Wendy Hunter is a Professor of Government at the University of Texas Austin. Recently, she cowrote an article with Timothy Power in the Journal of Democracy called “Lula’s Second Act.”
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I do want to underscore this should not be read as a victory of the left. It’s a victory of Lula and a narrow victory. And it’s Lula the person. It’s not so much Lula from the PT as the party that won.
Wendy Hunter
Key Highlights
- Introduction – 0:36
- Lula – 2:16
- The 2022 Presidential Election – 13:01
- Bolsonaro – 20:45
- January 8th – 27:18
Podcast Transcript
Most conversations about Brazilian politics instinctively turn to questions about the health of its democracy. Naturally, many saw the recent presidential election between Lula and Bolsonaro as a literal referendum on democracy. A few months later some Bolsonaro supporters still refused to accept the election’s outcome. So, they stormed the capital in Brasilia on January 8th in what many saw as eerily similar to what happened two years earlier in the United States on January 6th.
Since then, I’ve wanted to do a deep dive into Brazilian politics where we discuss Lula, Bolsonaro, the election, and what happened on January 8th. Wendy Hunter is perhaps one of those most qualified to explain Brazil’s recent political events and their implications for its democracy. Wendy is a Professor of Government at the University of Texas Austin. Recently, she cowrote an article with Timothy Power in the Journal of Democracy called “Lula’s Second Act.”
For those listening to this podcast for the first time there is a complete transcript at www.democracyparadox.com. If you like the episode, please give the podcast a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also send questions or comments to me at jkempf@democracyparadox.com. But for now… This is my conversation with Wendy Hunter…
jmk
Wendy Hunter, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Wendy Hunter
Thank you.
jmk
Well, Wendy, I really loved your paper in the recent Journal of Democracy. It’s called “Lula’s Second Act,” but I think it really helps to start with his first act. During that period, many described him as extremely successful. Barack Obama even called him the most popular politician on earth. What made Lula so popular back then?
Wendy Hunter
What made Lula so popular was a combination of being the president at the right time just after Fernando Henrique Cardoso had stabilized the Brazilian economy, growth was resuming, and commodity prices were high for Brazilian exports. Plus, his ability to be pragmatic and negotiate with groups across the political spectrum such that he was able to put forth some progressive social policy innovations. They were not radically leftist, but I would say center-left. But he’d also hold his own. So, he was able to do that by keeping the sort of center-right at bay, but also keep Brazil on a steady economic course and a responsible economic course partly by keeping the radicals in his own party at bay. He did that partly by putting them into ministries where they had competence and interest, but did not affect the main economic policies of his government.
So, being in the right place at the right time or getting a good hand of cards, but also playing them very well. And it turns out his first act was very important in his campaign recently because he was able to harken back to the glory days and not only remind people of the fact that 83% of them had supported him when he left power, but also to reject some of Bolsonaro’s claims that he would do things like close churches and promote left-wing policies in the culture wars. He was able to say, ‘Actually, I did govern for eight years. I didn’t close any churches and I really had very pragmatic center-left policies. I didn’t promote a left-wing culture war.’
jmk
So, Lula was obviously a lucky president, as you’ve just said, but was he simply a good president or was he a great president?
Wendy Hunter
Well, it depends on how you look at it. Brazil is a very hard place to govern. It’s a very, very hard place to govern. I think he did about as good a job as anyone could and in the actual policies that came out of his government, I would say, good to excellent. What he did not do well was look to the future. So, we are seeing some of the unfinished business of his earlier time and I would say the single thing he did not do well was within his party. It wasn’t within the government.
What he did not do well was renovate the party. There is very little new blood coming up that can lead the party and this affects his governing too. The Worker’s Party isn’t the biggest party in the Congress. It is only the second biggest and second to Bolsonaro’s party. One reason that is true is that he did not cultivate any successors and did not bring the new generation into his government in a way that could really put the party on track for the future.
jmk
Now, there’s actually a very well cited article that you wrote years ago. It was called, “The Normalization of an Anomaly: The Worker’s Party in Brazil.” And I’m bringing it up because in that paper you were emphasizing how The Worker’s Party was almost the only institutionalized party in Brazil at the time. It was an anomaly because it had a sense of who it was and most of the other parties just existed as vehicles for personalities to run for president or to run for political office. So, that’s what made the workers party different at the time. Are you surprised at how The Worker’s Party now feels very much like it’s just a vehicle for Lula’s own political career? I mean, that’s how it seems from afar when I look at it.
