His victory tells a broader story. A story about a war: the class war that the few are waging against the many across the Western world. It’s a war acknowledged by its victors, including Warren Buffet who once quipped: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Mr Buffett was not exaggerating. For almost four decades, Western governments and central banks have pulled every policy lever in the same direction: to make the assets of the few burgeon at the expense of the incomes of the many.

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Consider the numbers. Between 1952 and 1988, economic growth was behind nearly all the gains of the West’s stock market. From 1989 onwards, though, growth explains only about a quarter. The largest share, around 40%, came from income diverted from workers to shareholders. Another third came from cheaper money and lower perceived risk. This is not wealth creation. It is wealth extraction: a transfer from those who work to those who own, exacerbated by states making cheap money available to those who already have loads, and trumpeted on the evening news as “a strong economy”.

And the wealthy rarely pay taxes: they don’t actually earn an income, but, rather, own assets, which are taxed only when sold. So they avoid selling, borrow against their soaring assets at 1 or 2% and live on the loan. Then they die without ever paying tax on their capital gains and pass on the loot to their kids at ridiculously low inheritance taxes. Meanwhile, the worker borrows on a credit card at 20% to pay bills and put food on the table, her debts the mirror image of their fortunes.

This arrangement relies on one crucial thing: asset prices must be protected from collapse. And when they are threatened, the state comes to the rescue: 2001, 2008, 2020, the British gilt crisis of 2022, Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. Together this string of bail outs reveals the rule: when financial wealth is threatened, governments discover that money can be found. Today, in the United States, the top 10% own almost 90% of all shares. It’s a similar picture in the UK and the EU. The US federal government and the Fed, the UK governments and the Bank of England, Brussels and the European Central Bank have repeatedly intervened to insure the wealth of the wealthy, doing “whatever it takes” to prop up their asset prices. The rest of the population pays the premium, in the form of the austerity that follows every bailout.

Yet austerity does more than redistribute the costs of a crisis. It also changes the balance of power between those who own and those who work. To understand why it keeps returning, even though it undermines economic growth, consider the story Marx told about Thomas Peel, who in 1829 sailed to Western Australia’s Swan River with £50,000 of provisions and three hundred working-class men, women and children. On arrival, his workers walked off into the bush and worked for themselves. Peel had brought money, tools and labour, but he could not bring capitalism along, because his workers had alternatives.

Capital, Marx concluded, is not a thing, a mere asset, but a social relation: the power of those who own to get those who don’t own to do things they’d rather not do. Austerity is not an economic policy. It is a disciplinary device, keeping the many sufficiently insecure and indebted to accept “an offer they can’t refuse”. The ruling class’s deepest fear is not inflation or debt. It is to end up like Peel: asset rich, but without the power to compel.

Here is the part of the story that keeps me awake at night. When center-left politicians, from Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Tony Blair to Gerhard Schröder, François Hollande and Andy Burnham, abandoned the language of class, a void opened up in the working-class heartlands of the West. Into that void stepped a venomous storyteller with a century of experience in filling such voids: the resurgent far-right, including its rebranded fascists. It offers left-behind workers a story of dignity, then redirects their fury away from the owner who shipped their factory abroad, or the minister who sold their council house to some fund, and towards the migrant next door. It does not end the class war. It merely divides one side — the workers — to rule over them. It camouflages the war.

From the red suburbs of Paris to south Piraeus, from England’s red wall to Italy’s rust belt in Taranto, from the American rust belt to eastern Germany, the pattern is relentless. And so a fatalism has set in: the class war waged from above, we are told, must inevitably end in a neofascist, racist, misogynist revival.

Brazil has just refuted this fatalism.

Brazil knows the monster intimately. It lived through four years of Jair Bolsonaro, with his nostalgia for the military dictatorship. On 8 January 2023, his followers stormed the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. Brazil’s far Right is not a fringe. Unlike Trump’s ragtag stormtroopers, they had years of running a dictatorship.  They won the first round of this election. They had the White House fully behind them, while the US Democrats, once again demonstrating their irrelevance, stayed mute. And yet, yesterday, they were defeated.

How? Not by hand-wringing about “populism”, nor by a centrist promise to manage the status quo more efficiently. Lula won because he did what the Western center-left has forgotten how to do: he spoke the language of class, and backed it with policies that shifted power, however modestly, from the few to the many. His government exempted those earning up to 5,000 reals a month from income tax and paid for it with a minimum tax on the very richest. During Brazil’s G20 presidency, he proposed a global minimum tax on billionaires. When Lula tells Brazilian workers that the elites have rigged the game, he points his finger upwards, at the rentier and the speculator, not sideways, at the migrant or the poor. But the most innovative weapon in Brazil’s arsenal is one that few outside Latin America have heard of. It is called Pix.

Every time you tap a card to pay for a coffee, a toll is levied. Visa, Mastercard and the banks take a cut, often 2% or 3%, from every transaction. Multiply this by billions of purchases a day and you begin to recognize one of the most lucrative rent-extraction machines ever devised. These are not profits made in competitive markets but a toll extracted by those who own the digital rails on which our economic lives now run. It is a key weapon of technofeudalism.

Unlike Britain, Europe or, of course, America, Brazil’s central bank moved to limit this rabid exploitation. It launched an alternative: a public, instant payment system, free for individuals and with capped fees for merchants. A Brazilian pays a street vendor in Salvador or sends money to her mother in Recife, instantly, using Pix from her phone, with no card company or bank taking its slice. Brazilians adopted it with astonishing enthusiasm. Last year, Pix processed almost 80 billion transactions and overtook credit cards as the most popular way to pay online.

Pix is the Swan River of the digital age. It gave tens of millions of Brazilians, including the poorest, who had never had a bank card, an alternative to the toll booths of Big Finance. And, like Peel, the collectors did not take it lying down. This summer, Washington imposed 25% tariffs on most Brazilian exports, and its trade representative explicitly named Pix as a grievance, complaining that it “unfairly disadvantaged” American payment companies! The most powerful government on Earth deployed its trade arsenal against a Brazilian free public service for being too successful at denying rents to Visa and Mastercard.

Lula did not blink. He defended Pix as a Brazilian public good, and Brazilians rewarded him for it. Here, at last, is a concrete example of limiting the power of Big Business, Big Finance and Big Tech: not with slogans, but by building public digital infrastructure that removes the opportunity to extract rent in the first place.

Let me, however, refrain from romanticizing Lula. Lula is no revolutionary. His margin was admittedly narrow. Brazil’s Congress remains in the grip of agribusiness and evangelical blocs. Its central bank still keeps interest rates punishingly high, a weapon of the class war if ever there was one. Lula himself has compromised much too much with those vested interests, and lost support as a result.

But Brazil has shown us three things: first, that the class war waged against the many does not have to end in fascism. Fascism flourishes only when the Left vacates the battlefield of class. Second, a progressive government can win by pointing upwards, at those who extract rent, rather than downwards, at those who suffer. And third, Big Business can be defeated, at least forced to lose some battles, by building public alternatives to its rent-extracting machines.

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So, here is the challenge to Britain, to Europe, to the people of the United States. Build your own Pix: public payment rails that end the tolls of Visa and Mastercard. Tax capital gains, not just income. Make every rescue conditional, with the public receiving real, permanent equity in return. Create a public investment bank as an alternative to the bond markets. Restore the bargaining power of the workforce. And give working people what Peel’s workers found at Swan River: an alternative, and thus the freedom to say no.

Buffett was right. There is a class war, and his class has been winning hands down. But yesterday, in Brazil, it lost a battle; though not the war. It lost because a working-class president dared to name the war and fight it using weapons fashioned to defend the many.

The two candidates left in the run off have sadly offered up the most vacuous contest in living memory. Though keen to defend sovereignty, the Left-wing octogenarian Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva talks mostly about his past achievements. The 45-year-old Flavio Bolsonaro principally wants to get his dad, disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro, out of jail.

It is Flavio who looks the most likely to prevail, to the delight of US interests, from Donald Trump to Big Tech. However, the emergence of a new force in Brazilian politics — the upstart Missão party, led by the former student activist turned political entrepreneur Renan Santos — offers the possibility that this settlement may not hold forever.

Even if he was knocked out in the first round of the presidential election with 2% of the vote, Renan (politicians are known by their first names in Brazil) had led the field among under-24s with 36% in polling earlier this year. Commentators noted that he possesses a rare commodity in today’s digitalized political landscape: the ability to “break out of the bubble” and reach voters on the other side of the political spectrum. Indeed, the limitations of digital age politics is a core theme: “We have never been so polarized and yet there is so little debate”, he told me in a recent interview. Political alignment has become “automatic” so there is never any need to fight over politics. What he hopes to bring is fresh ideas, and transcend the “asphyxiating” effect of social media — which has done so much to shape the dire character of modern Brazilian politics.

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South America is now dominated by conservative governments — all of whom, despite their differences, adopt MAGA-like themes and are friendly to the US president. A slew of new Right-wing politicians are born-online culture-warrior provocateurs: foremost among them is the Bolsonaro-aligned Nikolas Ferreira, who has 23 million social media followers. Renan is scathing of these figures. “The electoral process has become the end in itself, and the mandate is only an instrument for gaining more fame and attention on social media.”

Younger generations in Brazil have grown up under Workers Party governments — 17 of the past 24 years have been under the party of the center-left — and now increasingly identify as Right-wing. Missão stands apart from its own camp for demonstrating a willingness to rethink Brazil’s role in a post-globalization world and presenting this in a forcefully ideological and programmatic package.

Renan is a constant critic of the Bolsonaro clan, their submissiveness to the US, their links to organized crime, and their self-serving culture wars. “Voters care more about a hypothetical trans person entering their bathroom than public security or corruption,” he says in one video. He repeatedly calls out Bolsonaro junior as a “miliciano“, or paramilitary gangster, for the senator’s alleged associations with Rio de Janeiro extortion rackets. Indeed, since Renan was knocked out of the election, the Left has been happy to amplify many of his critiques of Bolsonaro.

Missão are often called far-Right or even fascist by opponents, mainly due to their stance on crime. Under the party’s Direito Penal do Inimigo — “enemy criminal law” — members of organized crime gangs would be treated as enemy combatants and lose their status as persons under the law, much as has happened in El Salvador. The party has even pushed the slogan Prendeu, Matou (“arrest ‘em, kill ‘em”), implying a willingness to use extrajudicial killings appealing to a growing punitive strain in Latin America (and, indeed, the US).

Still, without wishing to explain away these provocations, Missão bucks convention today and in many respects resembles bourgeois modernizers, promising a politics of substance. In a recent post, Renan talked up the late Left-wing British philosopher Mark Fisher; and his defense of democracy and sovereignty stand out amid all the Right wing politicians who have tolerated or encouraged Bolsonaro’s coup-mongering as well as the clan’s lobbying the US against Brazilian national interests.

It is these themes that lead Renan to believe Missão can potentially appeal to Left-wing voters. Victor Marques, a philosophy professor and popularizer of Mark Fisher who has run for office for Lula’s Workers Party, tells me that Missão are at least “thinking through the global dynamics of the crisis of hegemony” — though he adds that he “disagrees with their entire programme.” The prominent progressive intellectual, Miguel Lago, has also praised their ambition: “Missão’s merit is to have outlined a vision for the country — which others have failed to do,” he argues, welcoming a “Right that thinks”. Still, Lago, who has written extensively about reconstructing Brazil, is at pains to emphasize that not only does he disagree with the content of Missão’s propositions in principle, he also finds many of them impracticable.

Where Renan is novel, at least on the Right, is in his understanding of the end of US hegemony: now the US demands explicit alignment, whereas previously it was presumed to be the only game in town. This imposes choices on Latin American countries. It is in this new world disorder that Missão is now seeking to advance Brazil’s interests.

This much is clear in The Yellow Book, a 500-page manifesto. Instead of focusing on Bolsonarist bugbears, it considers how to maximize the country’s rare earth deposits, clean-energy networks, and its status as the breadbasket of the world, so as to overcome regional inequality and unleash Brazil’s potential.

That starts with redefining what it means to be “Right-wing”. Orlando Lima, the editor of Valete, Missão’s in-house magazine, believes the Brazilian Right is stuck in “an intellectual and creative hole”, too obsessed by ideas of American libertarianism and British conservatism that don’t map on to the unique problems faced by Brazil, while the global Right in general is too fixated on being “anti-Left” on issues such as gender identity or migration.

Yet, Missão’s roots lie in the Free Brazil Movement (MBL), libertarians who were often criticized as Right-wing yuppies. For all their anti-establishment rhetoric, they were a young, business-friendly grouping from upper-middle-class backgrounds — and Missão supporters are still mainly drawn from this milieu. The anti-corruption movement they played a large part in advancing served to delegitimize politics, though Renan disagreed when challenged on this point, defending their record.

Still, today the party is expressly political. On founding Missão in 2023, Renan diluted his economic liberalism — he realized that there were too many problems in Brazil for “less state” to be the solution — and instead focused on remedying deindustrialization, low productivity growth, a dependence on imports, and a decadent elite.

