Divided Brazil faces another dysfunctional presidential contest

In Brazil it was a week when the public health emergency caused by coronavirus reached critical new levels.

A denialist president, a health minister woefully out of his depth and a population often unwilling to follow social-distancing protocols have allowed a new variant to surge across the country.

For the past fortnight average daily deaths have set record highs. Cities are running out of intensive care beds. With the national death toll above 273,000, Brazil accounts for a tenth of all fatalities from Covid-19 and its total is now rising by more than 2,000 a day.

But despite these grim new milestones this national health crisis, had to share the week’s airwaves and column inches with the latest shockwaves from the other, much older crisis that Brazilians have been dealing with since 2013.

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In a surprise ruling on Monday, supreme court judge Edson Fachin annulled the corruption convictions of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It was the latest handbrake turn of an institutional crisis that started with the street protests that erupted in 2013 against the hosting of the World Cup and Olympics and long ago metastasised, preventing the country's political class from fully regaining its equilibrium and leaving society increasingly polarised.

Fachin’s decision was the result of rancorous in-fighting on the supreme court over the legacy of Car Wash, the historic investigation into corruption in Brazilian politics.

Rampant graft

The judge’s decision immediately erased Car Wash’s highest-profile convictions, even though he is a defender of the inquiry, which unveiled staggering levels of graft. He did so by claiming the court in southern Brazil that tried Lula did not have the jurisdiction in the case, four years after his first conviction, for which he served 580 days in jail.

It appeared to be an effort to pre-empt his colleagues from ruling that Sergio Moro, the crusading judge who convicted the former president, failed to act impartially – a move that could definitively collapse the cases against the union leader.

The immediate consequence of the ruling was to restore Lula his political rights, meaning he can now contest next year’s presidential election.

On Wednesday, in a triumphant speech in which he misleadingly claimed he had been exonerated, the 75-year-old all but threw his hat into the ring. Many on the left will be relieved to have him back. In his political absence, they have accumulated defeats.

Lula will hope he can repeat the magic of a decade ago and rebuild the coalition that won four elections before his party became a byword for recession and corruption. Bolsonaro gives him reason to hope he can.

In 2018 a majority of Brazilians were so fed up of the Workers Party they took a gamble on Bolsonaro, an extremist voice on the political fringe who managed to catapult himself into the presidency by surfing the anti-establishment mood. But many have since told pollsters they repent their vote.

Bolsonaro’s paranoia and often violent temper, his family’s corruption and his administration’s disastrous handling of the pandemic mean in next year’s race there will be a large contingent of Brazilians who will vote for anyone likely to defeat the incumbent.

Dysfunctional system

Another candidate from the centre-right might yet emerge to do so. But Brazil’s political system is now so dysfunctional that, despite the risks Bolsonaro poses to its democratic set-up, to date efforts to coalesce around a viable centrist have failed amid factional politicking and personal vanities.

That process becomes both more urgent and difficult now someone with Lula’s star power looks set to run. Brazil is drifting towards another polarising presidential contest between an unhinged extremist and a Workers Party unwilling or unable to face up to its role in the interminable social and political turmoil the country finds itself in.

Bolsonaro might prefer it that way. His family’s corruption, brought into clear focus by his assuming the presidency, means his attacks on the graft of the Lula years will now ring hollow beyond his base.

But attacks by him and his supporters indicate he will seek to polarise the race between those who would defend God, country and family; and communists intent on turning Brazil into the next Venezuela.

Fear of the left has deep historical roots in Brazil, and not just among the better-off. Bolsonaro will feel more comfortable facing Lula than a challenger from the centre. A cultural war backed by populist spending policies targeting the less well-off could still make him competitive, despite his epic mishandling of the pandemic.

But it seems unlikely such a contest would be the path out of the country’s crisis.