Analysis: Bolsonaro and Lula polarize in adverse scenario – 03/30/2023 – Politics

After the unprecedented double abandonment of the Presidency, including the two months in which he sulked at the Alvorada Palace after losing reelection and fleeing to Florida two days before the inauguration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), Jair Bolsonaro (PL ) returned to Brazil.

After three months, his landing was far from the airport consecration that marked his march to the Presidency, probably due to the restrictive security measures — Brasilia is an island of Bolsonarism. But that’s the least of your problems.

The central issue for him is analogous to that of his political idol and behavioral role model, former US President Donald Trump. After being defeated in 2020, the Republican did not recognize Joe Biden’s victory and instigated a popular uprising that led to destruction of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Now, Trump is preparing to try to return to the White House next year, but the political reality around him is quite adverse. Evidently, he has the votes and his media power, but he faces renewed competition in his party and an array of serious legal disputes.

It remains for him, as shown by the crazy speech he made in Waco, an icon city of a certain American right for the tragic siege of federal forces against a religious sect, to redouble the bet on the polarization with which he was elected in 2016.

Adapting one thing or another, it is the story that Bolsonaro after the defeat of last October: without recognizing Lula’s victory, encouraging the coup plotters who created the 8th of January in Brasilia, seeing leaders emerge in his field of play and facing problems that could take away their political rights.

Thus, it will be up to the former president to radicalize, to bet on those 25% who, last December, told Datafolha that they consider themselves Bolsonarists. How many there are now, after the institutional reaction to the group’s coup d’état, is something to assess, but it’s an illusion to think that they disappeared.

What seems certain is that they are a reduced force of almost half of the electorate that voted for the then president in the second round, not least because that contingent included anti-PT supporters who disapproved of the 8/1 and the mess of Arab jewelry.

Bolsonaro returning to the country to lead the right, as the president of his party wants, jealous of the huge Party Fund that Bolsonarist votes gave him, is another story. As he himself said on boarding back to Brasilia, forget it.

Just look at his Presidency. Political construction is not part of his repertoire, on the contrary. Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a vote. It remains to be seen what use will be made of it — not even setting up the acronym itself, the Alliance, he managed at the height of power.

This is a moment of readjustment of forces, and the departure of the Republicans from the classic centrão with PL and PP towards Lula’s new centrão, by forming the largest bloc in the Chamber (142 deputies) with the PSD, MDB and Podemos, is an eloquent sign from that.

The brain behind the operation is Gilberto Kassab, the president of the PSD and secretary of the Government of São Paulo, who wants to transform its governor, Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans), into a national leader of a center-right that aggregates the conservative and Bolsonarist vote. , somehow convinced to put aside radicalism and clumsiness.

A sign of the adopted pragmatism, PSD and MDB are in Lula’s ministry, but always keeping an eye on the behavior of the president, who promises to actually start his government the moment Bolsonaro arrives, with the presentation of the new fiscal framework.

If it fails to convince the market and Congress of its viability, the Lula government risks remaining in a lethargic state or worse. If it works, the new center is unlikely to relinquish its share of the government, leaving the original model to play the role of opposition and fishery for dissidents.

Bolsonaro will have to remain on the platform to avoid bleeding support. For Lula, who has always maintained a symbiotic relationship with the former president, this is great news. It was from Bolsonarism that several themes emerged that helped the government to keep the focus on polarization, while struggling between difficulties of political articulation and the extreme verbiage of the president.

There was 8/1, the Yanomami crisis (which is perennial, but Bolsonaro’s account for his disdain for indigenous people), the jewels of Saudi Arabia, the demonization of the independent Central Bank inherited from his government. Now, there will be the former president in person.

As columnist Elio Gaspari noted, this will be an unprecedented situation in which a former president will directly lash out at his successor, with an eye on his chair. If Lula’s aggressiveness against his predecessors was already deleterious from an institutional point of view, nothing good should come out of an open war scenario.