Missão also marks a distinct contrast to the racism that pervades the radical Right globally in its embrace of Brazilian society as it is. Lima puts it grandly: he hopes to overcome the nation’s issues with a big civilizational project that would prove that a miscegenated tropical country can succeed in the new global order — finally making good on the long-promised (and much-derided) idea of itself being the “country of the future”. The Yellow Book argues that the decline of the US has left a power vacuum in the Global South that Brazil is uniquely positioned to exploit. De-dollarization would be pursued through the creation of a basket of South American currencies led by the real, while the BRICS+ would be engaged on a pragmatic basis so the country can extract concrete benefits and retain autonomy.

It would also use Brazil’s three “trump cards”: its possession of 23% of the world’s rare earth deposits, the largest behind China; its extraordinarily clean energy matrix; and the major diplomatic strengths of non-aggression and democratic stability. The vision rests largely on two strategic inputs — food and computing. Brazil is already the breadbasket of the world, but producing its own fertilizer would increase its independence. Meanwhile, reversing the brain drain and building data centers would see it become an AI powerhouse.

Rather more controversial is the plan to rid Brazil of its favelas, or informal settlements, in which 8% of Brazilians live (the figure is as high as 25% in Rio de Janeiro and over 50% in the Amazonian capitals). The favela “is more than an urbanistic problem, it is a civilizational plague”, argues the Yellow Book, seeing the remedy as not just a physical but a “spiritual” transformation. There are concerns that the combination of awarding land titles to residents, public service-provision, and housebuilding would cost a lot more than the projected 1.5% of GDP. Moreover, given Brazil’s authoritarian management of its lower classes, it’s not hard to imagine these plans playing out as violent mass expulsions.

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Moreover, the much vaunted “War on Crime” has still more alarming implications in a country where the police already kill 18 people per day, over 6,000 per year, according to official figures. Many of Brazil’s Military Police are already implicated in the criminal gangs known as “milicias“, who vie for territory with the drug traffickers. Missão’s plan — ostensibly in pursuit of territorial sovereignty, nation-building, and political control — could just as well end up in the violent chaos of a multisided armed conflict. Meanwhile the horrific implications of the Prendeu, Matou slogan hardly need spelling out. “The fact that Renan always explains it away confirms it is opportunistic and demagogic,” Lago tells me.

How much of a break with the neoliberal Right all this is remains an open question. Its development plans are still weak sauce, even by the standards of Brazil’s own past, while fiscal austerity is item one in their manifesto. “Inequality” hardly features in the Yellow Book, despite Brazil being one of the most unequal societies in the world. Renan meanwhile opposes Lula’s recent (incredibly popular) move to legally guarantee two days off a week as opposed to one — which even Senator Flavio Bolsonaro supported, suggesting the libertarian faith remains strong. In this sense, Missão’s departure from their 2010s neoliberal antecedents is only partial.

Still, whether or not Brazilians agree with the content of Missão’s programme — and many do not — there can be some small hope that their political seriousness, ambition and vision speaks to the possibilities of the emerging post-hegemonic world. For all the passivity-inducing brainrot of social media today, the current moment is also about the breakup of world order, which should force hard thinking, where previously complacency reigned. In place of imported ideas, there is an emphasis on taking the Brazilian experience seriously as a starting point.

Should Flavio win on Sunday, the defense of Brazilian sovereignty and democracy will be paramount from day one. Renan sees this as more propitious for his camp: the Lulista project will fall apart and there will be a mass of people who are still politically conscious looking for something new. But even if Lula pulls off another miracle, the prospects for progressives look grim. Missão should serve as a reminder to the Left that idealism and political commitment used to be their domain.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who turned 80 last year, took his chances when he ran for president in 2022 against Jair Bolsonaro and won by a whisker. It was a remarkable renaissance: he had gone from wildly popular as president in the 2000s to jail in the late 2010s with his party in tatters. But he was given far less room to maneuver this time, and while it seemed for much of last year that he would coast to victory and a fourth term in office in elections this October, now polls show him tied with Bolsonaro’s son Flávio. There is still time for him to end up as a Brazilian Biden.

Regardless of how his career ends, Lula will be remembered as an epochal figure by his enemies as much as his friends. While his politics were forged in the great social transformations and political shifts of Brazil’s 20th century, it was in the first decades of the 21st that he left his own mark on the country.

Lula was born in 1945, in the scorched hamlet of Caetés on the edge of Brazil’s northeastern sertão, a drought-stricken world little altered in many ways since the 17th century. When he was seven years old, he and his family joined the millions from their part of the country who migrated to the industrializing southeast of the country in the mid-century. This great movement of rural people from Brazil’s poorest region to its richest — and from the area most shaped by the legacy of plantation slavery to one defined more by recent European immigration — mirrored a simultaneous shift in the US: the Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the factories of the Midwest and Northeast.

Dropped into the “hellish cauldron” of the workers’ shanty towns of greater São Paulo, Lula lost a finger operating a lathe and rose to the presidency of a metalworkers’ union that made history with a bold strike under the military dictatorship in the Seventies. His wife died, eight months pregnant, of undiagnosed hepatitis. His communist brother was tortured by the secret police. And the Workers’ Party (PT) that he helped found in 1980 took shape amid the legendary stuff of 20th-century Latin American history: the guerrilla fighters and radical priests of the Sixties and Seventies. The story of Lula’s rise has almost the character of a picaresque novel — with the caveat that he built his career not on the street smarts of the pícaro, but on a combination of stubbornness and openness to negotiation he learned in the union hall.

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It’s ironic, for a party so often tarred in recent years as communist and anti-family by a rising Christian politics of the Right, that it was the Catholic Church that gave the PT its start. Founded in 1980 as a non-communist labor party under constrained elections during the military dictatorship, the PT spread from the car factories of the São Paulo suburbs by taking advantage of groups like the Mothers’ Clubs — where upper-class women taught poor mothers how to knit — that the church had organized during the period of pastoral verve and laity mobilization that followed the Second Vatican Council. No other organization, public or private, had networks that went into so many poor areas. But soon, the PT did, too.

As the party grew, it picked up survivors from the guerrilla movements of the Sixties and early Seventies, which had failed completely to win support from rural populations and were easily and brutally destroyed by the military dictatorship. Many of these veterans of the armed struggle took surprisingly well to Lula’s pragmatic attitude, bent less on revolution than on winning more for workers and the poor.

After the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship, in the late Eighties the PT began winning important mayoral elections, burnishing its credentials as a party that could govern. And it added new elements to its political portfolio, including environmental causes, such as the struggle of rubber tappers’ unions in the Amazon, represented by union leader Chico Mendes, to fend off illegal loggers.

In the early Nineties, Brazilian politics looked almost proto-Trumpian. President Fernando Collor was a flashily wealthy leader whose lifestyle had a certain aspirational appeal, and his political style involved creating and then abandoning successive controversies. But after Collor resigned in 1992, Brazilian politics became a contest of a sort that would strike envy into Left-of-center hearts in the developed world: one between the market-friendly social democracy of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (president 1995–2003) and the more old-fashioned, state-centric Leftism of Lula — as if elections were fought between Blair and Benn, or Clinton and Sanders, Lapper argues.

By the turn of the millennium, pundits were dismissing three-time presidential loser Lula as a relic of a vanished age of strong unions and strong states, in an age when privatization was a kind of religion for political elites. He proved them wrong in 2002 when he beat Cardoso’s handpicked successor. Amid a commodity boom powered by the rise of China, he oversaw the expansion of social programs — cash transfers for poor families and university scholarships are some of the best-known — that lifted millions from poverty without making sweeping changes to Brazil’s economic model. That, plus his success in combating deforestation, made Lula a global celebrity, drawing envious comments from Barack Obama.

Still, as Lapper notes, drawing on work by Brazilian sociologist André Singer, there was a grain of truth in the idea that Lula’s old-school social-democratic union politics was a mismatch with what was possible in the 2000s. Between his first term and his second, the core of Lula’s base shifted from the heavily industrialized southeast to the poor northeast, where a “subproletariat” showed its gratitude for the cash from social programs and newly available credit. As Lapper writes:

“Visiting poor areas in the north-east of Brazil ahead of the [2006] election it was easy to find enthusiastic support for Lula. ‘Lula is the only one who’s done anything for the poor,’ Ivandro Santos, a 33-year-old street trader told me, as he sold fruit juice and coxinhas — a minced chicken savory — in a run-down corner of Itapuã. He, his wife, and their two children were receiving monthly payments under Bolsa Família and other income-transfer programs. Helenita Santana, who earned a couple of hundred dollars a month working as a domestic servant, had been convinced to support Lula because of the broader availability of credit. She proudly showed us around her humble house in a down-at-heel neighborhood adorned with new items: a flat-screen TV, a fridge, and a DVD player that she had been able to buy in the previous couple of years.”

Lula took on a different image from that of the union leader — something more like the father of the poor, like that cultivated by contemporaneous “pink tide” Left-wing Latin American politicians like Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner or Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, though Lula’s style was always different from theirs. But that involved a slackening in his appeal to the middle classes and the rich southeast — providing an opening the right would later seize.

Things fell apart under Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff, who presided over the ugly end of the 2000s commodity boom and the first stirrings of a new Right-wing politics. Corruption investigations that Dilma herself encouraged boomeranged against the PT, which still bore the stigma of scandals dating from Lula’s first term in office. Dilma was impeached in 2016, and by 2018, Bolsonaro was elected and Lula was in jail, swept up in an anticorruption drive over a luxury apartment he was said to have received as payment in kind. Even Obama turned out to be a fair-weather friend, sniping at Lula’s “scruples” in a 2020 memoir.

These developments, serious as they were, proved temporary. The anticorruption drive fell apart after it was revealed that judges had collaborated with prosecutors, and Lula, freed from jail, returned to beat Bolsonaro in 2022 — perhaps the only politician who could have done so, and by a minuscule margin.

More permanent were the deep social, cultural and political changes, long in the making, that had brought Bolsonaro to office in the first place and still threaten to undo so much of Lula’s legacy — or otherwise make the country unrecognizable to the Brazil of his youth and middle age. These form the subject of Lapper’s previous book, Beef, Bible and Bullets (2021), named after three of these forces: the rise of agribusiness and the cattle-ranching frontier in and around the Amazon— a genuine Wild West, with uncontrolled violence, sumptuous fortunes to be won and nation-altering population shifts — plus evangelical Protestantism and the security lobby (along with broad concerns about crime).

Together, Lapper’s books form a kind of inverted diptych of Brazilian politics, facing its future and past respectively. In Lula!, Lapper adeptly entwines the political blow-by-blow with the economic and social context, combining his theoretical training as a sociologist with years of experience as Latin America editor at the Financial Times to construct a highly approachable yet learned overview.

In an excellent late chapter, Lapper discusses the ways Brazil’s economy and culture have shifted towards the individual in recent years. The unionized industrial workers that formed the original core of the PT have lost relevance as Brazil deindustrializes and pivots to a service-sector model where informal and gig work is more common. Factories accounted for a third of Brazil’s output in 1980, when the PT was founded; today, the figure is only 13%.

The three biggest delivery apps counted a total of over a million workers in Brazil in 2021 — the figure is surely far larger now — and Lapper shows that working for a delivery app is often more lucrative than the minimum-wage formal jobs available to low-skilled workers. The average app worker makes over 2,500 Brazilian reais a month, about $500, while minimum wage is only 1,600 reais, a little more than $300. Lula’s plan to rebuild the country’s battered industry, construct new ones and organize app workers has come to little, as he faces a Congress dominated by the Right, and that has been empowered (since his last stint in office) to bypass him in dispensing patronage. The PT hovers on the brink of irrelevance in local politics outside its northeast fortress, depriving it of new policy ideas to scale up to the national level.

Everywhere the culture seems to be running in directions that bode ill for Lula and his party. Evangelical Protestantism is taking over the poor communities where the PT and militant Catholicism once thrived — preaching not solidarity but entrepreneurship, self-sufficiency and the “prosperity gospel”. The agribusiness boom and accompanying cowboy culture, epitomized in the wildly popular sertanejo country-music genre, have proven irresistible for young people, even in the bastions of environmentalism. In an especially striking moment, Lapper speaks to the cousin of slain rubber tapper unionist Chico Mendes in Acre state and discovers that these iconic defenders of the forest — the tappers — are now themselves cutting down trees in the reserve named after Mendes, in order to tend cattle: the very thing they had fought against for decades.

For Lapper, international diplomatic blunders accompany the mounting obstacles on the domestic front. He raps Lula’s knuckles for condemning Israel over slaughter in Gaza and assigning part of the blame to the Ukrainians for war with Russia. From the remove of 2026, this seems unfair. The Ukraine comments, however clumsy, reflected Lula’s hopes of mediating the conflict — and on Gaza, Lula was nearer to the mark than Europe wanted to admit. International consensus is only now starting to catch up to him.

The question on many observers’ minds as October’s election approaches is whether Brazilian politics will continue to track US politics on a two-year lag, as it has done (very roughly) for much of the last decade. In 2018, two years after Donald Trump was elected in the US, Jair Bolsonaro won the presidency in Brazil. In 2022, two years after Biden’s victory, Lula narrowly beat Bolsonaro, whose reputation was damaged during the pandemic. In 2023, two years after January 6, 2021, Bolsonaro supporters invaded the seat of government in Brasília.

