After the October 2 first-round election, Brazilians will return to the polls October 30 to decide between left-leaning front-runner Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva "Lula" and the right-wing incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro. Sidney Chalhoub, a Brazilian social historian, is David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, discusses the Brazilian elections, the challenges the country faces and the very threat to Brazilian democracy.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Welcome to Faculty Voices. Sidney Chalhoub is a Brazilian social historian. He's David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of History and of African and African American Studies. Before coming to Harvard, he taught for 30 years at the University of Campinas in Brazil. Today we'll be talking about the first round of elections in Brazil. Welcome Sidney.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Thank you for having me, Jillian.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Starting off, our audience is probably divided into two parts. There are people who don't know anything about what's going on in Brazil right now and there are others who are watching every little detail. So starting off, for those who don't follow Brazil closely, could you give us a quick summary of what happened in Sunday's elections?
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
The front runner candidate that has been a front runner candidate for several months, Lula, a former president of Brazil, as expected got most of the votes and was very close to winning in the first round of the elections. He got 48.5% of the vote. However unexpectedly the candidate who came second was President Bolsonaro who got 43% of the vote, and the polls had indicated that he would get around 35 to 37%. So there was a surprising performance of President Bolsonaro in relation to what the polls seemed to indicate in the days previous study election. The other candidates performed poorly. The election was really polarized and they got 3, 4% of the vote. And so the second round is in October 30th between former President Lula and the present President Bolsonaro.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Were you personally surprised by the results?
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
In the terms of the mark that Lula had, the polls were exactly right. They were estimating Lula to get between 48 and 52%. He got closer to the lower end of this, 48.5. But Bolsonaro's vote was a surprise, because the polls indicated otherwise and because the polls also indicated a strong rejection of his government with a majority of people evaluating his government in a negative way and thus suggesting that the polls might be right in relation to his performance, which would still be strong with more than 30%, but it was unexpectedly strong.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
It leaves the second round really open because the margin is small and it gives him actually a chance of winning, which unexpected and surprising giving what the poll have been consistently indicating in the past couple months.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Well, you are a social historian and I'd like to draw on your expertise to tell us if there are any precedents in Brazilian history that can help us interpret the election results.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Well, yes. Another way of looking at this election and perhaps thinking that there is nothing surprising about it, surprising about the strong performance of the extreme right, is that Brazil is in many ways experiencing a new wave of a conservative reaction that has happened before in its history.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
For example, I usually think that the first reactionary backlash in Brazilian history resulted from the gradual slave emancipation laws, for example, a law of 1871, which freed the children of enslaved women and also allowed for the slaves to go to court to obtain manumission even though they had to compensate their masters. But they would have the right to manumission irrespective of a master's consent.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
This law was interpreted as a major problem by the slave holding class. They thought these would diminish their mortal authority over their enslaved labor force and there was a very important pushback, a backlash that came in many ways. One of the ways was that as the number of free people increased in the population because of this gradual emancipation law and also because Brazil was internationally isolated, was the last country in the west that still had slavery, African slavery, the Congress, the Chamber and Senate ended up approving a law in January, 1881 that established for the first time in the country's history a literacy requirement for voting rights. And in a country which did not have primary education available to people, it actually meant disenfranchising all of these African Brazilian population that was becoming freed for the first time, or even those who had been freed in previous generations but were poor and didn't have access to a primary education.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
