Good morning. Brazil’s left went into Sunday’s election hoping for an outright majority for their candidate Lula over Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right figure who has been Brazil’s president for the last four years.
At the very least, they hoped for a commanding margin and a sense of momentum going into a run-off between the two. And progressives around the world were watching for an emphatic repudiation of Bolsonaro’s presidency that would signal that the forces of extremism were in retreat. But it hasn’t worked out that way.
Instead, Lula won 48% of votes, roughly in line with polls – but Bolsonaro did much better than expected, taking 43%, and his supporters also outperformed polls in state and senate races. Lula is expected to take most votes from the minor candidates who now drop out, and should be favourite to win in the second round on October 30 - but the road to victory looks rockier than it did last night. The stakes could hardly be higher.
So what just happened? And why does the result matter so much, for Brazil and for the world? Today’s newsletter, with the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips, will explain it. Here are the headlines.
PS One other big story just breaking as I send this – the Sun and the BBC are reporting that ahead of his speech at Conservative party conference today, chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng is about to announce a U-turn on the controversial scrapping of the 45p top rate of tax. The Guardian hasn’t confirmed that yet, but Kwarteng is due to be on Radio 4’s Today programme at 8.10am - so it may be worth tuning in. And Politics Live is up and running early.
Five big stories
Politics | Liz Truss is struggling to persuade Conservative MPs to back her controversial mini-budget, with some even threatening all-out rebellion amid fears that they will once again become known as the “nasty party”. On Sunday Truss refused to rule out public spending cuts and a real-terms drop in benefits to help pay for the mini-budget in a BBC interview.
Ukraine | Volodymyr Zelenskiy confirmed Ukraine has “fully cleared” Russian forces from the key eastern city of Lyman, a day after Moscow admitted its troops had pulled out after they were encircled.
Coronavirus | More than a third of young people feel their life is spiralling out of control, according to findings released to the Guardian ahead of a nationwide campaign that highlights Covid’s impact on the younger generation. One in three said they think their job prospects will never recover from the pandemic.
Politics | Dominic Johnson, a City financier who is also Jacob Rees-Mogg’s business partner, has been given a peerage and a senior ministerial role in Liz Truss’s government. The controversial move comes amid growing questions over cabinet ministers’ close relationships with the City.
Immigration | The home secretary, Suella Braverman, has said that the UK has too many low skilled migrants. In the same interview Braverman restated that she has every intention of enforcing Boris Johnson’s plans to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
In depth: ‘It’s massively dispiriting for the left’
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – widely known as Lula – is the charismatic leader of the PT (Workers’ Party), the dominant left-of-centre force in Brazilian politics. His presidency from 2003-2010 is remembered by many in the country as an era of economic growth and declining inequality. In 2018, when he was unable to run because of a corruption conviction that has since been overturned, the far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro came to power.
Backed by Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán, Bolsonaro has arguably been as cartoonishly incompetent and malevolent a figure as either – presiding over the devastation of the Amazon, massive increases in poverty, and the deaths of more than 685,000 Brazilians from coronavirus.
“The mood among his opponents had been one of cautious optimism,” said Tom. “It’s been quite emotional for them – the idea that Bolsonaro’s presidency could be over, or nearly over. It’s been a long slog. They feel that so much damage has been done.”
***
What happened yesterday?
The catharsis that Lula’s supporters had hoped for failed to materialise. “It’s massively dispiriting for the left,” said Tom. “And really surprising - not in terms of Lula’s vote, which is in line with what everyone thought, but in terms of Bolsonaro’s, which is significantly higher. The pollsters got that badly wrong. I went to Lula’s rally, and people were crying, or in a state of shock.”
That mood of disappointment for the left was heightened by victory for Bolsonaro’s allies in 19 of the 27 available Senate seats, as well as a strong showing in the lower house.
Bolsonaro’s former environment minister, who presided over huge increases in deforestation, won his congressional election; so did Eduardo Pazzuelo, the health minister who oversaw Brazil’s catastrophic handling of coronavirus at the height of the pandemic. “Nearly 700,000 people died here, and his management of Covid was demonstrably incompetent,” Tom said. “But that doesn’t seem to have impacted his support.”
***
What kind of a campaign has it been?