Last year, Brazil diverged from the American script. Lula struck a bargain with Brazil’s political establishment in other branches of government — including Right-wing heads of Congress and the Supreme Court — to insist on firm rejection of bolsonarismo’s anti-democratic drift. Where the cases against Trump fell apart, one after another, clearing the way for his triumphant return, Brazilian authorities pressed the cases against Bolsonaro, sentencing him last September to 27 years in jail.

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Since then, many liberal Americans have looked to Brazil as an example of what their country should have done with Trump when they had the chance. “Brazil Just Succeeded Where America Failed,” argued two professors in the New York Times after Bolsonaro’s sentence came down. Last month, Vox published a major feature by Zack Beauchamp on “How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks.” Many Brazilians are happy to agree.

But the story in Brazil is hardly over. Things may still go the way they did in the US — and on schedule. War in Iran jeopardizes Brazil’s vital fertilizer imports and could tip the country into recession if the conflict drags on (although higher gas prices stand to benefit the country, a major producer). At home, a major scandal over ties between Brazilian institutions and an alleged fraudster who headed up a liquidated bank is battering the Brazilian Supreme Court, including the reputation of the justice, Alexandre de Moraes, who led the efforts to block election meddling and punish Bolsonaro and his allies for plotting a coup. Should Moraes fall, the anti-Bolsonaro bargain that took shape in 2022 could collapse.

Victory for Flávio, amnesty for his father and their allies, and an overall Trump 2.0 scenario for Brazil — i.e., return of the populist Right, strengthened and bent on revenge — all of it looks distinctly possible. Much of the progressive legislation on the books in Brazil, some of it thanks to the PT, some the product of the 1988 constitution itself, could go on the chopping block. The chaos and impotence of the Bolsonaro administration may be remembered as a mere foretaste of more serious things to come, in an inversion of Marx’s dictum — first as farce, then as tragedy (for the Left, at least).

Or Lula may win a fourth mandate this October, beating out Bolsonaro’s son Flávio and ensuring their family remains on the sidelines of Brazilian politics for another four years. He is more vigorous than Biden was at the end of his term — as he is eager to demonstrate in carefully arranged videos showing him jogging, beachgoing and partying at Carnival. The economy is doing relatively well. Lula has been dismissed as a walking museum piece before and has proven his doubters wrong. But the longer-term future still looks bleak for the Left, which has few, if any, potential successors with comparable stature and electoral appeal. Barring an unforeseen shift, one vision of Brazil will be buried with Lula, and a very different one is already waiting in the wings.

While Trump’s eventual return to the White House saved him from prosecution for trying to overturn the US government, Bolsonaro enjoys no such immunity. He is being tried for masterminding a failed coup d’etat by Alexandre de Moraes, a shaven-headed bruiser on the country’s supreme court, and will probably be sent to jail for a long time. And as if that were not destabilizing enough for Latin America’s biggest and most complicated country, Trump is now waging diplomatic and economic war against the government of President Lula.

The crisis started on 9 July, when Trump sent Lula an open letter announcing 50% tariffs on Brazilian products, among the highest he has applied. For all Trump’s talk of a level playing field, this has less to do with trade — the US runs a surplus with Brazil — than with taking down a titan of the global Left and aiding a fellow Right-winger in difficulty. Trump called Brazil’s treatment of Bolsonaro a “witch hunt”. That’s the very term he used to describe his own legal travails.

But if Trump expected Lula to scurry to Washington D.C. for a dressing down, he misread this grizzled opponent of the country’s former military dictatorship, who has himself seen the inside of a jail cell after being engulfed in a corruption scandal. Not for Lula the toadying of a Keir Starmer or an Ursula von der Leyen; in a televised address to the nation on 18 July, he denounced Trump’s “unacceptable blackmail” and “attack on national sovereignty”, adding in an interview with CNN, “if Trump was Brazilian… he too would be on trial”.

For his part, de Moraes, the kind of man who arranges the office furniture so as not to be surprised by a possible assailant, ordered Bolsonaro to wear an ankle tag to stop him absconding — as he did, to Florida, during the debacle of January 2023.

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By Christopher de Bellaigue

From his position on one of the most powerful courts in the world, “Big Alex”, as he is known, has punished US tech companies and Bolsonaro supporters, who had fired off scurrilous posts from America, with fines and other restrictions. Last year, meanwhile, he blocked access to X in Brazil until the platform complied with his order that it ban accounts spreading the fallacy that the 2022 presidential election was rigged. From exile in Washington D.C., where even de Moraes cannot reach him, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the ex-president’s son and a deputy in the Brasília parliament, calls the judge a “psychopath out of control”.

It was lobbying by Eduardo that persuaded the US government, on 30 July, to impose sanctions on Big Alex — who promptly placed the elder Bolsonaro under house arrest and seized his mobile phone. On 6 August, Trump’s tariffs came into effect, albeit with exceptions that include Embraer aircraft, orange juice, iron ore, wood pulp and petroleum. Brazilian coffee producers have started panic selling while, as Elizabeth Johnson of TS Lombard, a veteran Brazil analyst, told me, “the mango farmers of northeastern Brazil will have no alternative but to bury their rotting fruit in the ground”.

Wary of fueling inflation — already running at 5.4% — by imposing reciprocal sanctions, and with his fellow Bric leaders absorbed in tariff negotiations of their own, Lula’s ability to retaliate either unilaterally or in concert is limited. According to the Sao Paulo newspaper Estadao, the government is steeling itself for additional tariffs later this year, when Bolsonaro’s trial may conclude in a judgment that is politically fatal to him and objectionable to Trump.

All this said, the size of Brazil’s internal market makes it reasonably well placed to weather external shocks. Last year, after all, exports accounted for less than a fifth of GDP, of which just 12% went to the US, compared to 28% to China. Furthermore, as Diego Sartorato, a former staffer in Lula’s office, told me, while agribusiness — Bolsonaro’s natural constituency — will suffer as a result of the new tariffs, “the effect on inflation has already been positive”. As Sartorato points out, the price of a 500g pack of coffee has fallen from over $9 to around $7 — “and Brazilians love their coffee”.

If this, then, is what a breakdown in relations between the two largest economies in the Americas looks like, it also shows how events might help a physically frail, 79-year-old, third-term president win back lost support in time for his re-election bid in 2026. “Trump is making Lula great again,” Johnson went on, alluding to a recent opinion poll showing Lula’s approval rating above 50% for the first time this year. “What could be better for an embattled politician than to have an external enemy and for his main rival to be the cause?”

It is certainly getting harder for Bolsonaro to square his slogan, “Brazil above everything!” with his embarrassing devotion to a foreign leader intent on crippling the Brazilian economy. And yet, at an estimated 37,000, the crowd of Bolsonaro supporters that converged on central Sao Paulo on 3 August to protest against their hero’s house arrest was three times the size of a similar gathering — this one with Bolsonaro himself in attendance — at the same location in June. In Rio, a demonstrating Bolsonarista told France 24 that she agreed “100%” with the US sanctions on de Moraes, adding that “since no solution was found here, it had to come from elsewhere”.

For all the dedication of Bolsonaro’s core supporters, however, the Lula government is riding a wave of patriotism, one lent additional power by a US investigation into a wildly popular Brazilian payment system on the grounds that it may discriminate against US alternatives.

As for Lula himself, his TV address last month showed him punchy and alert — useful for preempting comparisons with “sleepy” Joe Biden, his old friend from the gerontocracy of the Left. Meanwhile the political tyro Bia Lula — the President’s 30-year-old granddaughter — has been having fun at Bolsonaro’s expense. “He’s constantly putting his feet where his hands should be,” she chuckled in a recent video, “and now he’s at home with his ankle tag and without a phone… congratulations, champ!” Then, turning her attention to Eduardo: “you spent two billion reals [$363 million] on lobbying in the United States. And the result? Father arrested and assets blocked. Total success!”

Amid the knockabout, Bolsonaro’s trial grinds on, and the charges could hardly be graver. The former president is accused of trying to destroy Brazil’s democracy. He is also accused of plotting to assassinate Lula and de Moraes. On 28 July, one of his co-defendants accepted the authenticity of a “coup plan” envisaging the imprisonment of several supreme court judges. Bolsonaro himself has acknowledged that he took part in meetings to discuss “alternative ways” of staying in power, the options including the deployment of military forces and suspension of civil liberties — but stopping short of an actual coup. “A coup is something abominable,” he told de Moraes from the stand, “and such a hypothesis was never even considered.”

That Big Alex is presiding over the trial of a man accused of plotting to kill him is not the only peculiarity of a case whose proceedings are broadcast live, with much incriminating evidence deriving from plea bargains, and whose final judgement is the subject of opinion polls. The most recent, conducted in late July, found that 48% of Brazilians want Bolsonaro to be sentenced to prison for his role in the alleged coup; 46% do not. That such polls are even conducted illustrates how public opinion is both grit and lubricant in the machinery of Brazilian law.

His conviction and imprisonment seemingly preordained, and his social media accounts silenced by Big Alex, Bolsonaro is running out of road. And yet, whether he is succeeded as figurehead of the far-Right by Eduardo or another of his sons of varying flamboyance and dissipation; the more straightforwardly conservative governor of the state of Sao Paulo, Tarcisio de Freitas; or someone we haven’t heard of yet, the answer is probably no: Bolsonarismo isn’t going away. Through his rhetoric, his undermining of environmental regulations and his support for the mining, farming and gun lobbies, he has vitalized a body of opinion, anti-woke, pro-wealth and fervently evangelical, that will retain its potency for years to come.

And what of the man himself, with his infantile smile and fragile amour propre, his alliances with agribusiness and evangelists who hold their noses at his incoherent speeches stippled with obscenities intended to curry favor with the plebs, a favorite being porra, meaning “semen”; the man of the immortal line, uttered to a female political opponent, that she was too ugly to consider raping? While he was never — even as president — in charge of the movement that takes his name, the former paratrooper did more than most to bring into existence the Brazil of deforestation, expulsion of indigenous people and farms the size of Luxembourg, the Brazil of soaring gun ownership where 600,000 people were murdered over the course of a decade, and where, in the year ending July 2024, 83,988 cases of rape were reported.

Opposite the presumed felon stands the dinosaur Lula, who for all his ancientness and his tolerance of corruption represents the Brazil of affability, multilateralism and care for the poor — and now of wounded pride. And, everywhere, the mutual animosity of the bald judge and the foreign president, spreading like an oil slick over the waters of the western hemisphere.

There was something quixotic about the whole enterprise: the discarding of one culture (imperial Portuguese), deemed alien on decolonial grounds, and the embrace of another (indigenous Brazilian), just as foreign to Brazil’s self-respecting, nationalist elite. Take Tarsila do Amaral, the star of Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, the new show at the Royal Academy (on until 21 April). An accomplished painter as well as an astute theorist, she was no doubt a brilliant mind. De Andrade was her husband, and his Anthropophagic Manifesto of 1928 owed more than a little to her oeuvre. There, in feverish aphorisms, he had worked up much resentment against Portuguese imperialism, a distant memory since decolonization over a century earlier in 1822 but one which nevertheless exercised a hold on the native imagination through an imperialism of the mind. “Down with Father Vieira… Down with every catechism… Down with all the importers of canned consciousness” is the gist of it.

As it was, even in his defiance to dispose of that distasteful Lusophone inheritance, de Andrade couldn’t help but appropriate its gaze, even if only to turn it on its head. The interwar Brazilian avant-garde called themselves “anthropophagites” — cannibals — only because the Portuguese had insinuated that one of their own, a particularly rotund bishop called Dom Pedro Fernandes Sardinha, had been devoured by the Caeté Indians in 1556. Western modernism was to be relished with equal abandon.

Do Amaral was very much the art cannibal par excellence. A canvas called “Antropofagia” was produced in 1929, a year after the manifesto, depicting a black woman with a single burdensome breast drooping groundward against a background of cacti. At first blush, this is the portrait of a Gauguinesque exotique, a sentimental celebration of the “noble savage” as it were, but there is a lot more going on. Her subject very likely is the same woman in “A Negra” (1923), do Amaral’s Cubist nude of a former slave. There were still many of them about between the wars, as Brazil had only abolished slavery in 1888, two-thirds of a century after independence. The seemingly implausible elasticity of the black woman’s breast, do Amaral later recalled in an interview, was achieved through the manipulation of stones with the objective of slinging it back over her shoulders; a Brazilian custom, apparently, that allowed black women to breastfeed and toil away in farms at the same time.

On whose farm, you may ask, was this degrading practice imposed upon her? Do Amaral’s own, it turns out. She hailed from São Paulo’s coffee aristocracy, which made a killing at the turn of the century; Amazonian rubber and northeastern sugarcane, both casualties of the abolition of slavery, had released a mammoth wave of manumitted labor into the southeast. For her part, do Amaral showed little awareness of having battened on cheapened labor. More interesting to her were the decolonial aesthetics of national identification: “I feel more and more Brazilian,” she wrote to her family. “I want to be the painter of my homeland. How grateful I am to have spent my entire childhood on the farm.”