So in fact, this is a very important restriction to the rights of people of African descent in Brazil that were becoming freed. And actually there is a recent dissertation defended in the history department at Harvard by [inaudible 00:06:09], who actually shows that some of the North American Southern planters who had immigrated to Brazil after the defeat of the South in American Civil War and stayed there for several years, and then returned to the US after Reconstruction ended. And they took back to the US the idea of using literacy requirements as a way of keeping people African descent away from political rights. The idea that these planters had learned in Brazil were actually deployed in parts of the US South as a strategy to exclude people who African descent of voting rights.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Because the slave holding class thought that the Brazilian monarchy had supported gradual emancipation, they also rebelled against the monarchy, and there was a military coup d'etat that brought about a Republican regime beginning in 1889. This is a kind of a reactionary wave that begins in the early '70s and goes on until the '90s in reaction to people having the right to become freed.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
A second big reactionary moment in Brazilian history was the one that actually begins with the military dictatorship in 1964. Beginning the late 1940s and in the 1950s, Brazil had a series of labor laws that started being enforced in part by the creation of a special judicial labor justice structure that adjudicated complaints brought to them by workers against their employers. Again, entrepreneurs and businessmen and their organizations really believed that judicial courts, these labor courts meant a weakening of their authority over their workers and also the recognition of requests for increase in wages and for rights in regards to labor conditions that for them was menacing their businesses, their authority and so on.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
And then when Congress starts discussing the possibility of extending these labor rights, which previously had been good and effective only for urban workers to the rural areas, then this was really important for the military and sectors of civil society of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, to get together and have the military coup of '64, which resulted in 20 years of a dictatorship.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
So I see the present moment in Brazil as a kind of a third wave of a reactionary backlash. The first one was just for people to become free, to get rid of slavery. The second one had to do with the traditional rights of the working class, the urban working class, working industries and factories and workers who acquired or had access to rights in period 1940s and '50s and early '60s. And then the coup d'etat came. And now beginning of the constitution of 1988, Brazil started a period of recognition of a broad array of rights. The constitution allowed for several changes that began with it, like recognition of the right to land by Indigenous communities, by communities constituted by former enslaved communities, labor rights that related approved for domestic workers, labor rights that are recognized for previous categories, especially domestic workers, which are really a large category, especially female African Brazilian.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Also the Supreme Court recognized the right of LGBTQ people to marry and to have their unions recognized. And then later and perhaps very consequentially for the present reactionary wave was the approval of affirmative action for access to public universities in Brazil, which was also a very aggressive affirmative action policy that began more timidly in the beginning of the 2000s. And then in 2012 after a Supreme Court decision that considered affirmative action legal, constitutionally legal, it gave a legal guarantee, a legal support to a federal law that actually instituted a very important affirmative action law for admission to Brazilian research universities, public universities in the same year of 2012.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
And then the backlash begins in 2013 when for the first time the right, which was not very much in the public scene after the end of the dictatorship in the mid 1980s, back on the streets protesting against the leftist government, Workers' Party government. And then that followed by 2014 election in which the right wing candidate lost by a small margin and for the first time in this democratic period after the end of dictatorship did not accept electoral results, alleging a fraud that a year later he recognized he never believed it existed.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
And then there was the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 without any crime or any wrongdoing that could be asserted. And actually a Brazilian court has recently ruled that the accusations against Dilma were not valid. They were dropped. So it's now legally recognized what everybody knew at the time, that these had been fabricated allegations to get Dilma out of power. And then it continued.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Then there is Bolsonaro's election in 2018. And the fact that he still has so much support and has this strong backing and goes to the second round with a chance to eventually succeed in the election contrary to expectations, it shows a consistent reactionary wave beginning in 2013, and it's still going on. We don't know when it's going to end. It's consistent of previous periods in Brazilian history in which your reactionary wave goes on for a decade, or two decades sometimes.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
But despite all these reactionary waves, slavery was extinguished, didn't come back. Labor rights are still there in Brazil. I mean workers have a lot more rights than in the US for example in Brazil, formal rights recognized by the courts, recognized, constitutionally protected. And I believe all this new range of rights that resulted from the constitution of 1988 are not going to be taken back. I don't think the wheels of history will go backwards in that sense. So this reactionary wave will eventually go away despite all the damage that it is causing to the country.
June Carolyn Erlick:
But if Brazil is in a reactionary wave, why is Lula showing so strongly?