Wendy Hunter
You’re very discerning to point this out. Lula is looking more like a populist in short than he used to and that many people, including myself, predicted based on the past. His magic formula in the past was that he came out of an institutionalized party and that he had control of that party. It was important that he keep the radicals at bay, but that he have outreach to the general population. That was his magic formula. Now it is looking less like he’s a person of the party and more like he is a populist on the left.
The fact that he did not cultivate a successor and, worse than that, the person who ran against Bolsonaro had to go around with a mask that was a Lula mask to remind people what party he came out of because Lula refused to give up the aspiration to run against Bolsonaro. But he was in jail so he couldn’t run against him. This really suggests the limits of a party centered on one person. Lula has essentially been the head of that party for 43 years, so you’re right, he’s looking more and more like a populist.
A couple other points that reinforce that is people wondered why he chose Dilma, why he signaled her as his successor, to run after his two terms. People are increasingly coming to the recognition that maybe he chose her because she wasn’t all that popular within the party. So, she could do a term and not outshine him and he could come back. As it happened that was a miscalculation. So again, this is why he wasn’t an excellent president, but a good one, I think.
And many of us now think had Dilma not been the president, and especially had she not won a second term, we would never have gotten Bolsonaro. It was her missteps with the economy and then her inability to negotiate with the Congress that led to the impeachment. After that it was all downhill. The other thing that is just emerging in the last few days is signaling that Lula’s wife, current wife, might be a successor. That is sounding very populist to me.
jmk
So, I’ve had Caitlin Andrews-Lee on the podcast.
Wendy Hunter
Okay.
jmk
Yeah, and she talks about charismatic leaders. One of the insights she found is that the successors to charismatic leaders are generally not charismatic. They struggle because the leader with charisma never wants to have their successor outshine them. It sounds a lot like what Lula actually did when he chose Dilma as his successor.
Wendy Hunter
I think that fits perfectly. Someone who is indebted to the first leader, won’t outshine, in most cases him, but also because of these non-outshining characteristics doesn’t have quite the play that the initial leader did. That play was important to be able to get out of logjams in Brazilian politics. So, I think that inhibited Dilma. The same reason she was president was the same reason she didn’t have the skills to negotiate her way out of an impeachment.
jmk
So, the other criticism about Lula coming from particularly Bolsonaro and his camp is that Lula is corrupt. And he was imprisoned for corruption, but the charges were later cleared, although it was on a technicality. Do you think Lula was corrupt or encouraged corruption during his terms in office?
Wendy Hunter
At the very least, Lula knew full well what was going on. It is impossible to imagine a scenario in which he was not cognizant of what was going on. The corruption that led to his jailing, I mean, he wasn’t even jailed on the central charge. He was jailed on an apartment… having an apartment through irregular means, which was the way to get him for the real thing. That was only a second episode of corruption in his term.
The first goes back to 2005 with the Mensalão scandal when it was clear that when Lula could not get the votes in Congress, he essentially bought off legislators to vote for his policies. Hardly anyone talks about that anymore, but that is clearly a scandal linked directly back to Lula that no one is even really denying at this point. So, while the left demonizes Bolsanaro, it needs to be stated that Lula really was no saint himself.
jmk
So, Lula’s not as popular as he was when he was in office, but he’s still very popular. He was popular enough to be elected president for a third term. Was Lula the only candidate who could have beaten Bolsonaro in this past election?
Wendy Hunter
Unequivocally, yes. There needed to be someone with name recognition. There needed to be someone that wouldn’t scare the business class and the political right. There needed to be someone with some play on the left. There is mandatory voting, but there are possibilities of getting out of it. It’s important to note that the candidate who came in the primaries third to Bolsonaro only got 4% of the vote, so Lula and Bolsonaro together managed to lock down 92% of the vote. People l,ooked for a third way. Many people in Brazil, the business class people who follow politics, the average citizen, kept looking for a third way. There really was no third way when you had these two giants. I don’t think anyone else from the PT could have beaten Bolsonaro either. Lula won by less than two percentage points. We see nobody within the PT who could have come up against Bolsonaro.
jmk
Were you surprised that these two giants, these two giant politicians, were able to capture so much of the vote in the first round?
