The risks to democracy, the similarities between Trump and Bolsonaro and Lula and Biden and Amazon now explain the greater interest of Americans from the last election.
Their opponents in Washington — such as Donald Trump strategist Steve Bannon and Socialist senator Bernie Sanders — don’t have much to agree on. But both many other politicians and public officials unanimously agree that there is much at stake when Brazilians 2 go to the polls.
“This will be one of the most intense and dramatic elections of the 21st century,” Steve Bannon told BBC News Brazil.
“The fate of Brazilian democracy and its relationship with the United States will be determined in the coming elections,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, one of five senators allies of Sanders. .
And that was the case, although Brazilian officials in the US hesitated to comment or say at a recent reception in the American capital to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Brazil’s independence that the election was “smooth” in relations between the two countries. exactly the backdrop for most conversations.
in the mirror
The fates of the two largest democracies in America seem to have been intertwined lately. The US and Brazil face similar challenges and share common interests. Both top the list of countries with the highest absolute death toll from covid-19 and face inflation levels above 8%.
Both countries produce similar goods and therefore compete in international markets. Brazil is the largest producer of soybeans and oranges, followed by the United States in second and fourth place, respectively, with Americans leading and Brazil second or third in corn, beef, turkey and chicken production.
But competing with Brazil, the US sees the country become China’s top investment destination in 2021, a major blow to Americans in Latin America, the most obvious areas of influence in the Cold War-style dispute between Washington and Beijing.
For all these reasons, interest in who will rule Brazil next year was expected to be high. What is new, however, is the amount of public demonstrations on the issue by senior US officials or representatives in the months before the vote.
“There’s more interest, and it’s because of the threat of democratic rupture,” says Carlos Gustavo Poggio, an expert on Brazilian-US relations and a professor at Berea College in Kentucky.
He argues that since the re-democratization, the elections went smoothly and without problems. “We now have a president who is not very clear whether he will comply with the polls and has a close relationship with the military,” Poggio says.
Since winning the 2018 election, Bolsonaro has been accused of electoral fraud without any evidence. Electronic voting machines have existed in Brazil since 1996 and no systematic fraud has been recorded to date.
During Bolsonaro’s recent visit to the United Kingdom to attend Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, if he gets less than 60% of the vote, the Supreme Electoral Court said “something abnormal is happening with the TSE”. But it never exceeded 35% in the polls, lagging about 10 percent behind Lula.
Bolsonaro has systematically been skeptical of the electoral process, even though he said at the time that if he lost he would “cross the lanes and retire”, he had no proof of what he said and admitted his own reaction to the results. .
For many American officials, his stance mirrors that of Donald Trump, who launched false fraud allegations about American democracy before and after his defeat to Joe Biden.
“Brazil and the United States are mirrors of each other,” says former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, who also served as the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil in the early 2010s. “What happens to one of these two democracies? What happens to the other?”, he adds.
In a recent speech to the nation, Biden was clear when he said he believed the Trump the Maga movement was a threat to democracy.
Some see the strong US interest in these elections in Brazil as a way for Americans to confront their own specters of January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters storm the US Capitol as Biden’s election victory is confirmed. The balance was the five dead and the scenes that shattered the country’s self-image.
Brown University historian James Green, who has worked in Brazil for more than 40 years, says it’s the first time he’s seen the pejorative term “Banana Republic” used by people in the United States for neighbors with chaotic political processes in America. America is practiced by Americans in their own country.
In July, then-president of the TSE, Edson Fachin, said in Washington before an American audience that Brazil was not only in danger of repeating January 6, but was in danger of experiencing something “more serious.” .
In the face of all this, the Americans began to act more intensely from the end of the first term. Victoria Nuland, Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, told BBC News Brasil in May that “What should happen in Brazil is free and fair elections, using institutional structures that have served you (Brazilians) well in the past.”
Recently, a conversation between CIA chief William Burns and Bolsonaro’s ministers was leaked. In the dialogue, Burns asked the Brazilian president to stop raising doubts about the election. Bolsonaro denied that the meeting took place.
Politicians also took to the field. Senator Leahy joined Bernie Sanders and four other Democratic senators to propose a resolution that supported democratic institutions in Brazil and recommended, among other things, that the United States recognize the winner of the Brazilian election soon after the result was announced by the TSE. any possibility of objection.
And in the House of Representatives, Democrats tried and failed to pass a measure that would suspend military aid to Brazil if the military relinquished its political neutrality.