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Well, we know there is a resistance by the progressives. There is always a struggle. The question is whether there will be a majority of Brazilian citizens supporting the overcoming of this reactionary wave at this point. And this is also another aspect of the whole situation. Bolsonaro campaigned in the last few months on a Trumpian mode alleging that the electoral system wasn't trustworthy, saying that the only way he would lose would be if there were electoral fraud.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
I think he didn't expect himself maybe to be so strong in the democratic game. He expected to lose and maybe on the first round. And now he's perhaps hopeful that he can win in a democratic vote, although I have no doubt that he will continue to suggest the possibility of fraud as a justification for an eventual loss. But I think he's probably going to play the democratic game. And in this case has really played in the sense of using it strategically, because I think an eventual Bolsonaro victory will probably be the end of Brazil democracy as we have known since 1988.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
He's going to find ways of constraining the Supreme Court, changing the rules of the game. You have a majority in Congress. You have a very conservative Chamber of Deputies and also in the Senate, and so he can have a majority there. He may come up with constitutional changes that will trump democracy in ways that will be enduring now.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
It's a very dangerous moment. Even though an eventual Lula victory will mean considering who got elected for the Chamber and the Senate. Lula will face a lot of difficulties to rule and it will be of difficult government, but it's very important that he wins because if the presidency is with someone committed to democracy, the threat of this right wing reactionary wave to become something other than democratic rule will be avoided.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
And Lula is very experienced and he will be able to talk with the Chamber and the Senate and get enough support, not to have a progressive government as perhaps you wish it to do, but he will be able to find a way of governing and do the most important task at this point, which is to preserve democracy in the country.
June Carolyn Erlick:
The most important task in Brazil is to preserve democracy, you say. But what are some of the other big challenges that Brazil faces?
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Some of them are challenges that have been there forever, like an incredibly damaging inequality in society in general that has been persistent. However, during the Workers' Party tenure in government inequality persisted, but there were public policies in place that at least maintained the poor population above a certain level of need that allowed them to have enough to eat and to have enough to go by and keep living. So there were very few people under the poverty line during Lula's years because of public policies.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
With Bolsonaro, the misery, the extreme poverty is again very much present in the country and so inequality is a major challenge. Now, there are other challenges. The problem of urban violence with Bolsonaro has been facilitating access to weapons. Brazilian police is increasingly violent, has long been violent, is even more violent now against the slums and the poor population, people of African descent are the ones who are targeted by this.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
The problem of democratic institutions themselves being under challenge, the way Bolsonaro has been negotiating with the Chamber and the Senate has been what they call the secret budget, which is to give away money to congressman, to senators, in order to guarantee their support without any transparency about where this money is going to.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Also, there is very notable damage in public health policies. Just for you to have an idea, Brazil never had a problem with people being skeptical about vaccination and because Bolsonaro was from the beginning skeptical about Covid, skeptical about Covid vaccines, and supported the use of drugs that were scientifically proven to be ineffective against Covid. He bought all the anti-science package about Covid, and vaccination hesitancy has become an issue in Brazil now, which had never been before in Brazil.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
For example, vaccination for childhood diseases in the national campaigns that were run every year, usually a target of 95, 98, 97% would be achieved and older children would be vaccinated. In the last couple of years, these numbers, depending on the disease have gone down to 70%, 60% or even below the target. So there is a threat there in terms of public health policies of diseases that have been completely under control for decades to return because of the performance of this government. So there is a lot to attend too.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Let's suppose that Lula wins and he has to govern with this right wing Congress, majority conservative Congress and Senate. I think there are some issues for which politicization is not going to be an issue because I doubt, except for Bolsonaro and some of its fanatics, that very many people will be against strengthening the vaccination campaigns and make them effective again to protect children.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
And the question of inequality, there will be discussions about how to deal with it. But I'm sure there won't be very much opposition about getting people out of a situation in which they are experiencing hunger. So there will be ways in which it is possible to put together a government that will bring enough support to core policies that will address urgent needs, situations that are really an emergency to get the country out of this four years of damage caused by a completely ineffective government.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Let's go back for a minute to October 30th and wrap up. What do you think we can expect between now and October 30th?