Wendy Hunter
I have to say I was surprised. What surprised me the most was Bolsonaro’s last-minute rally. I did think someone who had overseen such a disastrous covid performance, someone who had offended so many people…. I mean, you name the group, he probably offended them. Sort of the establishment right was just mortified by someone who did not use his four years in federal office to really extend his base. He had a deep base in the evangelical movement. I wouldn’t say he had an extensive base. So, all of those things I just said would suggest that he could not have come as close as he did in the primary or in the general election. I was really surprised he was able to get as close as he did.
jmk
Were you also surprised that he came as close as he did in the second round? Because in the first round he lagged Lula by quite a few percentage points, but in the second round it was a nail biter. It was super close.
Wendy Hunder
That it was. Yes, I was surprised in the second round too. Now, control over federal resources means a lot in Brazil and he threw that into overdrive as we say in the article. He gave fuel subsidies to truckers. He let all sorts of people into the conditional cash transfer program which had been pretty tightly run, but he managed to relax the spending on that in the conditions for entry, such that many people who would never have gotten into that program under previous governments were able to get in and get a monthly stipend. At the end, the last few months, it was no holds barred on the federal spending. Nonetheless, I was surprised that people did not see through it and voted for him anyway.
Lula even struggled to get the vote share we thought he would in the Northeast. But this is the rule of Brazilian politics. Incumbent presidents can do well in the Northeast. They usually increase their share compared to the first round in the Northeast because poor people are more easily bought.
jmk
Now, when I look at the vote map of where Bolsonaro did well compared to where Lula did well, it strikes me that it seems like it’s the more rural areas where Lula did well and it’s the more urban areas that Bolsonaro did well. It’s literally the exact opposite of what we see in the United States.
Wendy Hunter
Correct. The rural areas are strong Lula areas because the rural areas have been recipients of Lula’s signature program, the Bolsa Familia. Those people are pretty unshakeable Lula supporters, not just because of the hundred dollars they get every month that they wouldn’t get otherwise, but because he recognized them as worthy citizens. It’s the dignity that he afforded them that they have not forgotten and he was able to reap his investment in these people early on. But I do want to stress, I don’t just think it’s the money. It’s the fact that he recognized them.
jmk
So, it still doesn’t answer why urban areas support a conservative candidate like Bolsonaro, because in a lot of other places in the world, particularly in the West, we see more urban areas supporting more left-wing candidates. Why is it that they’re supporting somebody who’s not just economically conservative, but incredibly socially conservative and really drives home those social conservative policies?
Wendy Hunter
I think you’re right to try to get at that, because to the extent there are higher levels of education in Brazil those concentrate in urban areas too. So, what we are seeing, I mean, if you do a breakdown of education and voting, more educated people voted for Bolsonaro. So, I think it’s not only social conservatism, which there is more of it in urban areas than we would’ve thought compared to the US, but anti-leftist PT economic preferences, the preferences of business, the preferences of middle class. There is a strong anti-PT thrust in Brazil. Now, if it had been a more radical PT candidate running Bolsonaro would be president of Brazil. It was only Lula and the fact that he didn’t ruin the economy for eight years and was actually quite mainstream, but also another thing.
Lula appointed or asked Geraldo Alckmin to be his vice president. He is Mr. Centrist. He’s from Sao Paulo. He’s a doctor. He is very close with Sao Paulo business, so that was an important signaling. Lula obviously knew the educated urban class was a class he had to speak to. So again, Lula seems very, very in touch with the Brazilian population. That is one of the reasons behind that appointment. Had he not done that, as I say, I think we’d be looking at Bolsonaro as the president.
jmk
So, I want to dive in deeper into Bolsonaro and how he became such a powerful politician. In an earlier paper in the Journal of Democracy you and Timothy Power wrote about Bolsonaro, “Although this longtime office holder was not truly an outsider, Bolsonaro’s fringe status and national legislative politics meant that he was not much of an insider either. In the 1990s and 2000s, Bolsonaro became a well-known though irrelevant back bencher building a reputation as a gaffe prone extremist and a cartoonish foil for the left.” So, how did this cartoonish foil for the left become such a powerful politician for the right?
Wendy Hunter
He surged at the right moment. It’s instructive, I think it’s very reflective, that he never even tried to win an executive post before the 2018 presidential contest. But what did you have that helped Bolsonaro, who really was a buffoon, come in and win a majority? You had an economic crisis. You had very strong anti-PT feelings, and you had the political right really coming up in a culture war. And you had a PT without Lula. Most people didn’t even know the PT candidate until right before the election. So, these were just perfect conditions for some outsider to come in and he was that outsider. He just knew how to speak to the forgotten masses.
