What Bolsonaro’s Loss Reveals About the Limits of Populism
As Sunday’s high-stakes runoff election for the presidency between Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right incumbent, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his left-wing challenger, approached, Brazilian political analysts kept returning to two big questions. The first was simply, “Who will win?” The second was more ominous: “Will the incumbent leave office if he loses?”
The answer to the first question came late on Sunday night. Lula clearly, if narrowly, defeated Bolsonaro, with 51 to 49 percent of the vote.
All of the attention then shifted to the second question. Throughout his time in office, Bolsonaro had given the army a more political role, praising the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 and appointing generals to senior positions in his administration. In the past months, he’d the country’s voting system, claiming that it was rigged. Much seemed to indicate that he might follow the lead of Donald Trump and
