Allies who tried to reconcile with defeated President Jair Bolsonaro were said to have gone to bed after the results came in, neither thanking his 58 million supporters nor congratulating the new president-elect. This silence continued for almost two days. Heads of state from the United States, France, Germany, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Italy had congratulated Lula on his victory by the time Bolsonaro gathered the country’s media for his first public post-election appearance. In a terse speech that lasted no more than two minutes, he failed to acknowledge defeat and did not mention Lula’s name. Instead, he greeted small groups of coup plotters who had gathered across the country, calling on the military to annul the election results and keep Bolsonaro in power. Crucially, there were some signs of concession. After Bolsonaro vacated the lectern, his chief of staff, Ciro Nogueira, announced that the president had given his approval to begin the process of transitioning into a government. And before beginning his address to the media, Bolsonaro was heard saying: “We will miss them.” “Bolsonaro never planned to admit defeat,” Mario Sergio Lima, senior Brazil analyst at Medley Advisors, told Al Jazeera. “At first, I think he was really surprised that he lost, as he had been surrounded by yes men and thought he was going to win. But after that, the prolonged silence was a way to see if the street protest movement would pick up steam.” In the days after the vote, nationwide protests by Bolsonaro’s supporters blocked major highways as protesters openly called for a military coup. “Bolsonaro has never followed the rules,” political scientist Beatriz Rey, a visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins University, told Al Jazeera. “He spent most of his presidency criticizing the electoral system. Of course he wasn’t going to admit defeat.”
Balancing act
Bolsonaro surely hoped that his years of efforts to discredit Brazil’s electoral system would have led to more widespread popular anger at his defeat. But while the protests caused considerable disruption, even blocking access to Brazil’s busiest airport at one point, their radical nature and insufficient size quickly exhausted their value for the outgoing president, who was forced to ask the protesters to leave . Fabio Zanini, a political columnist at the newspaper Folha de S Paulo, described Bolsonaro’s behavior as a “balancing act”. “On the one hand, he cannot directly criticize the protesters, because that would be against everything he stood for throughout his presidency,” Zanini told Al Jazeera. “But at the same time, he can’t be associated with anything too aggressive, like highway roadblocks, because that could get him into legal trouble.” The protests have since dispersed, although small groups continue to hold vigils outside military barracks in major Brazilian cities. While Bolsonaro has yet to give up the fight, pre-election predictions that he would lock himself into power after defeat ended up missing the mark. His silence appeared to irritate several of his most powerful elected aides, who urged Bolsonaro to concede. “It doesn’t appear that anyone was on board with the idea of a coup under Bolsonaro,” Rey said. “Since the election, the political system seems to be organizing itself and returning to normalcy.” Indeed, Bolsonaro’s strategy of silence “has certainly failed to a point,” Lima said: “Bolsonaro has been abandoned by almost every institutional ally he had.”
“Hard to replace”
At age 67 and with more than three decades in politics, Bolsonaro suffered his first defeat in this election. Two years after being elected as a Rio de Janeiro city councilor in the late 1980s, he won a seat in the federal Congress. He was re-elected six times before rising to the presidency as an unlikely far-right outsider in 2018. “Bolsonaro doesn’t know what it’s like to lose,” Zanini said. “Maybe that’s why he took the loss so badly.” The question that remains is what will happen to the radical president, and the Brazilian far right as a whole, now that he is out of office. Crucially, losing public office strips Bolsonaro of his parliamentary immunity. “There are many pending cases against him, during the pandemic or in connection with the organization of anti-democratic protests, but it is unlikely that he will be imprisoned immediately after leaving the presidency,” Zanini said. “But it’s something he’ll have to watch out for.” Meanwhile, any suggestion that the outgoing president will drift into the shadows seems foolish. Bolsonaro won more than 58 million votes on Oct. 30, the third-highest total ever for a Brazilian presidential candidate, even surpassing his 2018 performance. According to Zanini, “no one can compete with Bolsonaro” on Brazil’s far-right, drawing a comparison with his American counterpart, Donald Trump. “Trump emerged from the 2020 election as the supreme leader of the American right and is now working on his 2024 candidacy,” he said. “Bolsonaro will do the same for the 2026 election, so he needs to maintain that hegemony until then.” However, there is doubt as to whether the broader right wing in Brazil will be confined to Bolsonaro or whether moderate factions will break away. “There are incentives for the center-right to distance themselves from Bolsonaro because he is a loose cannon. They want someone they can count on,” Lima said. “But, for the far right, it would be difficult to replace Jair Bolsonaro.”