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Well, it will be a terrible month. Of course Bolsonaro will use all the tools at his disposal as the president to continue to use government resources to get electoral advantage. I mean, he has been always a disbeliever in programs to raise the income of poor people, and now he's being enthusiastic about it until December. He has approved these payments to the poor to support them, their needs. This is something for the next few months. We don't know what's going to happen next year. He is going to be resorting even more forcefully to cultural wars. And so he'll be not only attacking the Workers' Party and Lula personally for allegedly being corrupt. In a case of Lula, there's no corruption charges against him. He was either being acquitted in several judicial procedures against him or in the ones in which Moro was the justice, the judicial procedures were considered void and annulled because he was biased against Lula and the thing was politicized.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
So he's completely clear and there is no corruption charges against him. Bolsonaro will be repeating that he is corrupt and so on and he's a former prisoner and so on and so forth. And Lula won't reply back to him, "I'm the former prisoner, you are the future one," because he won't play this game and it's going to be very hard. It's going to be four weeks of all sorts of attacks in the cultural wars and also using the government resources to forward his candidacy.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Now for Lula, I think he has to continue to do what he's been doing, which is to talk with other parties, seek an alliance, especially with the person who was third place with a low number of votes, it's not even 5%, Simone Tebet, but this was because of polarization. In the end, lots of people flocked to one candidate or the other when they saw the polarization so intense. But this was a woman who ran a very decent electoral campaign and she is a center type of figure respected by the left. And Lula should reach out to her. This four or 5% of the vote is absolutely decisive. She's given signs that she'll support Lula and this needs to be concluded and achieved.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Now there's the other candidate who got 3% of the vote, Ciro Gomes. This is a more difficult case. He is from a traditional leftist party. I think the party is going to be supporting Lula openly, but I don't know about the candidate who has been taking a right wing turn, which is really hard to understand, and attacking Lula vicious throughout the whole campaign. So I don't know if he will at this point be willing to support to Lula in the second round or if he will, as he did last time, go to Paris or find another way of disappearing from the political scene.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Would you dare to do a crystal ball prognosis of what's going to happen October 30th?
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Well, Lulu still has a significant lead. I mean, he got a 5% lead. This means 6 million votes ahead. If there is not an increase in abstention and all these voters show up again to vote, he needs a little more than a million and a half new votes to achieve the 50% margin. So he's still the front runner. He is still more likely to win than Bolsonaro. It's of course, at this point much tougher, much more stressful. The challenge is big. I think his major challenge is to maintain his base motivated because Sunday was kind of an experience of defeat. Not only because he didn't get to the 50% margin, but because Bolsonaro performed much stronger than expected. So there is a low morale on his troops at this point, and Lula has to cheer them up somehow.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
The main thing for Lula's campaign now is to overcome the shock of knowing that more than 50 million Brazilians still support a fascist. Lula has a challenge, which is to cheer up his base. This is his first challenge I think. And together with this, to seek out the available votes that is still there, the ones who went to Simone Tebet and those who went to Ciro Gomes. And if Ciro is not amenable to a conversation, just with his party and try to get as much support as possible, not only to win on October 30th, but also to prepare the government. That will be very difficult so you need to make these alliances to be able to govern without being blocked by the extreme right. You need a good conversation with centrist political forces.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
So he has these two things ahead of him. I hope he cheers up himself. He seemed to be under shock too on Sunday when he gave his interview. He tried, of course, to show his determination to go on, which I have no doubt he has. But he was of course under the impact of what had happened. And I think his main thing now is to cheer up himself, cheer up his base. It's very winnable. He is still the front runner. He's very likely to win more than the other guy, but it's a very tough task and it's all hands on deck to make this happen.
June Carolyn Erlick:
Thank you very much. You've been listening to Sidney Chalhoub. He's a Brazilian social historian. He's David and Peggy Rockefeller Professor of history and of African and African American studies. Thank you for being with us on Faculty Voices.
Professor Sidney Chalhoub:
Thank you again.