“It’s been pretty toxic,” Tom said. “I first covered an election here in 2006, and I’ve never seen this level of bitterness before. Bolsonaro treats elections as wars. A lot of people on the left have been frightened – one Lula supporter said to me on Saturday that it’s the first time in my life I’ve been scared to put a sticker on my car.”
Those fears are not idle: a Lula supporter was brutally murdered by a Bolsonaro supporter last month, one of a string of violent attacks by supporters of a candidate who has demanded leftists “be eradicated from public life”. And the murders in June of Guardian contributor Dom Phillips and indigenous expert Bruno Pereira have also come at a time when Bolsonaro has made relentless verbal attacks on advocates for the rainforest.
Lula has sought to frame his campaign as the strongest possible contrast with that of Bolsonaro, and his message of unity is just one of the ways the race has echoed the Trump-Biden contest in the US of 2020. On Sunday, he told reporters: “We want no more hatred, no more quarrelling, we want a country that lives in peace.”
***
How important is this election for Brazil?
The vote comes against a backdrop of terrible damage during Bolsonaro’s presidency, as this piece from Tom yesterday made clear. Bolsonaro’s authoritarian tendencies and contempt for any obligation to protect the worst-off have left Brazil facing a cost-of-living crisis and a lurch to the right on social issues.
While Bolsonaro authorised a welfare package worth billions of dollars during the campaign, he has also promised to privatise the state-owned oil company, pass pro-gun legislation, cut corporation taxes, and toughen restrictions on abortion.
One voter told Tom: “So many of the advances that took decades to achieve have been destroyed over the last four years.”
***
What does it mean for the Amazon?
Under Bolsonaro’s presidency, the destruction of Brazil’s rainforest reached a record high in the first half of this year; Lula has promised to put a stop to the deforestation. That is of global importance given the Amazon’s role as a store for carbon dioxide.
Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor, wrote on Friday that almost a million hectares of the Amazon have been burned in the last year, with fires at their highest level in a decade. “Bolsonaro has dragged Brazil back to the wild west days we thought we’d left behind,” one expert told him. “It’s no exaggeration, then, to say that the Amazon’s fate rests on the outcome of our election.”
While the identity of the next president remains crucial, last night’s results appear to be bad news for advocates for the rainforest whatever happens. Jonathan Watts, the Guardian’s global environment editor and former Latin America correspondent, noted on Twitter that congressional success for Bolsonaro’s supporters will make it hard for Lula to pass Amazon protection legislation even if he wins.
***
Was this result a repudiation of Bolsonaro?
Lula has drawn support from a broad coalition of voters. “A lot of the people who’ve voted for him are not leftists,” said Tom. “People in the centre and on the centre right viewed this as an emergency election. They want a hard stop to this period, and hopefully next time a normal election with normal candidates.”
That looks further away now. Cas Mudde, a leading expert on populism and the radical right, wrote in a sobering thread on Twitter last night that the result was the “worst possible Lula victory”, and that while he still expects Lula to prevail, the margin is likely to be small - or could be reversed if anything unexpected happens that favours Bolsonaro in the next few weeks.
Comparing the prospect of a Bolsonaro defeat to Donald Trump’s in the US, he said that both men would have lost “very narrowly, and mostly because of a freak cause (the pandemic) … moreover, based on US experience, expect the right to further radicalise rather than moderate. And to be very competitive again in four years.”
***
What happens next?
Bolsonaro has long been planting the seeds of election denialism: “He’s been paving the way for the ‘big lie’ for years,” Tom said. In July, as one example, he made baseless claims that Brazil’s electronic voting system was vulnerable to subversion. The fact that the result now looks likely to be narrower than expected even if Lula wins “significantly increases the credibility of [the] “stolen elections” narrative among Bolsonaro supporters and thus the possibility of post-electoral violence,” Mudde wrote.
Many in Brazil are fearful that Bolsonaro may stoke an anti-democratic mood among his supporters – though, perhaps scenting the possibility of a revival, he was noticeably quieter on his baseless fraud claims last night than he has recently been. “I don’t think we quite know what happens now,” Tom said. “If he does lose, there are people who fear a January 6 style assault on government institutions. And the most radical of his supporters are in many cases armed.”
