Scholar: Lula faces uphill battle against Flávio Bolsonaro in Brazil runoff

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 unem

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