The result of the Brazilian election was eagerly awaited around the world. Many commentaries drew a comparison to the 2020 US election. Why the comparison to the US presidential election falls short and yet says a lot about the current state of presidential systems.

Originally published the 07.11.2022

by Paul Schweickhardt

50 – 49: US conditions?

In the end, it was 49.1% of the electorate that the former and renewed left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva could not convince of himself and a government led by him. A razor-thin victory that highlights the division in the influential Latin American country of Brazil. This makes Jair Bolsonaro the candidate with the most votes in Brazil’s history, both numerically and in percentage terms, who was not elected to the presidency. This is likely to strengthen his future ambitions to run for office again and position himself as a central and vocal opposition figure in the coming years. Many international observers repeatedly drew parallels with the USA. In particular, Bolsonaro’s behavior before the election brought back memories of what happened in the Capitol on 6 January.

The example of social division is also geographically evident – while the poorer and Afro-Brazilian north and northeast around Brazil’s first capital Salvador de Bahia voted for Lula, it was the south around the metropolises of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which is more characterised by European migration and has a stronger economy, that cast the majority of their votes for Bolsonaro. Just like in the USA, the Brazilian map showed both „blue“ and „red states“ on election night last Sunday. Brazil’s political system, on the other hand, does not have an electoral college, and even though it is a federal republic with a presidential system, like the USA, and the political system is similar in many respects, the president is actually directly elected in Brazil – a key difference, since in Brazil Trump would never have become president that way.

After Bolsonaro’s election, he oriented his policy and that of his country strongly towards the USA under Donald Trump, which perceive each other as political allies. Thus Ernesto Araújo, former foreign minister under Bolsonaro until March 2021, wrote in an article back in 2017 about how Trump was the only Western statesman at the time who had the right answers to offer to the political questions of his time. However, this relationship promptly ended with Trump’s ouster in 2020 and Joe Biden taking office. However, the fact that Trump, who repeatedly campaigned for Bolsonaro in recent months, did not concede defeat in the election may well have been a source of inspiration for Bolsonaro’s strategy. Bolsonaro repeatedly spread the refuted accusation that the digital form of voting was not safe from manipulation and that he could not accept defeat under these conditions.

However, a key difference between Trump and Bolsonaro, as surprising as it is reassuring for many observers, is that Bolsonaro reacted to the result, after a previous conspicuous silence, by promising to apply the constitution and asking his supporters to refrain from unlawful protest such as the ongoing street blockades. Meanwhile, his and Lula’s teams are said to be cooperating in organising the takeover. Without explicitly saying so, Bolsonaro conceded defeat and tried to calm his radicalised electorate, initially spurred on by himself. Even though he may have spent the previous days sounding out the chances of a successful coup d’état and thus it would have been a simple cost-benefit calculation, Jair Bolsonaro was thus able to present himself as a statesmanlike politician. It is only the fact that a former US president explicitly did not do this, and instead blew his supporters to attack the federal parliament, that does not make this a plain, normal, expectable, self-evident course of events in an institutionalised transfer of power.

The „Centrão“ – The Real Power Instance

Alongside the presidential elections, however, there were also the lesser-noticed elections of the Brazilian National Congress, consisting of the two chambers of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. These were simply lost in the hubbub of a personalised showdown between left- and right-wing populism. The Brazilian party landscape is deeply fragmented and only weakly institutionalised, which also makes it harder to communicate. Before elections, it is common for candidates to change parties for tactical reasons, which quickly makes the situation very confusing. In the 513-seat Chamber of Deputies, for example, there are 23 parties in the new legislature, represented by between 2 and 77 of the MPs. But these elections will also strongly influence Brazil’s future politics, indeed just as much as the presidential election.

The left-wing party alliance of 16 (!) parties supporting PT candidate Lula missed by far the majority in both chambers. In both chambers, the party alliance around Bolsonaro, consisting of „only“ five parties, was able to win more mandates. However, this does not mean that Bolsonaro will be able to block the future executive around President Lula. In contrast to the USA or other electoral systems with majority voting, Brazil’s young republic has obviously not developed a two-party system with two overpowering parties. If the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) is the power centre of a left-wing party landscape, it is, however, always dependent on coalitions in the legislative bodies, and this time is no exception. On the far right is the bloc of Bolsonaro’s party, the Partido Liberal (PL), which will probably concentrate on fundamental opposition in the future.