The black slave, I would hazard, would have seen less reason to feel grateful for her inclusion in the national sorority of epistemically liberated postcolonials. No doubt do Amaral’s pontificating would have struck her as tone-deaf. The two Brazilians couldn’t have been more different: one was patting herself on the back for emancipating herself from the tyranny of Western modes of representation whereas the other perhaps dreamed of emancipation at a more elemental level. One person’s decolonial emancipation is another’s postcolonial oppression. One person’s languorous nostalgia is another’s living nightmare.

It should come as no surprise that there is something deeply unfeeling about do Amaral’s early art. Her nationalism, properly speaking, was just academicism. She was an alien in her own homeland. A Belgian nanny taught her her first letters. On her grand piano, she played French composers to an audience of French upholstery. French literature dominated her downtime. Like so many Westernized Asian and African nationalists, then, she only discovered her poorer compatriots through an adventitious agency: it was the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars, in Brazil to make a documentary on the local art scene, who convinced her and de Andrade to take Afro-Brazilian and Amerindian culture seriously. He was hot on samba and carnival, both hitherto dismissed by artsy metropolitans as the unformed festivities of benighted primitives, and his enthusiasm proved infectious.

Yet the results of this belated recognition were oddly sterile. Do Amaral’s subjects aren’t so much people as placeholders, standing in for grander themes. It is no accident that the face of the woman in “Antropofagia” is featureless. Likewise, there’s not much more to the woman in “A Negra” than her “huge, pendulous lips”, as do Amaral put it.

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As in painting, so in fiction. Macunaíma, the novel associated with this scene, is heavy going. Its biracial, bisexual novelist Mário de Andrade — no relation to Oswald — set out explicitly to cast away its Lusophone past. Accordingly, after immersing himself in a five-volume work by the German ethnologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg, he dashed off a draft in six days of self-imposed immurement. The upshot was a hurried, self-published affair. Its hero is a concupiscent, shapeshifting Lothario, a kind of Brazilian Michael Jackson, born black but then turned white. Over the course of this bizarre novel, he sleeps his way across the rainforest, conversing with loquacious worms and slurping on wine, only to be dismembered by a river monster and then transformed into Ursa Major. Like so many postcolonial novels, this one only works at the level of national allegory — though it doesn’t work for me.

Part of the problem is stylistic. These are well-meaning works, of course, but, as Flaubert had it, “you don’t make art out of good intentions”. The other defect is more structural: the self-defeating exercise of consciously fashioning a national culture. To be sure, national cultures do exist. They are, all the same, easier to define historically than to create artificially. For instance, it was easy enough for Nikolaus Pevsner to identify a set of characteristically English qualities — compromise, understatement, empiricism — running from Reynolds to Blake and beyond in The Englishness of English Art. But it was an altogether harder proposition for a set of interwar practitioners, not theoreticians, to construct a distinctively Brazilian style from scratch.

Cobbling together a national signature out of the dissenting currents of Continental modernism was easier said than done. All too often, the source material was plainly visible, jutting out like a bone from an anthropophagite’s mouth. The Lithuanian-born and Berlin-trained Lasar Segall’s paintings on display here, for example, are of obvious Cubist derivation. The failed liquor baron turned painter Vicente do Rego Monteiro’s work, similarly, is unquestionably Art Deco. Anita Malfatti’s pictures are, by turns, Fauvist, Cubist, and Expressionist.

Decolonial aims notwithstanding, the foreignness showed — especially to their nationalist compatriots. The leading critic of the period taxed Malfatti with the “diplopic influence of rebellious schools” and “ephemeral theories”. Her uncle’s verdict was much of a muchness, only more demotic: “This is not painting. These are Dantesque things!” The São Paolo press was savage when her exhibition opened in 1917. Thereafter, she retreated into an anchoritic life, altogether giving up exhibiting a decade later.

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The more convincing paintings here are the ones with no obvious nation-building “decolonial” agenda. The former dentist and autodidact Rubem Valentim, for one, knew what he was about. An Afro-Brazilian who had witnessed Candomblé religious ceremonies first-hand, he achieved a satisfactory synthesis of cultures. So it is with the half-indigenous Djanira da Motta e Silva, also self-taught, who deployed her knowledge of local art and custom to brilliant effect. They weren’t cosplaying. They were the real deal.

Their art is a far cry from Monteiro’s, whose grand theme, too, was the life of indigenous people — only he had had no contact with indigenous people himself. He had learned a trick or two from Rio’s Museu Nacional, but that was it. Like an old colonial, he divided his time between Paris and Recife, setting great store by his eclecticism and cosmopolitanism: “I’m a citizen of nowhere, but I love Paris above all.”

Sensibly, if belatedly, do Amaral came to the conclusion that cannibalism wasn’t for her. The Depression radicalized her against such decolonial doctrines. It instantly destroyed Brazil’s coffee business, ruining her family in the process. The Revolution of 1930 followed in short order. The oligarchy was overthrown and replaced with Getúlio Vargas’s regime, welding autocratic nationalism and social reformism in a heteroclite alliance of organized labor, the gentry and military. Fired by these events, do Amaral traveled to Moscow the following year, and was briefly arrested on her return. By then, she had long since abandoned cultural nationalism for socialist realism. Some of the best pictures in the exhibition belong to the latter tradition — not only do Amaral’s “Second Class” (1933), a moving depiction of discalced peasants, but also Candido Portinari’s “Coffee Agricultural Worker” (1934), a muscular fellow in contrapposto.

The artists, and indeed activists and academics, of our time who go doolally over decoloniality would do well to follow in do Amaral’s footsteps. Banging on about a supposedly pristine indigenous past lost to the sands of time, she realized, achieves precious little. Better, then, to swap the sentimental appeal of cultural nostrums for the hard-nosed allure of proper class politics.

No figure embodies this symbiosis better than Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the American-Brazilian philosopher, politician and Harvard Law School professor. Now 76, Unger’s star has risen, fallen and risen again in importance as both a global and specifically “New World” thinker. Today, he is more influential than ever: if De Gaulle once located Brazil’s promise in a constantly deferred future, Unger, in contrast, is a philosopher who argues the moment for innovation is now.

Often described as “Brazil’s answer to John Stuart Mill”, Unger shares both Mill’s youthful precocity (reading Plato’s Republic as a bedtime story) and a record of serving in government. At the heart of his work, however, there is a rejection of Mill and much of the Anglophone world’s liberal faith in progress.

Indeed, through a 49-year career spanning politics, law, social and political theory and philosophy, Unger has put forward a collection of searching inquiries meant to pierce the liberal mythos of necessary progress. Across dozens of books, including the recently published metaphysical tome The World and Us (2024), the Brazilian philosopher has tried to think beyond 20th-century categories through a series of questions.

To what extent can our politics be understood as an ongoing experiment rather than a set of negotiated solutions? How far are human beings free to transform themselves? What can be rescued from the lost thought of marginalised social groups, such as the peasants, petite-bourgeoisie shopkeepers and artisans crushed between the development of big capital and the working class? Can we think beyond the boundaries of capitalism and socialism, liberalism and bureaucracy, anarchy and the state? How can the nation retain political meaning and reinvent itself in a globalising world?

These lofty questions have played out across Unger’s life. Generationally, Unger is part of, and partly characterised by, the distinctly positivist Baby Boomer generation. This was a cohort that experienced a great opening up of cultural and economic possibility while contesting social norms, Left and Right-wing dictatorships and, ultimately, the Cold War itself before declaring the End of History. Admittedly, Unger’s thought tends to mistake the contingent positivity of his generation, expressed half-heartedly in the third-way Clinton, Blair and Obama administrations, for a natural phenomenon, despite his ongoing critique of necessity.

Yet Unger would also rebel against the closure of the unipolar American moment and his generation’s refrain of “there is no alternative”. Instead, he retained his early faith in the possibility of immediate change and reform outside the iron laws of history put forward by figures like Marx. In this way, his philosophy is stuck between an elderly liberal group broadly committed to the finalisation of Western progress and the closure of political change, and a despondent younger cohort critical of inevitable progress and cynically detached from reform.

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Consequently, Unger, in his radical openness and rejection of determinism, has much to teach both generations. As he argues in Beyond the Small Life: A Letter to Young People: “We settle into a way of living and doing. A mummy begins to form around each of us, diminishing our reach and vision by accommodating them to circumstance.” In response to these deadening political and social routines, from cycles of political election to routinised work, Unger proposes we practise “negative capability”, a term borrowed from John Keats that suggests a rejection of the present as normal or inevitable.

Unger’s own distrust of political inevitably is partly explained by his background. He was born to a liberal American-Brazilian family of recent elite status in Rio de Janeiro. His father, Artur, was a German-American lawyer, while his mother, the journalist Edyla Mangabeira, was the scion of a left-liberal Brazilian dynasty. The family included Octávio Mangabeira (1886-1960), the liberal governor of Bahia, and João Mangabeira (1880-1964), the founder of the moderate Brazilian Socialist Party. Both men were opposed to the early Estado Novo dictatorship (1937-1945) and were frequently jailed before being exiled to the USA.

Unger was born in New York just after this family exile. His education was split between formal private schooling on the Upper East Side and forays back to Brazil, where he shadowed his senator grandfather Octávio as a miniature political neophyte. It was in the halls of the Brazilian senate in the Fifties that Unger would reconcile the pragmatism of a political life with the idealism of his family.

After returning to Brazil and receiving a Jesuit education characteristic of Rio’s elite, Unger became an unusually young Harvard Law professor at the age of 29. Re-engaging with his native Brazil, Unger would find the country once again under military dictatorship in the Sixties after the brief Fourth Republic (1946-1964). Indeed, the reforms his family had pursued were forever in contest with cycles of repression and democracy characteristic of Latin America in the 20th century.

Consequently, Unger grew increasingly sceptical of normal political cycles. After the fall of the Brazilian dictatorship in 1985, Unger, through intensive collaboration with the official opposition party (Brazilian Democratic Movement), wanted to prevent Brazil from falling back into Cold War binaries or adopting old-fashioned forms of social democracy. Instead, Brazilian politics was to be shaped by peasants, slum dwellers, small businesspeople, artisans, farmers and tribes rather than the dominant large industrial working, professional and capitalist classes. In this way, the revolutionary subjects of both liberalism and Marxism, the worker and the large capitalist, were to be replaced by “the losers” who wanted to “reverse the verdict of economic defeat”. As Tom Nairn wrote, perhaps slightly mockingly, in a review of Unger’s books: “We’re all petit-bourgeois now.”

On the surface, Unger’s politics — centred around disrupting both organised capital and labour, as well as partnerships between the state and the market — has much in common with the Third Way politics of Blair, Clinton, and Obama (the latter to whom he was, briefly, a mentor and confidant). Yet, Unger would ultimately reject Obama and the Third Way as a deeply conformist mixture of Eighties capitalism and New Deal social policies, calling it “a surrender disguised as a synthesis”.

Instead, Unger’s politics have always been distinctively weird, defined, for instance, by political campaigns deep in the gang-run favelas of Rio where the professor, “alone” and dressed in his customary tailored suits, handed out “pamphlets to local drug pushers”. Indeed, many were surprised when Unger assumed a prominent role in the trade unionist, statist and social democratic administration of Brazilian president Lula da Silva.

This was a government which achieved a pronounced uptick in living standards while pursuing humdrum and prosaic technocratic solutions, never quite reaching the conceptual and romantic heights of “negative capability” or “anti-necessitarianism” that Unger espoused as Brazilian Minister of Strategic Affairs from 2007. During Lula’s first presidency, beginning in 2003, Unger was said to have found the socialist government’s style formally conservative and unimaginative, describing it as “the most corrupt in Brazil’s history”.

Yet only a few years later, Unger would be invited into the Lula government as a minister in charge of “long-term” planning. In this role, Unger tried to quietly move beyond the constraints of old-school, 20th-century social democracy, proposing state-run micro venture capital funds, radical disaggregations of monopolies and an extension of participatory democracy to the level of the street and slum. But Unger’s personal mission to reinvent politics was overwhelmed by a popular welfarist Lula government, high on the 2000s commodities boom and flush with surplus cash.

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After returning to Harvard in 2009, Unger wrote The Left Alternative (2009), in which he attempted to set out why and how the Latin American “Pink Tide” progressive governments had gone wrong. For Unger, leaders such as Lula were attempting to set up “tropical Sweden[s]” while ignoring the potentialities of place, culture, and geography inherent to politics. In a similar vein, Unger describes Left-wing Brazilian, if not global, politics as stuck between a “recalcitrant” Left, obsessed with slowing down markets and protecting industrial workers, and a “humanising” Left, concerned with supercharging markets and globalisation while distributing the proceeds to those left behind.

On the eve of the Great Recession, Unger would propose a new third Left-wing “reconstructive” solution, characterised by a mass distribution of political power. Programmatically, Unger’s policy proposals for a New Left remain more vague than his definite rejection of both traditional social democracy and the Third Way. He even admits in The Left Alternative that “the programmatic imagination require[s]… a theory that does not yet exist”.

In tone, too, much of his philosophy instinctively seems ephemeral, located in a vanished time when Lula and Obama could meet on friendly terms and look forward to an era of mutual progressive experimentation. But it would be a mistake to discount his prophetic power entirely. After all, his subjects — the dispossessed slum dweller, the rural peasant, the bankrupt small businessman — continue, across the world, to drive the most surprising of political changes.