“Sometimes the message is official, sometimes it leaks, but everything tries to convey Washington’s thinking,” says Nick Zimmerman, a senior adviser at the Brazil Institute and a former White House foreign policy adviser in the Obama administration.
What is at stake for Zimmermann is not just the situation in Brazil, but a broader international policy issue for Democrats and Republicans about global threats to democracy.
“The multilateral democratic order built after World War II is at risk more than ever in the past 80 years. And that’s something the United States will fight to defend,” says Zimmerman.
Trump of the tropics and Lula in the style of Biden
Questioning the electoral process is not the only similarity between Trump and Bolsonaro, known outside of Brazil as the “Trump of the Tropics”.
Both campaigned as outsiders, pledging to fight the political elite, even though Bolsonaro was already a veteran of the National Congress.
Both promoted nationalism and gun ownership and denounced so-called “globalism” and “gender ideology”. Both dominated direct communication with voters through social networks.
“Bolsonaro is a great hero to all of us,” says Bannon, who sees Brazil as an important part of the global right-wing populist movement.
“At that level [primeiro-ministro húngaro conservador e autoritário] Viktor Orbán as someone who defends sovereignty and builds a grassroots movement. There are evangelicals, there are working class people. If you look at Bolsonarism in Brazil, it’s very similar to the Maga movement,” says Steve Bannon.
On the other side of this electoral conflict is Lula, whose trajectory Americans have compared to Biden himself.
Both came from humble beginnings, families of manual workers and became national references in politics, occupying very high positions before returning to the polls: Biden as Obama’s vice president, Lula as president.
Both have always had negotiations as their main assets and formed broad coalitions to ensure that the two populist leaders in their countries had only one mandate.
In Lula’s case, his allies include eight former presidential candidates, from Guilherme Boulos, leader of the homeless workers movement, to Henrique Meirelles, former president of the Boston Bank.
On the American side, Biden has managed to unite, from socialist Bernie Sanders to some Republicans who died in 2021, like George Bush’s former Secretary of State, Colin Powell.
Besides the interesting similarity between the two main candidates here and there, and the possibility of a contentious election, there is another reason why Brazil is on the agenda of American and European politicians.
In recent years, Brazil has accelerated the process of deforestation in the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest. Bolsonaro’s government reduced the budget to control the destruction of the biome. Last year, then-environment minister Ricardo Salles was accused by the US of involvement in illegal timber smuggling and denied it. At the same time, the issue was becoming a priority both in the current US government and in Western Europe.
Green and Left Agenda
For Shannon, it became clear to the world that the decisions made at the Palácio do Planalto will impact the lives of billions of people on the planet.
During the 2020 election campaign, Biden suggested that Americans lead the creation of a multibillion-dollar international fund to help Brazil pay for forest protection.
But the word never got off the ground. According to those in the administration familiar with the matter, the main reason was the lack of confidence that Bolsonaro’s government would achieve the set goals.
Bolsonaro says that Brazil is a benchmark in environmental protection, and the policies adopted for the region are also a matter of national sovereignty and economic development.
Lula has spoken widely about her intention to protect the Amazon and has managed to attract the support of Marina Silva, an internationally respected environmentalist and former environment minister for five years.
However, Marina stopped being Lula’s minister in her second term of PT, denouncing that the green agenda was not a priority, and both Lula and her successor Dilma Rousseff undertook the construction of a series of hydroelectric dams in the middle of the region. The Amazon, which caused serious damage to the forest and its native population.
If Lula’s new, greener stance pleases the United States, there is far more dissatisfaction with his close relationship with the Cuban, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan regimes – which Lula has tried to temper with statements about the need for a change of power in those countries.
Lula was also a strong supporter of BRICS, a bloc made up of India, Russia, China, South Africa and Brazil, which some saw as a challenge to Western power.
By contrast, in 2019, under Bolsonaro, Brazil voted for the first time in history, along with the United States and Israel, in favor of a US embargo against Cuba and 187 other countries.
Against Biden, Bolsonaro will remember working as a shield against what he calls “the spread of communism” in Latin America.
Yet, despite the protests of the Americans, the Brazilian president visited President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2022, just two weeks before the start of the war in Ukraine.
According to Shannon, regardless of who wins the election, Brazil will be a major international player that the United States must work with without any pretensions to domination.
“The difference between Brazil and the US is that the US is a global superpower and they know it,” he says. “Brazil is a superpower and has yet to discover it.”
– This text was originally published at https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-63003434.
source: Noticias
