The very close victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil corroborates fears that the extreme right, once it has sown its seed, is here to stay in radically divided societies. Even with unpresentable leaders and at a time when the left is booming in Latin America. As happened in the United States in November 2020, with Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump, Lula’s victory is far from settling Jair Bolsonaro’s influence in Brazilian politics, whatever terms he ends up digesting the defeat. On the contrary, the outgoing president has sufficient resources to complicate the transfer of powers unspeakably and, once it has been completed, to make it difficult for his successor to apply a progressive program and contaminate democratic coexistence.
Bolsonaro’s reluctance to acknowledge Lula’s victory is disturbing. While most of the significant officials of Bolsonarism have immediately recognized the cleanliness of the election, and the United States, the European Union, Russia and the Latin American countries have rushed to congratulate themselves unreservedly on Lula’s victory, endorsing his legitimacy in a message unequivocal in the face of any possible temptation, the president’s unusual behavior portends difficult days when, in accordance with the Constitution, he will have to update the transitional cabinet on state affairs.
Even if this requirement is met by Bolsonaro with reasonable loyalty, Lula will occupy the command bridge of a society as fractured as it is in conflict, with a similar capacity for electoral mobilization on both sides of the divide, but with more and greater resources for destabilization in the hands of the extreme right than on the side of the Workers’ Party and its allies. Although it is nothing more than a protest that ends up undoing itself, the decision of truckers from several states to block highways because they do not accept the result of the vote count certified by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal is still a warning. There is a huge distance between that initiative and Trump’s strategy that culminated in the assault on Congress, but it is still symptomatic of what the future may hold.
All in all, the theoretical majority in the Chamber of Deputies of the extreme right, united to the right and the center, gathers the ingredients so that Lula’s exercise in his proven ability to make a pact will diminish little by little. According to the Brazilian political tradition, the tendency of the center is to agree with whoever is in power and distance itself from the opposition. The statement by Judge Sergio Moro, who sentenced Lula to prison, accepting the result but advancing that he will continue as senator in the opposition, is unlikely in the mouths of the leaders of the center, who are used to completing the presidential majority when such a thing is not it exists from the outset as it happens to Lula.
As important as the slippage of the center to guarantee governability, and the continuity of the moderate turn that the elected president has undertaken to dispel fears and achieve his election, is the fact that for the first time the four great economies of the Americas -Mexico , Colombia, Argentina and Chile–, in addition to Brazil as of January 1, have at least nominally progressive presidents. Add to that the fact that the Brazilian extreme right now does not have the decisive support that was the Trump presidency, not only to achieve victory in 2018, but to entrench itself in issues as dramatic as the disastrous management of the pandemic and as indefensible as the intensive and irregular exploitation of the Amazon.