The Brics acronym was coined more than two decades ago by Lord Jim O’Neill, formerly Goldman Sachs’s head of global economic research, and it has stuck — unlike the initial expectations for the group. Only this week, O’Neill himself suggested that the collective of emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — has not “achieved anything since they first started meeting”.

Yet the aggregate numbers remain impressive. Jointly, the group holds $4.4 trillion in reserves. Its New Development Bank (NDB), a counterpart to the World Bank, is capitalised at $100 billion, and the Brics Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), equivalent to the IMF, also stands at $100 billion. Between them, Brics countries are home to more than two-fifths of the world’s population.

Despite this success, Brics members disavow any competitive or confrontational aspirations against the developed world in general, or the G7 in particular. Sotto voce, they make it clear they regard themselves as the new kids on the block, emphasise their common purpose and extol their bountiful resources. Look deeper, however, and one finds more conflicting sub-agendas in Brics than the group lets on.

First, the two biggest players, China and India, are prickly neighbours. Apart from the ongoing 60-year border dispute that has claimed hundreds of lives, the two are highly competitive in developing world countries, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, and are certain to clash at this year’s summit over China’s ambitions to expand the group to bring in more “non-aligned” members. Twenty-two states have formally applied to join, among them Iran, Argentina, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. India — which, in terms of GDP, would beat France, Italy and Canada to a seat at the G7 — wants to keep things reasonably tight.

Second, embattled Russia hopes to use the Summit to push its own agendas, primarily garnering developing-world support for its imperial ambitions in Eastern Europe and driving a de-dollarisation of the international financial markets, possibly through some form of Brics currency. This might seem a forlorn hope in the short term, but it’s perhaps obliquely attainable in the distant future, through the strengthening of the Chinese renminbi against a weakening dollar. Again, India, alarmed by Russia’s putschists methods in Africa and locked into deep market relations with the US and the Middle East, is unlikely to be convinced. The absence from the meeting of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, because of the possibility of arrest under an International Criminal Court warrant (he is expected to appear by video link), indicates exactly how embattled his country’s position is.

Third, the Brazilian and South African governments will likely pursue a narrative aimed at creating an ostensible “non-aligned” lobby in world geopolitics, inside or outside the Brics group, that is, in reality, an anti-America front, something that may become too confrontational for India’s liking. They hope, perhaps erroneously, this will play well with the punters back home. Yet the duo is unlikely to be making any of the big calls: Brazil and South Africa’s combined shareholding in Brics, if measured by nominal GDP, amounts to 7.3%; South Africa is at 1.62%, which is perhaps why O’Neill has always argued the country should not be part of the club at all.

Lastly, the Brics are divided on key issues of energy policy. Resource-poor India and China favour alternative energy systems. Russia and South Africa are prodigious producers of coal, and, in the case of the former, oil.

So, what does Ramaphosa hope to gain from this gathering of fraternal yet deeply wary confreres? He certainly hopes to use it to add weight to his public argument that, regarding the Ukrainian war, there is a middle way between blind support for the United States and Europe on the one hand, and Russia and its silent sponsor, China, on the other. Amid a resurrected Cold War, he wants a resurrected “non-aligned” movement — or, to use the buzzword, “Global South states”.

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Few in the developing world would disagree with the objective; many feel the US has acted badly in attempting to lead-pipe third-party nations into picking sides. But Ramaphosa also seeks to use the Brics Summit to promote Africa, to advance Russian interests in Africa, and to divert focus from the multiple self-induced crises that confront him at home. Sixty-nine heads of Global South states, including all African heads of state but no developed world ones, have been invited as “observers”.

The extent to which African leaders respond to the invitation will be a guide to some key questions: the attraction of the Brics option, the resilience of US influence in the Global South, increased Russian and Chinese activity in Africa and, lastly, the status of Ramaphosa himself at both home and abroad. His vulnerability, ironically, may well be his chumminess with Russia.

The nature of South Africa’s relations with Russia hardly needs rehearsing: its persistent refusal to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the holding of joint naval exercises with Russian naval forces, clandestine arms trading between the countries, and the unhealthy predominance of Russian oligarchs financing the perennially cash-strapped ruling African National Congress. Ramaphosa was also instrumental in organising a quick-fire “peace mission” to Ukraine and Russia in June, with seven rounded-up African heads of mostly minor states. He was also front and centre in the recent Russia-Africa Summit in St Petersburg, though attendance by African heads of states was down — 17 this year, compared to 43 at the Sochi 2019 Summit, which had heralded Russia’s new and ardent embrace of Africa.

As his gofer efforts continue to be coolly received by the majority of African leaders, Ramaphosa’s Russophile position runs the risk of sidelining him and South Africa from the doyen position that the country and its president has always assumed since liberation. Indeed, if India has claims to a place at the G7, Nigeria has an even greater claim to Africa’s seat at Brics: its GDP is now larger than South Africa’s.

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Samuel Ramani, in his new book Russia in Africa, intensively tracks Russian post-Cold War engagement in Africa. The theme of that diplomacy, although sometimes erratic, is a long-term strategy: patience in ambition, opportunism in deployment and lupine in execution. “By combining counterinsurgency operations, arms sales, autocracy promotion and soft-power tools, such as media outreaches, educational diplomacy, debt forgiveness and humanitarian aid, Russia could remain an attractive partner for African countries and preserve a unique niche between France, the United States and China,” he writes.

The target countries for such attention share certain disfiguring features: fragile states under weak leadership, volatile internal politics, collapsed national institutions, despairing polities, emigrating elites, biddable security services and vacuums created by the departure of agencies once able to guarantee sovereign stability. To these tottering autocratic regimes, Russian Private Military Companies (PMCs) make an offer they cannot refuse: private security support to maintain power in return for control or shares in mining operations and preference in infrastructural contracting.

Since its renewed interest in Africa in 2019, Russia’s fingerprint can be seen wherever there is existent chaos: in Libya, Burundi, Congo, Central African Republic, Guinea, the Sudan and, most recently, in Niger. This is particularly true in the Sahel and Maghreb, where the West’s reckless and naïve support of the Arab Spring in 2010 destroyed stable autocratic regimes and left a mishmash of theocratic zealots, bandits and irredentist nationalists, opening the way for the independent and muscular Russian PMCs such as the Wagner Group, with its billions of dollars in revenue from its mining and oil operations in Africa and the Middle East. A Blackwater on steroids, Wagner is dangerously independent and ferocious. In asymmetrical warfare, they offer their clients something the judicialised military of the West cannot: brutal, indiscriminate efficiency.

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The involvement of Wagner in coup or counter-coup activities on the continent has raised huge concern among African leaders, most recently in the Niger coup which the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) vows to crush. But curiously, and damagingly, President Ramaphosa — known here as “Cyril the Silent” — has not taken a firm public position on Wagner, despite the fact mercenary activity is outlawed under the African Union’s Covenant on Mercenarism, effective since July 1985. Indeed, one of Ramaphosa’s predecessors, Thabo Mbeki, was the driving force behind its implementation and instrumental in closing successful white South African mercenary operations across the continent following the democratic transition in 1994.

After its bizarre, two-day quasi mutiny in June, Wagner’s role as Putin’s stormtroopers in Europe appears to have run its course. It now proclaims that Africa is its future, another troublesome legion consigned to the farthest part of an empire. Thinking South Africans, watching the complex forces at play in their Brics summit, conscious of the fragility of their nation and alert to the possibilities of tumult at the elections next year, pray that they remain out of reach.

On Sunday, a few thousand supporters of the ex-president, Jair Bolsonaro, stormed the Three Powers’ Plaza, invading the (mostly empty) buildings of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidential Palace in Brasília. A great deal of vandalism took place, but government is in summer recess and the recently inaugurated President Lula was also away, tending to floods in São Paulo state. Within some hours, the invaders had been cleared.

Was this a credible coup attempt? As shocking as the images of Bolsonaro supporters rampaging through the halls of power are, just as symbolically loaded is the sight of authoritarian militarists seizing the seat of power ­— and then having no idea of how to actually seize power. They shat the bed – almost literally.

There is something deeply adolescent about the whole affair. Sore losers who refuse to accept the election result and then protest by destroying daddy’s belongings. Even the invasion of the Three Powers had something of the teenage tryst to it: they managed to penetrate the sacred site of government but their performance was a mess.

At least since the events of 7 September 2021, when Bolsonaristas threatened to storm the Supreme Court on Brazil’s independence day (but caused chaos a day early leading forces to intervene), there has been widespread concern about a coup. As the October 2022 election drew nearer, these worries grew stronger — though perhaps in inverse proportion to such an event’s likely success. Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters, both institutional and grassroots, might desire a coup, but that doesn’t mean they would take the plunge – whatever they might claim about a “stolen election”.

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In the event, a coup was not even attempted. What we got was a series of illegitimate, anti-democratic but ultimately blunt adventures. On election day, the federal highways police mounted a mass vote-suppression operation by detaining buses in Lula-favouring regions. For a few weeks after the election, Bolsonaro supporters, including truckers, blockaded highways while observers wondered which arm of the security forces would clear them away, given the highway police’s manifest sympathies. But cleared they were. The next phase saw encampments set up around army bases where Bolsonaristas would petition the armed forces to intervene. It was from one such encampment in Brasília that Sunday’s would-be putschists departed for the Three Powers’ Plaza.

None of these points on the way to Sunday’s events was threatening enough on its own. Had they taken place almost simultaneously around the election — or at least prior to the January 1 inauguration — they might have signalled not just serious intent but coordinative capacity.

But the Bolsonarista ultras lack leadership, while institutional support is more circumspect. The clearing of encampments before Sunday’s invasion, led to some pathetic scenes. These are the hardcore of Bolsonaro’s support, infused with messianic and apocalyptic ideas. For them, the Workers’ Party’s return to office is not a mere alternation of government, but a cataclysm. Their behaviour does not testify to a capacity for carefully balanced strategy or tactical nuance.

Bolsonaro-aligned military generals, mostly reservists, have a comfortable arrangement and lack sufficient pull among the active troops. That meant they were not willing to take the risks a coup would imply. Elsewhere in the state — police or politicians — a similar calculus obtained. And of course, Bolsonaro himself absconded to Florida before the inauguration and has now been taken ill. The only other relevant force are the businessmen who fund the operation — including the 100 buses that carried the rioters to the Three Powers. Drawn from agriculture or retail, they probably lack sufficient knowledge of political power and how the Brazilian state works to perform the necessary articulating function a coup would require.

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As a consequence, all these intimations of a coup turned out piecemeal and reactive. There were more emotional outbursts than strategic manoeuvres.

Crucial, then, will be the new government’s reaction. In the US, where the Capitol is already absurdly sacralised, the Democrats’ response to January 6 was to mythologise it. For two years, the party and its media satellites have self-servingly turned the riot into a national trauma. And worse, used it as motive to launch a domestic war on terror.

What is the likelihood the Workers’ Party does the same? Lula’s campaign last year was explicitly constructed as a broad front to save democracy and return the country to a more orderly politics. Throughout, there was a hint of nostalgia for the consensus politics of the 2000s, when one’s bitter rivals supposedly still played by the rules of the game. The temptation to use January 8 as the basis to excise Bolsonarismo from the body politic will be strong. 

But as Bolsonaro’s narrow defeat showed, that is easier said than done. Moreover, the danger is that this gives the Bolsonaristas the narrative of victimhood they crave, while further empowering the judiciary.

We should be clear here: the vandals, hundreds of whom were arrested, should be punished in accordance with the law; the funders should be investigated and prosecuted; and institutional accomplices should be rooted out. Already, the Federal District’s security secretary, an ex-minister of Bolsonaro’s, has been sacked. The governor, himself a Bolsonaro ally, no doubt did so in a move to protect himself, but Governor Rocha has, in turn, been removed from his post for 90 days by the Supreme Court. Both were seemingly complicit in allowing the invasion to happen.

The risk, then, is that this becomes a judicial crusade rather than a political struggle. Lula’s justice minister, Flavio Dino of the centre-Left Socialist Party of Brazil, had already announced in his inauguration speech on January 2 that “terrorist acts, crimes against the democratic rule of law, incitement of animosity between the armed forces and constitutional powers and civil institutions are very serious political crimes… [and] will permanently be on the table of the Ministry of Justice and Public Security.” The fear is that a new anti-extremism law is brought in, a move that would parallel one of the final acts in the last Workers’ Party administration, when Dilma Rousseff signed in a widely criticised anti-terrorism law.

With these riots coming within a week of his inauguration, they may now prove a crucial pivoting point. Lula has, after all, pledged to reconstruct and transform Brazil. But is the aim to transform a rotten state whose constitutional settlement locks in oligarchy and military oversight just as much as it promises social rights? Or is it to defend the limited gains of the past?

