
So a lot of the anger has been directed at a particular Supreme Court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, who is seen as, and I think this is effectively true, a Lula ally. And so that way corruption scandals such as the Banco Master scandal that affect Supreme Court justices effectively affect Lula as well.
Bacon: Let me finish by asking—there’s a big focus in the US, particularly in what I’ll call the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, on, if we improve people’s working conditions, their economic conditions—you see this with Zohran Mamdani particularly, and with AOC particularly—if we get wages up, if we take care of the economy, voters will come to us.
I agree with a lot of those policies myself, and this is not your place to speak about that, but I’m curious, looking at Brazil, are we looking at a left-wing populist leader who has done a lot of good economic policies, policies that have worked for people, and he was still not benefited politically? Should we look at what happened in Brazil and be a little bit skeptical of this materialistic politics? That’s what I’m trying to ask.
Paarlberg: Yes. I think that it’s always too simple to expect class-based voting. That’s never happened in the US, certainly, and of course, in the US we have reasons of racism, institutional racism, that have divided the working class historically. But we see that in Brazil too.
But on the other hand, you can say, look, Lula did win three terms in office. He did get to be in office for a long time and make a lot of material changes. If he loses, the fact that he lost his fourth one at age 80 isn’t necessarily that much of a knock on his record, or the idea of a more social democratic message.
Now, that said, I’m biased. I advise Bernie Sanders, and, just to plug a little bit, we have a book coming out from the Center for International Policy that should be out on Election Day, called A World to Win, that’s going to be a blueprint for progressive US foreign policy. And I certainly have ideas that are not just about material economic benefits.
I think that corruption is a major through line in certainly Latin American elections, and should be more of a through line in the US as well. That’s something that can really drive cynicism, and when there’s an attitude that they’re all corrupt, that really benefits the right more than it benefits the left.
Bacon: Interesting.
Paarlberg: And Lula’s response to this is essentially, We’re not as corrupt as our opponents. That’s not a very convincing message, even if it’s true. And so I think that tackling corruption, and tackling issues that affect working people—I didn’t mention this, inflation is going up in Brazil. It’s not as bad, but for Biden to say the price of eggs is not really an issue, it is an issue, and it’s an issue especially for working class voters, because working class voters spend more of their income on food.
Bacon: Material goods, and groceries. We’ve seen in Europe a backlash to Trump, but it looks like parties associated with Trump in Europe are losing and trying to move away from Trump. That hasn’t happened in Latin America. Talk about why that might be different. They’re different places, but unpack it a little bit.
Paarlberg: It is actually true that Latin America does tend to work in trends. We saw a big shift to the left in 1998, and then a big shift to the right around 2014, 2015, and then another shift to the left, now another shift to the right. We’re currently in the middle of a right-wing wave.
But you can oversimplify, because all of these are particular to each country. So I think, for example, Colombia, it was largely the failure of Petro’s Paz Total program, the peace plan. And then in Brazil, I think it has to do with the social issues and Lula’s age and the anti-establishment thing.
But I would say that there are definitely trends that parallel Trumpism. A lot of it is that the issues that are defining politics are increasingly social issues. They’re increasingly, you might say, religiously tinged or racially tinged or both. And they are often out of step with actual numbers.
Something I brought up earlier was Chile is another example. A far right president was elected, Kast, who ran on an anti-immigration, anti-crime platform. Crime was actually dropping, and immigration’s dropping, at the time that he was running. But these were still emotional issues that could turn out a lot of people regardless of what the statistics said.
And so again, going back to the vibes-based thing, I think it’s more of a matter of setting the terms of what are the issues that an election’s going to be about, and that’s something that a lot of progressive leaders have struggled to do.
Bacon: And it sounds like, because you work with progressives in the US—how do progressives get better at setting the terms for the election? I think Zohran was a good example of that in New York.
I don’t know how you do that. Biden struggled with it. Is there a way to do that in an election where there’s social media, the right is very—New York is Democratic leaning and liberal, I would say. So in the country, how do progressives get better at setting the terms of the debate for the elections? I think that’s an important question, and I think you’re right about that.
Paarlberg: Yeah. It’s a tough answer.
Bacon: Tough question.
Paarlberg: I think that there’s obviously a lot of factors that have to come into play at the same time. I do think the charisma of their particular leaders helps. And so to have people who are younger and more vigorous, I think, is helpful.
And I think that also being able to inoculate against or defuse some of the more divisive social issues, and just move on to issues like Mamdani did the rent. There is a way to focus on certain popular issues. Obviously, it’s easier if you’re not an incumbent, to say, These are their problems that need to be solved.
But there are things that unite people. I used to work in the labor movement, and unions are broadly popular across the spectrum. And I would say that encouraging the organization of workers builds the kind of social base for long-term progressive politics that really would parallel the rise of the more reactionary social bases that had been building in Brazil for decades and are resulting in the rise of Bolsonaro’s movement.
Bacon: Michael Paarlberg, thank you for joining me. I appreciate it. Great conversation. Thank you.
Paarlberg: Thanks for having me.
Bacon: Good to see you. Bye-bye.
Paarlberg: Take care.