And when I say speak, it is true that social media savvy goes a long way. It went a long way and the PT does not have it. I spoke to someone who was an advisor to the PT campaign this last round and he said, “Boy, we’ve really had to learn the modern way of campaigning. You get on WhatsApp and you can reach 3 million people in three seconds. The days of putting up posters are gone.” The Bolsonaro camp knew it had just conquered the media. So, they had the message and the message was mainly anti. You know, the PT brought about transgender rights. The PT brought this horrible economic crisis. The PT brought corruption. So, they had the message at the right time and they had the means.
jmk
Why is it that another candidate on the right wasn’t able to take advantage of that opportunity, of that moment? Because Bolsonaro was not known as a great coalition builder. He was in Congress in a party by himself for most of the time before he was president. Why is it that somebody else on the right side of the spectrum wasn’t able to take this same opportunity and become president instead of Bolsonaro?
Wendy Hunter
Many Brazilianists have asked themselves that question many times. It was a non-establishment moment. People and the polls suggest that everyone before had run. They all contributed to the moment and this was a wild card. It came out of the blue. He hadn’t been tainted. He wasn’t tainted with corruption, because he had never held much power. People were saying, ‘Well, he hasn’t done anything wrong yet.’ Correct. If you’re a governor, you’re probably going to have some skeletons in the closet. If you are a mayor, there are things they could probably pin on you like either lack of performance or corruption. Bolsonaro had one item in the Congress, increasing police and military salary. So, it was really a non-establishment moment that people were taking advantage of.
But this was precisely why he did such a bad job as president. He couldn’t negotiate with anyone, because he wasn’t part of the Brazilian establishment, he didn’t know how to do it and, in a sense, didn’t want to do it because then he would lose his outsider populist status.
jmk
It sounds like that’s part of the reason why he wasn’t able to damage Brazil’s democracy beyond a certain point. In the paper you write, “For all Bolsonaro’s blustering against the institutions of Brazilian democracy, he did not dismantle them.” So, would Bolsonaro’s second term, if he had won, would it have posed a greater threat to democracy than his first?
Wendy Hunter
I think he would’ve been more unhinged. There are areas in which you do not need the Congress or the Supreme Court. They are foreign policy, Amazonian policy, well, we’ll start with those. He would’ve gone all out I fear if he had had a second term. He still would’ve had problems getting things through the Congress. You know, I want to go back and answer your one question on why it couldn’t be someone else. I gave sort of a domestic response. Everybody else had governed. People said, ‘Okay, they’ve governed. This is what everybody has brought us cumulatively. Let’s go for an outsider in this context.’
We haven’t said anything about the international context. It is not irrelevant that. Donald Trump was the president of the United States and gave an example in Brazil of the possibilities of right-wing populism. It is known that Steve Bannon has relations and has advised the Bolsonaro family. So, I think the US example was important for many would be Bolsonaro electors to say, ‘Okay, this can happen in the United States. And what did we get through Donald Trump? We got high growth.’ No doubt that example was important in putting Bolsonaro over the victory line.
jmk
And there’s no greater parallel between the United States and Brazil than what happened in Brazil on January 8th and how it mirrors what happened in the United States on January 6th. So, when we think about what happened on January 8th, it was interesting because leading up to it, a lot of people felt that the worst had already passed. That Bolsonaro in many ways had not quite accepted the outcome, but had called off any attempt to stage a coup or threaten Brazilian democracy. He had kind of pulled back and unlike Donald Trump, he didn’t give a speech on January 8th. He wasn’t even in Brazil at the time to be able to rally his supporters. How responsible do you feel Bolsonaro was for what happened on January 8th in Brazil?
Wendy Hunter
Okay. There is no direct evidence that he incited the attack. However, the whole background of his inciting violence and out of control agitation, I think speaks loudly here. So, there are parallels, but you know, I want to also note that there are pretty serious differences as well. When the protestors rioted in Brazil, Lula was already president. There was no sense in which they would be preventing the new president from taking power, unlike the situation in the US. So, first of all, that was more irrational.
Secondly, you note there weren’t very many congressional supporters for the protestors. There were a couple. But whereas many right-wing politicians in the US said nothing or they went along with questioning the results of the election, the political right, which had just simultaneously won in the same election with the same voting machines that turned out Bolsonaro, couldn’t really say, ‘Oh, the machines worked correctly for us, but not for him.’ So, you didn’t see support from them, which really hurt the protestors, and that’s really a difference. The other difference was Brazil came down decisively and swiftly on not only the protestors, but the head of the federal police who obviously knew what was going to happen. So, there was no two-year report of people sitting around investigating the obvious. This was dealt with very, very swiftly and I think it has increased Lula’s mandate.
jmk
So, you mentioned that the right-wing politicians were not just lukewarm, but even against any effort to question the outcomes of the election, because they had won so many offices, and I think that that’s something that’s overlooked. When we look at the headline, we think the left must have done extremely well in this election because Lula won the presidency. But so many of us overlooked the fact that Bolsonaro’s allies up and down the ticket, other than him, had an extremely strong performance in that election. Can you help explain how well the right actually did in this past election?
