Jairo Nicolau: Bolsonaro vs Lula overshadows political change – 04/29/2023 – Power

A quiet shift is underway in Brazilian politics. When it ends, the party cadre will look little like it did a few years ago. Its impact will be profound, to the point of making projections for the 2026 presidential race even more uncertain.

“It doesn’t appear to us, ordinary people who follow politics, because we are looking at the congressional dispute all the time, at PTism and anti-PTism”, says political scientist Jairo Nicolau.

“People are always looking at [Jair] Bolsonaro [PL] versus [Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva, PT]but underneath, a radical transformation of the Brazilian party scene is taking place”, he continues.

As a result of electoral reforms approved in recent years, the number of parties will decrease and their size will increase. Left and right will need to reorganize, and the center will need to be reborn.

In parallel, Brazilian society is also moving: the population is aging, the female electorate is growing, schooling is expanding; urbanization, deindustrialization and religion advance. “Anyone who looks at Brazil in 2003 and 2023 finds a very different country”, says Nicolau.

In an interview with Sheethe analyzes which of these changes benefit Bolsonaro and explains why he avoids the term “Bolsonarism”.

The most recent Datafolha poll showed that 30% of voters identify themselves as PT and 22% say they are Bolsonarists. Even though Bolsonarism is not a party, is it possible to treat it as a political-electoral identification factor? This question has to be seen carefully, because it is a bit mixed with lulism. Note that the PT had less than 13% of the votes for the Chamber of Deputies in the last election. But, despite these precautions, the PT is in fact a brand, the only force that has organized this party confusion since redemocratization.

On the other hand, it is difficult to make a conceptual balance between petism and Bolsonarism. Perhaps the survey, in another round, should test Lulism, since we are talking about leadership power.

Bolsonaro, in recent years, has gone through two electoral tests, four shifts, and has always had an expressive vote. In his government, even in the worst moments, he had around a quarter or a third of the population making a positive assessment. But I am very careful when using the term Bolsonarism.

Why? Without a more precise definition, we start calling all conservatives, reactionaries, extremists, all these movements Bolsonaristas. Practically the entire right voted for Bolsonaro, but there are differences.

I try to avoid the term Bolsonarism and think of Bolsonaro as a charismatic leader, in the Weberian sense. [referência ao sociólogo Max Weber]. Bolsonaro, for a part of the electorate, has a differential that makes him a politician to be followed, with whom people fall in love; a politician that a part of Brazil admires and communicates with.

But we don’t have a minimum theoretical body to call Bolsonarism what exists beyond the individual. Bolsonaro is not like other right-wing political leaders. He has no intellectual training.

I remember Janio a lot [referência a Jânio Quadros, que presidiu o Brasil em 1961]. Jânio was also a charismatic leader who created a term, Janismo. But Janismo was Jânio with his ability to lead, to mobilize people and attract a part of the electorate – period.

What happens to this field if Bolsonaro is declared ineligible by the TSE? We have to work with three fields. The first, by shortcut, I will call conservative, a right in the broadest sense. This field has always existed in Brazilian democratic life, and today we have the most conservative Congress since redemocratization.

On that right, there are politicians who orbit Bolsonaro’s leadership, who today are basically in the PL. And there is a fragmentation of leaderships, let’s say, of the ultra-right, of movements of social networks, blogs, etc. So, not everyone who is right wing in Brazil is Bolsonaro. The enigma for 2026, in the event that Bolsonaro is not a candidate, is whether he will try to invent someone from his field.

But what is at stake from now on is a reconfiguration of Brazilian party life. On the right side, this will depend on Bolsonaro’s actions. For the past six months, luckily for the government, he has been a mediocre leader. Nor mediocre: he was silent. This behavior took a lot of energy from Bolsonarism.

In this scenario, is there room for the PSDB to grow again, considering that it was the party that fought the PT until 2014? Bolsonarism destroyed what we used to call the center. So the PSDB will have to make a huge reorganization effort to try to recover this idea of ​​center, that is, of a political force that is not aligned with either PTism or conservatism.

And a restructuring of the PSDB necessarily involves mergers, bringing in politicians from other parties. The game is now medium subtitles and up. There must be 50, 70 deputies. The era when a party of five or six deputies made a difference is over.