Here we can glimpse the vice much of the Left has wedged itself into – not just in Brazil, but across Latin America and beyond. Continually on the defensive in the face of a rebellious and populist Right, the Left has abrogated itself the role of defender of civilisation. Suddenly, it finds itself not far removed from the concerns of the Tony Blair Institute, which has celebrated the decline in the number of “populist” leaders. A recent report commends a new wave of Latin American leaders for having “disavowed populist rhetoric and focused on progressive economic and social rights rather than the populist Left’s historic focus on industrial nationalisation”.

In Brazil, this was reflected in a Lula-led campaign that emphasised consensual deal-making and political nous over maximalist claims, and inclusion over polarisation. Meanwhile, if you squint hard enough, Bolsonarista rhetoric about how the state is not really impartial, and how the only true authority is the people, ends up sounding awfully Leftist, revolutionary even.

How to avoid cementing this political inversion of roles? After all, nothing good will come by allowing the Right to capture the spirit of revolt, given its declared anti-democratic and repressive goals.

But should Lula’s party follow the US Democrats’ lead in trying to make this early January insurrection into a national trauma, to be overcome through a defence of existing institutions, the only “transformation” the President will achieve is to definitively convert his side into the Party of Order.

The football they played in iridescent heat on sun-bleached grass that shimmered an unfamiliar green on television screens across the world; the patterns they had found in their vibrant yellow shirts had an artistry about them, a grace that enraptured the world. “Other teams thrill us and make us respect them,” wrote Hugh McIlvanney in the Observer. “The Brazilians at their finest gave us pleasure so natural and deep as to be a vivid physical experience.” Just as the moon landings had been a triumph of human ingenuity, so Brazil’s World Cup win seemed somehow transcendent, a celebration of the best of humanity.

At its heart was Pelé, born Edson Arantes do Nascimento. As a 17-year-old, he had scored twice in the 1958 final as Brazil won their first World Cup. In 1962, as Brazil won again, he had been injured early in the tournament. In 1966, brutal tackling had bullied him and Brazil out in the group stage. Disillusioned, he quit the national side but even after being coaxed back, there had been doubts as to whether he would make the squad in 1970 after the coach João Saldanha began to question his eyesight. But Saldanha was sacked on the eve of the tournament, Pelé was restored and, at 29, he enjoyed his apotheosis.

He scored in the final, a magnificently athletic header, but what is best remembered is his lay-off for the overlapping Carlos Alberto to make it 4-1 in the final seconds, a team goal of mesmerising fluency to crown the tournament. The pause, the timing, the awareness… This was football of the very highest level. Pelé had risen from horrendous poverty to become probably the most revered sportsman on the planet. He was painted by Andy Warhol, who commented that Pelé would have “15 centuries” of fame.

Pelé’s lob from the halfway line against Czechoslovakia; the header that drew the stunning save from Gordon Banks; the dummy on the Uruguay goalkeeper Ladislao Mazurkiewicz — none of them resulted in goals, but that seemed not to matter. This was about more than winning or losing, bureaucratic notches on a scoreboard. It was about the greater glory of being and the game. And there was even perhaps, for those minded to see it, in the famous photograph of him and Bobby Moore exchanging shirts after Brazil had beaten England, an image of racial harmony.

There has been a sense ever since of football trying to recapture the spirit of 1970. The more apt comparison from the previous year is perhaps less the moon landings than Woodstock, a festival of love and artistry that now embodies a moment of lost possibility with Pelé as its pregnant Joan Baez. And yet, like Woodstock, the idealised image of the 1970 World Cup was largely illusory.

The popular conception of Woodstock, great crowds revelling in the possibility of peace while listening to Jimi Hendrix and Creedence Clearwater Revival, stems largely from the over-idealised Michael Woodleigh documentary, released three months before the 1970 World Cup. In reality, it was chaos: several acts performed hours late, anarchists broke down a fence to admit thousands without paying, two people were killed (one run over by a tractor).

The 1970 World Cup, similarly, becomes a much darker event as soon as you peer beyond the brilliance of Brazil’s football. Mexico was ruled by the US-backed Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which was engaged in a constant war with Left-wing student and guerrilla groups. Torture and extrajudicial killings were commonplace: the World Cup fell between two massacres of student demonstrators by government forces, one in 1968 and one in 1971. Brazil itself was under a military dictatorship led by the hard-line General Emílio Médici (that Saldanha was an outspoken Leftist was one of the major reasons for his removal as coach). The World Cup success was, along with short-term economic growth, framed as part of the “Brazilian Miracle” he and his repressive policies had supposedly made possible. To call Pelé a stooge of the regime, as many have, or to criticise him for not speaking out, is perhaps unreasonable — but he was undeniably the face of a major propaganda success for Médici.

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And yet, in World Cup terms, 1970 does represent an age of lost innocence. Football can be divided into two eras, ancient and modern, with the moment of transition falling in the mid-Sixties, when it became a game of systems rather than individuals. England won in 1966 because of their pressing and their revolutionary adoption of a rugged 4-4-2 formation. It was functional rather than spectacular and drew criticism from almost everybody (until it worked). Football as a romantic game was over. The 1970 tournament was celebrated as a brave new world of attacking potential; rather it was, even if Brazil were rather better organised than the samba cliché had it, a throwback to what had gone before because the heat and humidity of Mexico made the physical exertion demanded by a systematised game impossible.

But football was changing off the pitch as well as on it. Since 1961, the president of Fifa had been Stanley Rous, a former schoolteacher from Suffolk who had refereed the 1934 FA Cup final. He tended to work from home, making occasional flights to Fifa’s small office in Zurich, and was sceptical about expanding the game beyond its European and South American heartlands. He tried to ignore politics altogether, which in part explains the lack of qualms about the 1970 World Cup being played in Mexico.

That policy, though, never particularly practical, created two major problems. He opposed the ban that had been imposed on apartheid South Africa and then, in 1973, he refused to listen to Soviet protests against playing the second leg of their qualifying play-off against Chile in Santiago’s Estadio Nacional, which was being used as a torture and detention centre by the Pinochet regime after the coup against Salvador Allende.

His clumsy handling of both issues, allied to a perception he was an old-school British colonialist, led to Rous’s defeat in Fifa’s presidential elections shortly before the 1974 World Cup. The man who beat him was the Brazilian João Havelange, the son of an arms dealer who had been an Olympic swimmer. A year later, Havelange appointed as his technical director Sepp Blatter, a Swiss businessman who, while working for Longines, had the revelation that rather than the Olympics paying watch-manufacturers to use their timing apparatus, the watch-manufacturers should pay the Olympics for the exposure. This was a whole new world. The following year, Blatter completed the negotiation of a huge sponsorship deal with Coca-Cola. Football’s commercial age had begun.

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Everything in football now is corporate. The ban on beer at the Qatar World Cup and Budweiser’s fury was a rare example of local culture winning out over commerce. And Pelé too was infected: from Puma to Snickers to Viagra to diamonds made by heating his hair under extreme pressure, there was nothing he wouldn’t advertise or monetise. Perhaps it is fitting that one of the last tweets posted from his official account was used to advertise his new clothing range.

Pelé was smooth and charming, a safe pair of hands. His 1970 teammate Tostão has a theory about the use of nicknames in Brazilian football, that the clamour around players makes it useful for stars to split themselves in two: the public figure (the nickname) and the private (the “real” name). For Pelé, he said, that divided self ceased to exist: the mask became the man. “He says that Edson is separate from Pelé, but I don’t see it,” he said in an interview with The Blizzard. “The only one that exists is the public Pelé. He adapted from the age of 15 to becoming a public figure. He passes the impression of never going through depression, anxiety, anguish, sadness as a consequence of loss of identity. He’s happy, well adapted. He’s always smiling and upbeat. You never see him bad tempered. He loves being Pelé.” Even when one of Pelé’s sons was admitted to a drug rehabilitation clinic, it became a public event, something of which Tostão was sharply critical. By coincidence (and it wasn’t planned; I was the editor), on the next page of the magazine was an advert for artwork signed and endorsed by Pelé.

Of course, plenty of people exploit their fame to make money. Nobody should criticise somebody who grew up in the poverty Pelé did for pursuing every opportunity they can. But that doesn’t mean that there cannot be sadness for what he became and what football has become. Amid the dictatorships, there was something beautiful about 1970. The feelings of wonder Brazil and Pelé evoked at the time were not fake, nor should they be invalidated by context: art can flourish in the most brutal of places.

But equally it’s impossible now not to look back at that tournament and see what might have been for football. Perhaps an increased level of tactical complexity was inevitable; it is probably desirable even if it complicates the simple tales of heroes and villains that many still desire. Increasing commercialism was probably also inevitable and has arguably in some ways been beneficial — but, still, in the silent pause before Pelé’s lay-off to Carlos Alberto, in that moment of perfect stillness, there is a glimpse of a better world.

In elections this Sunday, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is likely to triumph over current President Jair Bolsonaro. But the best way to understand the new Brazil, as well as to shed light on the workings of Brazilian politics, may actually be to leave Bolsonaro and Lula to one side and examine another candidate, a life coach and self-described theologian who, thanks to party wrangling, has been left without a legal candidacy.

Pablo Marçal, 35, has four million social media followers, sells a controversial life-coaching course called “The Worst Year of Your Life”, and is best known for nearly leading a group to their death in an ill-prepared trekking expedition in the service of “mental unblocking”. This year, the marketing-cum-political entrepreneur proposes to “unblock the nation”, and to do so from “neither Right nor Left, but from above”.

Marçal fulminates against the two leading candidates. The election, he argues, is like choosing a product: “there’s a car dealership called politics, and they tell you the most popular models are the little red Fiat or the yellow VW [Lula or Bolsonaro], but behind those you find Mercedes, BMWs… and way at the back there’s one no one talks about, a three-million real McLaren.” Encouraging his audience to choose the McLaren, he argues that “some can’t stand people who take risks; if you don’t, you won’t be able to govern, to reach the top”. It is this mix of opportunism, individualism, braggadocio, and indeed faith, that make Marçal emblematic not only of a style of politics, but of deep changes in Brazilian society.

Marçal is a fiery orator and canny operator, worth a declared R$ 96m (US$ 18.5m). With corporate donations banned in Brazilian politics since 2015, the small centre-Right Republican Party of Social Order (PROS, in its Portuguese acronym) signed up Marçal on the promise that he would contribute R$200m to the party. But following a dispute, a legal ruling has now seen control of the party handed back to its previous president. The PROS is back in Lula’s electoral coalition and Marçal’s candidacy is stillborn.

Marçal became famous in January this year after leading a large group up the Pico dos Marins, a 2,420m-high mountain in the state of São Paulo. Facing 100km/h monsoon winds and near-freezing night-time temperatures at the peak, the group had to be rescued by the fire brigade. In a chest-thumping video posted on social media after the rescue, Marçal gave no indication of having needed help to get down the mountain. Instead, he provoked viewers to “stay home and watch [social media] stories” if they did not feel up to taking risks. “There’ll be a bunch of people in your life, like mountain rescuers, telling you what you can and can’t do in your life. But only you can decide.”

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Marçal is also an entrepreneur whose marriage of New Age woo and business acumen recalls the “California ideology” of figures like Steve Jobs. His “IP method” of life coaching, for instance, includes courses on emotional intelligence based on Neuro-Linguistic Programming, with a focus on “brain unlocking, identity activation and purpose clarification”.

To this he adds a dash of evangelical Christianity. His mental unlocking sessions have moments that resemble an exorcism — but in the service of professional advancement. “People are going to criticise you… in the name of Jesus, tell them to go fuck themselves,” he boomed when invited to speak at the Community of Faith church. It was met with a mixture of shock, mirth, and applause.

Marçal’s proposition is not so much religious as earthly. His programmes concern professional success and wealth; his presidential candidacy is an attempt to sell change, good management, and economic growth. His worldly pragmatism, however, is infused with the emotional registers of neo-charismatic Christianity.

In a way, this represents the closing of a circle. Neo-Pentecostalism grew out of post-Sixties New Age milieus. So did life coaching. According to Silas Guerriero, a professor at Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, life coaching emerged from a New Age vision in which personal autonomy can be achieved through the development of individual spirituality. Now, evangelicals — in Brazil, but also around the world — are appropriating the techniques and styles of life coaching into their ministry. They blend “counselling, personal consultancy, and psychotherapy” with charismatic Christianity to help followers deal with both religious demands and the challenges of contemporary life.

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With his brand of self-help religiosity, Marçal is representative of the changing face of Brazil. Thanks to budget cuts, Brazil has delayed its decennial census, which should have been due in 2020, until this year, and so we do not know the total number of evangelicals in the country. One recent estimate, however, put it at 31% of the country’s population, up from less than 7% in 1980. As a whole, evangelicals, more than half of whom are Pentecostal, are set to overtake Catholics by 2030.

These numbers are only likely to rise as the country experiences what is, in effect, an economic lost decade. Brazilian researchers have found that for every 1% fall in the country’s GDP, evangelical numbers increase 0.8%. As Christopher Lord has noted, Bolsonaro, though a Catholic himself, “may well prove to be the first president of post-Catholic Brazil”. After all, if evangelicals were to decide the upcoming election, Bolsonaro would win a first-round landslide; they are one of the few demographic groups in which the incumbent holds an incontestable lead.