It’s worth emphasising that Lula remains the favourite – and that while Bolsonaro did better than expected, he is still the first sitting Brazilian president to go into a second round running behind since the 1980s. But after a deflating night for progressives, predictions about what might happen after a Lula victory risk being premature. “If people thought Bolsonaro and Bolsonarism were down and out they were wrong,” Tom said. “The far right is absolutely here to stay.”
What else we’ve been reading
In this fascinating interview Laurie Clark speaks with law professor Danielle Citron, who compellingly argues why privacy is a central part of human existence. “If you don’t have the ability to set boundaries around those aspects of intimate privacy, it’s hard to develop who you are,” Citron says. Nimo
The veteran Guardian foreign affairs correspondent Ian Black and his wife, Helen Harris, write with astonishing precision and courage about Ian’s rare neurodegenerative disease, and his “increasing realisation that as my brain is shrinking, so is my world.” Archie
The Labour party is doing well in the polls, and an election victory in two years seems within reach. However, Nesrine Malik writes that the party is having trouble reckoning with the racism that lies within its ranks. Nimo
Martha Gill explores the contradictions within the new Marilyn Monroe biopic, Blonde. While the movie is touted as a feminist project that shines a light on the harsh reality of the exploitation of Monroe, in reality, Gill argues, it is tapping into “the market for female pain.” Nimo
Nothing you’ll find looking at the consequences of a nuclear strike by Vladimir Putin is exactly cheerful, but over the weekend I came across Eric Schlosser’s primer for the Atlantic, published in June, and found it extremely helpful. What happens next is like an escalator, one expert tells him: “Once it starts moving, it has a momentum of its own, and it’s really hard to get off.” Archie
Sport
Football | Manchester City humiliated Manchester United as Erling Haaland and Phil Foden both scored hat-tricks to secure a 6-3 victory in the Manchester derby. Meanwhile, Leeds held on for a 0-0 draw against Aston Villa at home after winger Luis Sinisterra was shown the red card.
London Marathon | The 23-year-old Ethiopian runner Yalemzerf Yehualaw became the youngest woman to win the London Marathon, finishing in 2hr 17min 26sec despite a heavy fall over a speed bump with six miles to go. The men’s race was won by 30-year-old Kenyan Amos Kipruto.
Cricket | England beat Pakistan by 67 runs to win the Twenty20 decider and claim the series 4-3. Dawid Malan led the way for England with 78 not out off 47 balls.
The front pages
The Guardian leads with “Tories threaten rebellion as Gove says tax plan is ‘not Conservative” while the Times says “Gove and Shapps attack ‘tin-eared’ Tory tax cuts”. The Mirror’s subheading reads “Calamity conference” above the headline “Truss ‘is finished’”.
The FT leads with “Kwarteng to defy mounting Tory rebellion with defence of tax cuts” while the Express says “Kwasi: no more decline ... we must stay the course”. The Telegraph has “Truss delays vote on 45p tax cut after Tory revolt” while the Mail says “Fury as Gove stokes Toy 45p tax revolt”.
The Sun splashes on Spice Girl Mel B’s “plea” to government over domestic abuse and its headline “Mel: How many more must die?”
Today in Focus
How the assassination of Shinzo Abe became a political scandal in Japan
The killing of the former prime minister shocked Japan, and the ensuing scandal has shaken the government, says Justin McCurry in Tokyo.
Cartoon of the day | Edith Pritchett
Sign up for Inside Saturday to see more of Edith Pritchett’s cartoons, the best Saturday magazine content and an exclusive look behind the scenes
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
Home ownership in Welsh villages has become extremely difficult for local residents. Second homeowners and property investors have sent prices soaring, forcing people to move elsewhere. To combat this, the Welsh government has announced a raft of measures to stop communities in Welsh-speaking heartlands from being hollowed out. The measures will come into effect next year and they include: raising discretionary council tax premiums for second homes by 300%, a licensing scheme for holiday homes, and ensuring that second homeowners do not avoid these tax increases by tightening the rules and closing loopholes.
Mabon ap Gwynfor, the housing spokesperson for Plaid Cymru in the Senedd, has a vision for villages in Wales to be “a place where local people have the right to live and where visitors can come and hear the Welsh language spoken by everyone from babes to the elderly.”
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.
This article was amended on 4 October 2022 to correctly refer to Jair Bolsonaro as a far-right figure rather than “a figurehead” as an earlier version said.