A central role therefore continues to be played by the so-called „Centrão“, a group of mostly centre-right parties, which put up their own candidates in the presidential election campaign, but which were not able to assert themselves between the two high-profile personalities Lula and Bolsonaro. The balance of power in the two chambers shows how powerful these parties are: While in the Chamber of Deputies, with 513 seats, Lula’s alliance has only slightly less than 150 mandates, while Bolsonaro’s alliance has about 190 seats, the parties outside these two camps have just under 180 of the mandates. The alliances of the two presidential candidates are therefore far from having their own majority. 

The same picture emerges in the second chamber, the Senate, with its 81 seats. Here, the alliances around Lula (15 mandates) and Bolsonaro (19 mandates) do not even have half of the seats combined, which once again shows the deep-rooted power of the „Centrão“ in the legislature. They are the absolute king or queen makers in Brazil’s political system and will know how to use this power in the upcoming negotiations. For the shaping of Brazil’s future politics, it is therefore essential which parties the PT will be able to integrate into a coalition in the future through political concessions, through the awarding of offices or, as the past has shown, by buying votes. The fact that one of Lula’s first well-wishers was Arthur Lira, the president of the majority right-wing Chamber of Deputies and until recently a supporter of Bolsonaro’s candidacy, gives hope that this division will not automatically translate into a blockade of the institutions, as it has in the USA. In the past, the „Centrão“ has already worked pragmatically with Lula-led executives, as the Brazilian constitution expects of the executive and the legislature.

It is not clear what role possible bribes in the „Lava Jato“ complex played. It is striking that most of the politicians who could be proven to be corrupt came from the „Centrão“. The suspicion is that political support in the past was simply bought monetarily and not negotiated politically. The focus on anti-corruption in the election campaign and the long-term political damage caused by the „Lava Jato“ to the PT, which is now once again in power, gives reason to hope that attempts will now be made to shift the focus to political alliances and compromises. This, on the other hand, would probably mean a softening of the left-wing program of Lula’s federal government. So before any predictions can be made about Brazil’s politics under Lula, these negotiations remain to be seen. 

But here, too, important differences to the political situation in the USA become apparent. Despite the formal similarity of the structure of the legislature at the federal level with a bicameral parliament in the form of a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies, power is not in the hands of two irreconcilably opposed parties willing to jeopardise the country’s political functioning through filibusters or the simple blockade by a majority in one of the two chambers rejecting the presidency. Cooperation between parties has always been necessary for effective governance of the country in Brazil, as there has almost never been an absolute majority for any party or alliance supporting the president. And in the past, the so-called Centrao has shown itself to be quite pragmatic and willing to compromise, when the price was right.

Presidential system and political stability

The comparison with the USA, however, leaves observers doubtful. After last week’s impressions, is Brazil now a politically stable country or does the comparison only show once again how politically unstable the US is and how Trump contributed to a worldwide reduction of democratic standards and expectations?

Brazil’s deep political division is real and this is not only due to Bolsonaro’s rhetoric but also to the squandered trust of a PT that shook confidence in the state through numerous corruption scandals. Representatives of the judiciary were proven to have wanted to prevent Lula from running for president in the last election in 2018 for political reasons. All powers thus contributed to a breeding ground where misinformation, hatred, fear and populism found space in the political discourse and helped make Bolsonaro’s electoral success possible. And yet: power is handed over in an orderly manner, the constitution is respected, illegitimate protest is rejected by the defeated and the parties also show a willingness to compromise.

These are aspects of a stable political culture that the US currently cannot demonstrate. In the end, the decision was entirely Bolsonaro’s, who could well have chosen otherwise and sent his supporters to Brasilia to storm the Brazilian National Congress just like Donald Trump did in 2021. This again shows the enormous power that can easily fall into the wrong hands in a presidential system with a high concentration of power in the executive. He decided at that very moment on the political stability of an entire country of 214 million people. And just because he chose differently than Trump before him does not make this danger any less real. It is the political structure and constitution of a country in the form of a presidential system that has made this phenomenon possible yet again. And with both personalities in the starting blocks for another candidacy, it will probably not be the last time that the stability of an entire country is in the hands of a single person who either decides differently in the future than Bolsonaro did, or who could actually succeed with his plans for a coup.