The evangelical churches “promise people what they want, now: health and wealth. And this is why it’s the faith of the world’s working poor,” explains Elle Hardy, author of an exposé on the religion’s global spread. We are a long way from sociologist Max Weber’s understanding of the way Protestantism sustained capitalism: hard work, duty, sacrifice and delayed gratification, in the name of rewards in the afterlife. Today, it’s the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Grifting. As Hardy tells me, “these people aren’t reading Luther, they’re reading Elon Musk biographies”.

In a context of wide and deep mistrust in institutions, Neo-Pentecostal churches also reject traditional authorities, be they priests or politicians. Its adherents, feeling besieged by the world around them, are told by pastors that only you, the believer, can dig yourself out of this hole. But the church also provides a community amid this individualism. In a precarious economy, the little microenterprise you set up to make ends meet will find willing customers among the faithful — once given endorsement by your pastor. The appeal here to the poor and struggling is obvious.

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These social transformations have clear political consequences. There is a large, multi-party evangelical bench in Congress: 195 federal deputies (38% of the lower house) and 8 senators. Neo-Pentecostals are a fair proportion of them. According to news outlet Metrópoles, 52 deputies elected in 2018 are Neo-Pentecostals.

These churches have their base in the poorest section of the population, but over the past two decades, the ranks of the faithful have steadily ascended into what is referred to in Brazil as the “new middle class”. The “Lulista” years, from 2003 to 2016, saw strong growth, cash transfers to the poor, an expansion of credit, and new private universities sustained by access to student loans. But this was not equalled by improved public services, while at the same time the rate of unionisation fell precipitously. Stagnating formal job creation has resulted in an informality rate exceeding 40%. For poor and lower-middle-class Brazilians, opportunity coexists with extreme precarity.

The result has been a much more individualistic country in which Marçal’s style of self-help has flourished. “Imagine yourself a baby who is taken from a royal family in the castle and given to a poor family. But as you grow, you look up to the castle and think, ‘I belong there,’” Marçal preaches.

One former Marçal follower has sued the life coach for encouraging her to make this vision a reality — by quitting her steady job and starting her own business. In court, the plaintiff alleged that Marçal told her, “we should not be celetista” (a reference to the CLT, Brazil’s labour code that guaranteed employment rights, and thus shorthand for formal employment), given that we are “born to prosper”. “He believes that everyone should choose to become an entrepreneur, that we should listen to our ‘heart’… and not be enslaved,” she explained, arguing that Marçal preys on the vulnerable.

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Marçal leverages this attitude into politics. “I feel like going to every person and yelling, ‘you’re asleep, you’re zombies, don’t you want Brazil to improve? Don’t you want change!?’ What do I want? I want you to prosper,” he exclaims in one recent livestream.

On his official campaign website, there are five keystones. The first is “every Brazilian a governor”. But this is no democratic slogan, it is an individualist one, dovetailing with his broader gospel discourse about prosperity. This becomes evident in another keystone, “every family a nation” — a slogan that could resonate just as well with Bolsonaro’s conservative, evangelical voters. The family is under threat and needs defence against the hostile outside world. Society is nowhere to be found. There is only “my fatherland, my family”, as yet another keystone has it.

The political echoes of Bolsonarismo should be obvious here. Indeed, the sharp-tongued Marçal calls the president merely an “expired antibiotic”: he did his job but now the moment has passed. “I’ll say it until my last days, until Bolsonaro hands me the [presidential] sash. I’ll get down on my knees and wash his feet and thank him for getting rid of the PT [the Workers’ Party],” Marçal explained.

At the same time, Marçal has sought to distance himself from the chaotic Bolsonaro. “I’m the resistance!”, he says. “None of the other ‘third way’ held on, I’m the third way we all dream of!”

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Indeed, a huge range of other, more established politicians have auditioned for the “third way” — between Lula and Bolsonaro — and failed. Previously, at the 2018 election, these politicians, mostly from the establishment Right, backed Bolsonaro in the second round. This year, they believed they had a chance to be president. After all, Bolsonaro can no longer claim to be an outsider, and his “disgovernment” has repelled many.

But the return of Lula — the most popular president in Brazilian history — has swallowed up the anti-Bolsonaro vote. And Brazilians have no love for the uncharismatic politicians of the mainstream Right. These are “cuckservatives”, in American internet parlance, who have seen the bulk of their voters abandon them in favour of the far-Right. Most of them have grudgingly fallen behind Lula in the search of some temporary stability.

Yet if Lula defeats Bolsonaro as expected, the anti-system new Right, with its base in Right-wing YouTube channels, will need a champion. This is undoubtedly terrain Marçal or someone like him can exploit. For instance, Marçal has already warned that Lula’s promise to reverse a grievous rollback of workers’ rights “will enable huge corruption”. The message here? Embrace precarity, throw yourself into the market, trust only yourself, your family, and God.

And so, across the country, the growing uncertainty of Brazilian life means the country will continue to be fertile ground for the pastor-coach type. Violent crime forces a recoil into a defensive posture inside the family unit. Economic informality means the lure of entrepreneurship pulls harder than that of a steady job, itself a growing rarity. The discrediting of mainstream institutions creates a demand for new sources of authority. The waning of tradition and Catholicism — with its more collective bent — should be providing an opening for progressive, secular politics. But for many, absent some big new idea to fill the void of meaning, it also represents a seemingly existential threat. If the public realm promises little, why not see if a little “mental unblocking” can make you rich?

A BBC article from 2001 notes that opponents of globalisation believe “it leads to exploitation of the world’s poor, workers, and the environment; “makes it easier for rich companies to act with less accountability: and “that countries’ individual cultures are becoming overpowered by Americanisation.” On the other hand, “those in favour of globalisation claim it “should make everyone richer… [while] trade links can encourage countries to respect human rights”.

Twenty years on, it is clear that the opponents of globalisation were entirely correct, and the supporters were utterly wrong. And yet, their brains broken by Brexit, Britain’s liberal commentariat continue to advocate globalised food supply chains purely as a result of Remainer tribalism.

The BBC’s neutral tone at the turn of the millennium is almost unimaginable in today’s hysterical discourse, where opposition to globalisation has been re-coded as a political signifier, entirely randomly, from a reasoned Left-wing argument to an irrational prejudice of reactionary and probably racist deplorables. Likewise, the Left has seemingly abandoned its commitment to localisation and the preservation of unionised, national labour in favour of cosmopolitan dreams of unfettered globalisation.

In Britain this bizarre polar inversion is manifest in the political discourse over the current supply chain crisis. The fundamental problem causing empty shelves in Britain today is not Brexit itself, but the over-complexity of supply chains maximised for efficiency in good times, but which are dangerously fragile whenever the system meets a shock. By over attenuating supply chains on a global scale, and centralising food production for the benefit of the supermarkets, the system was unable to cope with the pandemic’s cascading aftershocks, from energy crises to labour shortages, still working themselves through the global economy. 

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By Dominic Sandbrook

This is a global supply chain crisis caused by a worldwide slow-motion, but accelerating collapse of globalisation. As the American economist Matt Stoller underlines, globalisation “has left us uniquely unprepared to manage a supply shock. Our hyper-efficient globalized supply chain, once romanticized by men like Tom Friedman in The World Is Flat, is the problem. Like the financial system before the 2008 crash, this kind of economic order hides its fragility. It seems to work quite well, until it doesn’t.” Now, we’re beginning to see what it looks like when it doesn’t. 

Take meat processing as an example. For decades, in search of efficiency, supermarkets have centralised the processing of meat in gigantic mega-abattoirs, forcing small regional abattoirs to close and crowding out local farmers. The working environment in these places is so appalling and exploitative, and the pay so low, that they can only be staffed by immigrants from poorer regions of the world. As a result, more than two thirds of Britain’s meat processing labour force is made up of migrants, making the nation’s food supply dependent on the free flow of foreign labour, and on the nationwide distribution of live animals and processed meat to a tiny number of centralised hubs.

This is an entirely unsustainable as well as immoral state of affairs. As the commentator Richard North, an expert on the meat industry, observes, the number of abattoirs in Britain has shrunk “from 3,326 units in the 1960s to a mere 156 in 2020”, with the result that “the meat industry structure in the UK is already so concentrated as to be unsustainable”. As soon as the system meets a shock, as it has now, it is unable to cope..

Yet even before the current shock, the centralisation of meat production was eroding the resilience of Britain’s food supply. In 2018, 34 separate organisations, from the National Trust to the Women’s Institute and the RSPCA, lobbied the Government to halt the collapse of Britain’s network of small regional abattoirs, “a huge national asset” closing “at an alarming rate”. As Christopher Price of the Rare Breed Survival Trust observes has noted, “large scale abattoirs require workers to carry out highly specific, often highly mechanised, procedures as part of the slaughtering process and employ relatively large numbers of narrower skilled, lower paid people in one location”. Instead, the Government should support the creation of more local and smaller abattoirs, “where each worker is required to be more highly and multi-skilled, with the flexibility for part-time work”. This would benefit rural areas where local employment is rare and “facilitate the creation of new premium markets for distinctive meat products from local breeds and the expansion of related businesses such as butchers and farm shops”.

But instead, this vital opportunity to reform the sector into one dependent on high-skilled, high-paid labour working in significantly better conditions is being squandered. Instead, cheered on by their useful idiots in Britain’s commentator class, the corporate food lobby has leaned on the Government to re-open the floodgates to low-paid migrant labour, keeping a broken and exploitative system on artificial life support. 

The current system is simply unsustainable and exploitative to agricultural workers. As the radical Left farming union the Landworkers’ Alliance noted in their 2016 manifesto, “the rural economy… is vulnerable to competition from global markets and to aggressive price bargaining from cartels of processors and distributors (supermarkets)” with the result that “less than ten per cent of earnings from the UK food industry go to UK farmers and fishermen”. 

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Don't blame Brexit for shortages

By Philip Pilkington

Already, the labour shortage is allowing farm workers to demand higher wages, a process which should be allowed to continue, not just because it’s fair but also because it builds resilience into the system. A Britain where the farming sector is forced into decline by global competition is a Britain highly vulnerable to global shocks of the kind we are experiencing now. And yet, as the Landworkers’ Alliance warned back in 2017, the corporate farming lobby is addicted to the current system, with organisations that have the Governments’ ear like the National Farmers Union “more focussed on developing super-efficient mega-farms capable of competing in a cut-throat global market, than in producing the bulk of the UK’s food supply through a network of secure family farms”. 

The globalisation of supply lines according to the logic of the free market is also a disaster for the environment. As a Greenpeace investigation revealed last week, the growing consolidation of Britain’s dairy industry into a handful of American-style megadairies is allowing global food corporations to feed cows soybeans sourced from Brazil’s endangered Cerrado ecoregion. The impact has been profound: it has accelerated deforestation and global warming, forced cows to live in miserable and unnatural indoors conditions in giant sheds and driven small dairy farmers here in Britain out of business. 

Yet aside from moral questions, the supply chain of soybeans is also extremely liable to disruption in times of crisis, such as the drought — the worst in over a century — currently devastating Brazil’s farming sector. Shortages of soybeans caused by environmental collapse in Brazil or by blockages in the global shipping system will mean future shortages of milk and cheese, an absurd situation in a country like Britain blessed with abundant rainfall and lush grass. 

Such built-in vulnerabilities are dangerous as we head into an era of permanent crisis. Indeed, as the Left-wing economist James Meadway warns, though Brexit has exacerbated Britain’s exposure to supply chain disruption, “it is a parochial mistake to single out Britain’s leaving the EU as the primary cause of the crisis”. Rather, what we are experiencing “is the first tremors of the generalised environmental collapse of this century. Gas prices are not going to come down any time soon, and the supply chain crisis will not be resolved this year — or even next.” 

Crisis is the new normal: and to sustain the very basic good of food security, Britain will have to become more self-reliant, decentralising supply chains in pursuit of resilience rather than efficiency and reshoring food production as far as is possible. This isn’t a leap back to the Middle Ages, as online critics howl: Britain was 78% self-sufficient in food as late as the 1980s, and returning to localised production and supply chains should be considered a vital strategic goal.

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The Tories can save Blue Labour

By Aris Roussinos

And yet, in a stunning example of cognitive dissonance, we see liberal commentators who warn of the looming catastrophe of climate collapse simultaneously arguing that fragile globalised supply chains are somehow both desirable and permanent. Like the famous quote that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it seems it’s easier for these people to imagine total civilisational collapse than not being able to eat Kenyan strawberries in midwinter. 

The Left-wing anti-globalisation protestors of twenty years ago were right then, and their newly localist conservative successors are right now. Instead of mocking the Government’s tentative steps towards re-localisation of the nation’s food supply as the backwards fantasies of nostalgic Brexiteers, our stubbornly parochial Remainer comment class should for once step back and observe the changing world around them. 

The global supply chain crisis is forcing the Conservatives to abandon their free-trading dreams as neoliberal ideology gets crushed by stark reality. This is an unalloyed good, and should be supported and encouraged as far as possible. The Government is correct to say that today’s supply chain meltdown is “a failure of the free market and not of the state” and that businesses “have become drunk on cheap labour”. The current crisis is an opportunity to rebalance Britain’s food system into a fairer and more resilient model, and the Government, finally being forced towards good policy by events outside its control, needs to hold its nerve. 