Wendy Hunter
Yeah, it is really, really stunning. This was the biggest victory of the political right since the military regime suggesting there is a lot of right-wing sentiment out there and that Bolsonaro himself, especially with the federal resources, must have really blown it not to win. There is a big story behind this. Okay, he got close. But how could a president in this kind of right-wing climate that put all these governors in place and put all these senators and deputies in, how did Bolsonaro not manage to eke out a victory? So, it does suggest there is a limit to how badly you can do in policy. There is a limit and he saw that limit.
So, I do want to underscore this should not be read as a victory of the left. It’s a victory of Lula and a narrow victory. And it’s Lula the person. It’s not so much Lula from the PT as the party that won. So, what explains this massive winning of the right? Anti-PT values, the culture wars. I think the culture wars are very big in Brazil. I think Lula would be well advised to sidestep these as much as he can and to focus on labor policy, the minimum wage, executive performance, civil service reform and those sorts of things. Because this 30% of, let’s call it Bolsonarismo without Bolsonaro is not going away.
jmk
Has Bolsonaro, despite himself, created a strong political party, like institutionalized a party for the right in Brazil?
Wendy Hunter
People are surprised that the PL which was the third party he tried out before he ran for election. It was this sort of, let’s try this out, so let’s see who will have me. I’m surprised that it has done as well as it has, but it’s still not huge. I don’t think it breaks 90 of 500 people in the Congress. I think he will have a legacy in sort of culture wars, evangelical support. I don’t think it will be through the party though. I think it will be a nebulous social movement. There will need to be a replacement leader to coalesce this sort of nebulous, ambiguous societal support though. But, you know, it is strong. It seemed like no matter what Bolsonaro did his support level never really fell much below 30%. He has three sons, too with the last name Bolsonaro.
jmk
So, Bolsonaro’s party obviously did exceptionally well in the elections. So, at least for the moment, you have a strong party of the right. The PT did not do as well, but they still are the second largest party in Congress and in most political offices and they have a long history as well. So, you would think that it should be able to survive for some time, although there are questions as to how long night can survive after Lula. But is Brazil moving past its multi-party past? Because whenever we think of Brazil, we think of a presidential system with an incredibly diverse range of political parties, like multi-party presidentialism. Is Brazil moving towards a more structured two-party system like we have in the United States?
Wendy Hunter
We thought that it was actually under the PSDB versus PT duopoly. I would say that existed from roughly 1994 to 2016. Those were the two parties that always appeared as the two biggest front runners in the presidential elections. They became big parties in the Congress and they jostled on sort of the neoliberal economic reform ticket versus opposition. I don’t think Brazil now is anywhere as duopolistic as it was in the Congress and it was in sort of political sentiments as compared to 1994 to 2016. So, I’m afraid we’re in for just a period of fragmentation.
You know, the PT also could stand to renovate. So, the economic structure of Brazil has changed. Brazil is losing manufacturing to countries down the totem pole. The big sort of initial banner of the PT was union workers, people with hardhats. That is not as relevant as it once and the Catholic church was also very, very strong as part of the initial PT pillar. That has also diminished in importance. I’ll tell you a third thing that is not helping the PT among sort of centrist voters. The failure to reject the example of Maduro in Venezuela and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The PT as a party has not signaled that it wants a different path than that group. Even though Lula never took that path, I think it would be very well advised to distance itself from those examples.
jmk
So, with such a diverse range of political parties that exist right now in Brazil, the PT already has a numerical disadvantage to Bolsonaro’s party. Do you feel that Lula can build an effective coalition to pass meaningful legislation?
Wendy Hunter
I think Lula’s going to have a very hard time. He will not have as big a party as he had last time and the center that he was really able to work when he was president before, the ppportunistic center, because its members would go along with programs as long as they got something out of it, that has been vacated. So, where are the votes going to come from? I think that’s really a question of the day. The Congress is more polarized than the Congress that he had to work with last time and even then, it wasn’t easy. So, yes, I think he has his work cut out for him.