A good part of these changes is explained by new electoral rules, many of which impacted the 2018 race. In 2018, the main change was the end of private funding. This had a very big impact on the dynamics of the competition. And this we feel until now.

I’m not saying that the order of events was that, but, given that crisis that the political system suffered with Lava Jato, street mobilization, impeachment, relationship with the Judiciary… When the campaign financing came to an end, they created a system that greatly benefited those who had a mandate.

There was a concentration of TV time, giving smaller parties minuscule time. It was a reform to protect the traditional political elite against an outsider; to give resources to the central actors of that moment.

And it didn’t work. Bolsonaro broke that system.

Will these and other rules still have an impact in 2026? We had a rule that started to affect the survival of small parties, which was the 1.5% clause [chamada de cláusula de desempenho, ou cláusula de barreira]that is, parties that did not have 1.5% [dos votos para a Câmara] in that election they lost resources from the party fund, they lost TV time.

And then came what I think is the biggest reform of the electoral system since 1945: the end of coalitions. The number of parties represented in the Chamber, for example, dropped in all states in the historical series. It’s a compression frame, and I think it’s going to speed up.

We are constantly looking at Bolsonaro versus Lula, but underneath, a radical transformation of the Brazilian party scene is taking place. When people open their eyes, they will see that there are very few nationally structured subtitles left.

We are in a moment of reconfiguration. It does not appear to us, ordinary people who follow politics, because we are constantly looking at the congressional dispute, at PTism and anti-PTism, approval of measures, the presidential game.

How should this reconfiguration affect the 2026 presidential race? I think it’s all very open. The PT is an unavoidable force. The non-PT left has suffered a lot with this strengthening of the PT. The center has practically disappeared. And, in the field on the right, compaction has already taken place and may become even more dense.

With the electoral fund, the life of a politician is much easier, as he does not need to ask for money. Being in a big party means having access to campaign money; means having a greater probability of being elected. So there’s no more incentive to stay in a small caption.

Now, the names for 2026, this will depend on Bolsonaro’s political survival as an electoral actor and will depend on whether or not the Lula government succeeds.

In the book “Brazil Bent to the Right: A Radiography of Bolsonaro’s Election in 2018”, Mr. says that certain transformations in the electorate helped Bolsonaro that year. What can you design for the future? Brazil is going through a gigantic demographic and socioeconomic transformation process in the last two decades: aging of the population, increase of women both in the total number of voters and in proportional turnout, increase in schooling.

There is also an ongoing religious revolution, with the growth not only of this complex world of denominations that we call evangelicals, but also of people who believe in God but have no religious denomination. Not to mention urban hyperconcentration, the reduction of the population in extreme poverty, deindustrialization.

Anyone who looks at Brazil in 2003 and 2023 finds a very different country. Some of these changes benefit Bolsonaro. The increase in schooling, for example. Since 2014, voters with medium education and above have become a minority on the left.

Metropolization too. The PT continued to lose in the big cities, even if not in the crushing distance of 2018. But the metropolitan challenge of the left was not resolved with Lula. The challenge of entering the middle class, the new middle class and the more educated sectors has also not been resolved.

And the religious question? In 2018 and 2022, there was a cleavage in the religious world that had not happened before. That is, a candidate concentrates a volume of votes in a field far above his national vote. It is necessary to wait for it to settle down, but I have the impression that this agenda cut right and left. There is a meeting between the values ​​of theology and political conservatism that may remain.

These are deeper issues, which started in the 2010s, with debates about identity, Marco Feliciano versus Jean Wyllys, this whole identity agenda, sexuality, drugs.

The issue is not against Lula, it is not corruption. It’s the values. Perhaps it is something more complex than a temporary membership of Bolsonaro. Cleavages happen in public opinion. And the left does not need to change its values, stop defending certain policies in order to win evangelical votes. The left will have a limit of conquering a part of the electorate because it defends certain values. This is completely normal.

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X-ray | Jairo Nicholas, 59

Graduated in social sciences from Universidade Federal Fluminense, with a master’s and doctorate in political science from Iuperj (University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro), he is a professor at FGV Cpdcoc (Center for Research and Documentation of Contemporary History of Brazil). He is the author, among other books, of “O Brasil Bent to the Right: A Radiography of Bolsonaro’s Election in 2018” (Zahar, 2020)