Now, luckily there are enough pragmatic forces in the Congress. So, if the price is high enough, there will be legislators that sign off on his reforms. However, let me note, any sort of paying off of people will be more scrutinized than it was before. I think that option is not going to be as much on the table as it was.
jmk
In the paper you write, “Lula’s heavy reliance on nostalgia during the 2022 campaign may yet come to haunt him.” I think it comes back to this idea of working in coalitions, but can you tell me more about what you meant?
Wendy Hunter
You know what I meant was, especially during the campaign, but I see glimpses of it now, I don’t sense that Lula has quite realized how much Brazil has changed. He is governing in a much more polarized setting than he governed before and he is governing in a setting in which all eyes are going to be on how legislation is passed. There will be much more scrutiny on who pays off whom and how much, but especially the polarization aspect. I’m not sure that he quite realizes that he’s in for a new ball game.
jmk
So, Lula was able to resurrect his political career and run for President and win yet again after so much that happened to him. Do you expect that Bolsonaro will do the same?
Wendy Hunter
That is a very interesting question. It’s a question everyone is asking themselves. One reason Bolsonaro is in Florida is because he does not want to be tried in Brazil. One reason he wanted to win the presidency was immunity from prosecution. He is facing several potential charges. One of them being obstructing justice when the federal police got closer to uncovering the misdeeds of his sons. He’s also facing trouble on denying the vaccine entry to Brazil and obscuring some of the facts. He is in Miami for a reason. I think those reasons might keep him out of the running in the future. I mean, he may be prosecuted. His sons also have charges, so they could all get Italian citizenship. That would be another exit option.
But you can’t take those exits for too long and come back to political power. I did think it hurt his image to go radio silent and to flee. That is not what Bolsonaro’s supporters wanted to see. So, I think there’s a reservoir of the kinds of sentiments that got Bolsonaro elected and almost reelected that are not going away. Whether it will be him though is questionable due to the charges, but also the fleeing from the country.
jmk
Does it matter though? Is the type of politicians on the right more like Bolsonaro than they are like past politicians of the center-right?
Wendy Hunter
There is a mix. There are more people like Bolsonaro. You know, the Congress is now full of former police officers and many former military officers. I’m not sure anyone has quite the mix of Bolsonaro’s qualities with the conjuncture that allowed him to come in in 2018 or to win an election in 2018. You know, the international context also will be important. The Trump era helped Bolsonaro take power and you could see it even in the dealing with Covid. There was about a four day lag between what Donald Trump would say and what Bolsonaro would say. It was really uncanny how many parallels there were. So, I think who the president of the United States is and what the discourse is is really important in determining the climate in Brazil including who can come up and what they do when they’re in power.
jmk
So, circling back to Lula once again. If he fails as president in his term in office, this third term in office, how will it affect the future of democracy in Brazil?
Wendy Hunter
You know, he’s very savvy. When we talk about failing, he’s already framed his legacy as, ‘My job was not to produce a great governance for four years. It was to save Brazilian democracy from another four years of Bolsonaro.’ So, he’s getting a lot of mileage in the fact he is not Bolsonaro and there will be a limit to how chaotic governance will be. I mean, one reason why some center-right people in states like Paraná in the Southwest voted for Lula was they just said, ‘We cannot take the chaos and the extreme volatility of another four years of Bolsonaro.’ Many Business people voted for Lula because they said, ‘We just want stability. We need to be able to plan better and with just this volatility, we can’t.’
So, the standards have already been ratcheted down. The Brazilian economy is improving and inflation is getting more under control than it was. There’s been a little row about where the interest rate will be set. Lula always has a way of landing on his feet. It may not be with a triple jump and a ten. But there will be a limit to how disastrous it will be and that was the pitch and I think that’s what we’re seeing.
jmk
Well, Wendy Hunter, thank you so much for joining me today. I want to mention your article one more time. It was in the Journal and Democracy. It’s “Lula’s Second Act.” It was co-written with Timothy J. Power. Thank you so much for writing it. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Wendy Hunter
Thank you very much. It was really a great pleasure.
Key Links
“Lula’s Second Act” in the Journal of Democracy by Wendy Hunter and Timothy J. Power
“Bolsonaro and Brazil’s Illiberal Backlash” in the Journal of Democracy by Wendy Hunter and Timothy J. Power
“The Normalization of an Anomaly: The Workers’ Party in Brazil” in World Politics by Wendy Hunter
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Jennifer Piscopo on the Constitutional Chaos in Chile
Amy Erica Smith on Politics and Religion in Brazil
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