“Jewish Atheist,” the man said.

Dumbfounded by the answer, the kidnappers eventually muttered: “Are you… Catholic… Jewish Atheist or a Protestant Jewish Atheist?”

Contempt for ambiguity: it reigns when war is real — but also when the extreme politicisation of non-violent social behaviour makes “war” an inescapable metaphor. As in the culture wars of today.

It came for me last year, after I published a book that didn’t sit neatly on either side of the political fence. War for Eternity traces the activities of three high-status far-Right operatives: Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon, and unofficial guru of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Olavo de Carvalho. It probes the depths of their anti-liberalism, exposes Bannon’s efforts to align the United States and Russia and suggests these figures’ opposition to political consensus contains more fervour and spookiness than even alarmist commentators suspected.

Summarising the content of the book makes it sound like a classic hit-job (and in the US, it was marketed this way). And yet I do not call the people I study names, do not hide the fact that my relationships with some of them grew casual and friendly, and occasionally show interest in their lives beyond topics of obvious political consequence. Moreover, I strived to take them seriously as thinkers.

With a tone more empathetic towards the Right, and a conclusion aligned with the Left, the book seemed a perfect fit for no one — and therefore destined for trouble. If you’re going to write a book on politics, industry wisdom demands you affirm the views of some large constituency. Find an entertaining way to tell a critical mass something they already believe and you can count on sales and positive reviews. Write with an unclear political profile, and at best you’ll be ignored. At worst, you’ll be treated to a brand of contempt reserved for misfits who obscure battle lines in ways transparent enemies do not.

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Granted, I don’t think an opposition between style and substance is a recipe for ambiguity. Certain content speaks for itself: readers’ capacity for discernment is not as fragile as some assume. Nevertheless, the thick editorialising endemic to commentary on political extremism makes for boring writing, belittles readers’ intelligence and seldom persuades anyone to think in new ways.

But the approach is risky at a time when accusations of ambiguity can stand alone as slurs. American writer Thomas Chatterton Williams experienced this during the reception of his recent memoir Unlearning Race, in which the Left-leaning, mixed-raced author criticises race-based political and social mobilisation. The spear-tip of a scorching Bookforum review was the allegation that Williams’ was “politically incoherent.” Dig a bit and you’d see that the reviewer wasn’t actually confounded by William’s arguments; he thought that author was simply (and quite coherently) wrong. But “incoherent” and “wrong” will appear synonymous to those certain of their own virtue and insight.

Still, even insincere branding as “politically incoherent” seems a kind of luxury. More often, cultural authorities respond to ambiguities with frantic attempts to classify in familiar terms. J.D. Vance’s memoir and its Golden-Globe nominated Netflix adaptation provide a recent example.

Hillbilly Elegy chronicles the economic and social traumas of Vance’s childhood in post-industrial Ohio, and the book and its author became oracles for the American centre-Left following the 2016 elections, when understanding the white working-class was in vogue. It didn’t take long, however, for critics to identify the book’s less savoury features: its inattention to racial dynamics in greater Appalachia and its alleged moral of individualistic self-improvement. For these critics, the book’s deficiencies didn’t temper its virtues — they erased them. By the time of the film’s release in late 2020, Hillbilly Elegy had been decried as a Right-wing imposter that exposed poverty in the wrong ways and for the wrong reasons. It was a small step thereafter for critics to dismiss the film, as the New Yorker did, as little more than “a libertarian’s dream”.

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Like Hillbilly Elegy, my book hasn’t had a straight-forward reception. In the UK and the US, it was generally welcomed by the anti-establishment Left and Right, but the political centre judged it more harshly. Centrists complained that I was too chummy with the subjects I was supposed to be taking down — I called Steve Bannon “Steve” — and that analysis of my subjects’ ideas was itself a form of adoration. Few mentioned an opposition between my language and the content of the book, though this was sometimes amusingly implied. Guardian journalist Luke Harding wrote that the book “infuriated” him because its presentation allegedly obscured the consequences of the ideas I profiled, consequences he came to understand — as best I can tell — by reading the book.

Because for much of the Anglo-American cultural establishment, form is content. Symbolic politics reigns as language and rhetoric become the key indicators of ideological virtue and political identity. Things must be called out, fascism described as fascism — so that gullible readers are never duped, and so that nobody will wonder whose side the author is on. And a book that doesn’t proclaim its opposition to Steve Bannon cannot in any meaningful way be critical of him.

It’s striking, then, that the same book was received so differently by the Left and Centre Left in another context. It may have begun with a gift from Olavo de Carvalho — Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s guru and the third main subject of my book. Whereas Bannon was ambivalent in private and mum in public about my book, and Russian Aleksandr Dugin messaged me calling it “much better than anything else” and publicised positive reviews, Carvalho went berserk. From the time of its release and until the present — across BBC interviews, Twitter threads and hour-long YouTube rants spread to his nearly one million social media devotees — he described the book as pure lies. He called me a fake scholar, out to harm him and Bannon, and christened me with a baffling, Trump-style nickname: “Tiger balm.”

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What followed? Universal praise in Brazil’s mainstream media and features in all its major papers. The book was quickly translated to Portuguese and is already selling into its second printing. Olavo vaporised whatever potential the book had to appear politically ambiguous. In Brazil, it was an anti-Olavo book, and his and President Bolsonaro’s many opponents jumped to my side.

It was personal for many of those opponents. Olavo, though he turned down offers for a ministerial post in Bolsonaro’s Right-wing populist government, uses his social media megaphone to drive popular support for the Brazilian president’s anti-establishment agenda, skewering bureaucrats, scientists, academics and the media with the filthiest prose you can imagine.

Those targeted surely feel solidarity with each other, and with me, but there may be other reasons why I got a different read in Brazil. The country’s Left is fundamentally unlike that of the UK and US. While the latter is increasingly defined by social capital, prominent Brazilian leftists are murdered in the streets and coerced, sued or otherwise threatened in their positions as government representatives or journalists. Fighting for survival leaves less space for games of posturing. Content matters more than style if you are in an actual, rather than a symbolic, struggle. And in Brazil, I’m yet to hear a reviewer complain about the names or labels I use.

Christopher Hitchens reminded us, however, that there are serious prices to be paid when battle lines attempt to bisect the dynamism of human life. Outliers and dissidents are erased, figuratively and literally. But as demands for regularity spread into the realm of ideas, it is intellectual risk-taking that stands to suffer most. Uncomfortable readers are better readers, we are told, but seldom do we allow ourselves the discomfort that comes from pausing our familiar methods for classifying thoughts, words and people. As curiosity and patience give way to certainty and closure, the consequences will inevitably be grim.

These recent scenes in South America, so reminiscent of pre-pandemic times, will be reassuring for some — but will send a shudder down the spines of many in the region hardest hit by Covid-19.

Latin America became the pandemic’s epicentre this summer, when it recorded over a quarter of the world’s confirmed coronavirus cases, despite being home to only 8% of its population. The region accounts for over 415,000 Covid-19 related deaths — that’s around one in every three of the global total.

Brazil, with its football stadiums converted into makeshift hospitals and its mass graves hastily dug in the Amazon, has suffered the hardest. The country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, will be remembered as the region’s pantomime villain for playing down the virus as it ripped through the country. Over 5.5 million cases of the coronavirus — the third highest tally in the world — and 165,000 deaths have been recorded there.

But Brazil is not such an exception in South America. From Argentina to Colombia, despite most countries locking down swiftly and strictly, success stories are few. Of countries populated by more than 25 million people, five of the world’s ten highest Covid-19 death rates per capita are in South America.

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More than six months of lockdowns have destroyed livelihoods and businesses and caused a spike in domestic violence and depression. The economic fallout threatens to reverse a decade of fighting poverty and widen the chasm between the haves and have-nots in the world’s most unequal region.

But the lockdowns have also failed to contain the virus’ spread.

Cases and deaths remain persistently high across South America and are now appearing in many previously unaffected regions.

Argentina, which has endured the longest lockdown in the world, became the smallest country to record over a million cases of the coronavirus on October 20. It has since recorded another 300,000 cases. Colombia joined the undesirable club five days later, and Peru is likely to follow soon.

While proponents and critics of lockdowns alike cherry pick figures from Sweden and across Europe to craft their arguments, Latin America offers perhaps the starkest lesson: lockdowns are not only devastating to economies and lives, but used alone, they are an ineffective tool.

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On March 20, three days after the UK entered a national lockdown — and two weeks after Colombia diagnosed its first case of the coronavirus — Colombia’s president, Ivan Duque, ordered all residents to stay at home except for essential activities such as grocery shopping and medical attention. Schools, borders and public events had already been closed.

As Italy’s ICU units began collapsing under the strain of Covid-19 patients, the decision to enforce lockdowns swiftly and strictly was mirrored across most of South America. Fears — later borne out — were that if Europe’s healthcare systems could not cope with the influx, South America’s frail, underfunded hospitals stood little chance.

The region’s population is the world’s most urban (around 80% of people live in cities) and the most unequal. Around a third of people live in poverty — many of whom reside in sprawling slums where regular running water and soap are lacking. Healthcare systems are typical of developing economies, while people have the health profile of a developed one: heart disease, obesity and other comorbidities which make Covid-19 particularly deadly, are rife.

Swift action bought the region the vital time it needed to ramp up its hospitals. Overnight Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, was emptied of its usual chaos. Roads full of buses recklessly vying for precious tarmac suddenly became orderly and pavements fought over by food vendors, street hawkers, pedestrians, and cyclists became vacant.

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“It was like one of those films in the Wild West with the balls of tumbleweed rolling through the streets,” says Gloria Zuluaga, a 52-year-old restaurant owner. Zuluaga was concerned by the closure of her restaurant but relieved by the trickle of daily Covid-19 cases as Colombians retreated to their homes, rather than the flood in Europe. But alarm bells were soon ringing elsewhere.

In neighbouring Peru, the number of Covid-19 cases were rising steadily despite similar measures being implemented. By May daily deaths had reached triple figures. As less than half of households own a refrigerator, many Peruvians had to shop daily in markets which quickly became breeding grounds for the virus.

In April, South America looked on in horror as families in Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, laid the bodies of their loved ones in the streets. The city’s morgues, hospitals and large refrigerators had already been filled. The surge in cases was an early warning that the continent’s poverty and large informal economies would undermine lockdowns.

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“It was the best evidence-based thing to do at the moment,” says Diego Rosselli, an epidemiologist at Bogota’s Javeriana University who has consulted the Colombian government on managing the pandemic. “But I think we would have been thinking differently if we had known what we know right now.”

Rosselli now advocates enforcing the use of facemasks in all public places and a nightly curfew rather than trying to prevent people from working in the day. Unlike in Europe, the majority of South Americans work in informal jobs such as cleaning houses or selling snacks on the street. They had to make a tough choice: go out and risk contracting the disease, or go hungry.

“We’ve been inside for three months. We’re all terrified of going outside and catching the virus but eventually I had to go back to work”, said Luis Carlos Diaz, a 35-year-old taxi driver and father of two young girls. Diaz was forced to resume driving for Uber in early June despite a surge in cases. He had handled the onset of alcoholism under house confinement but could not stop his savings being burnt up.

Governments did offer economic support but it came too late or not at all.

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“They said they are helping people but I don’t know who, because they aren’t helping around here,” says Diana Rodriguez, a 47-year-old mother of two who broke quarantine after two months to resume cleaning houses for £10 a day.

The Panamerican Health Organisation (PAHO), the WHO’s branch for the Americas, believes a lack of financial security was central to lockdowns being broken. “PAHO has urged governments to ensure that public health measures are accompanied by social protection measures so that people do not have to choose between their lives and their livelihoods,” says Dr Jarbas Barbossa, the organisation’s assistant director.

As early as March, the economic pain caused by the pandemic sparked protests and looting protests and looting in Bogotá. But the biggest failure was misusing lockdowns indefinitely as a tool to fight the virus rather than to buy time to draw up a wider, more sustainable strategy, say experts.

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“A lockdown is only meant to buy time for the health system to ramp up testing and tracing efforts. Certainly to clear out space in hospitals for intensive care units in particular, and to prepare public health guidelines and information campaigns or mask mandates, distancing suggestions, if not requirements,” says Michael Touchton at the University of Miami’s Covid-19 Policy Observatory for Latin America.

Lockdowns did allow South American countries to ramp up their intensive care capacity. Colombia’s ICU capacity was up 40% on March by August.

President Duque and PAHO have pointed to the country’s relatively low Covid-19 mortality rate of 3% to illustrate the success of lockdowns. It is less than half of Bolivia’s 6.1% and Ecuador’s 7.8%, where healthcare systems collapsed.

There was no plan, however, to come out the other side once hospitals had weathered the initial storm, say observers. “Lockdowns have been wasted because they haven’t been accompanied with sensible reopening measures,” Touchton says.

Colombia eventually relaxed restrictions such as restaurant and airport closures in September because of economic pressure. There was a brief respite from August’s peak of 13,000 daily cases but they did not drop below 5,000 and are rising steadily once again.

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Across the continent, Argentina, hailed not long ago a regional benchmark for keeping infection rates low into the summer, is a grim example of why lockdown-reliance is dangerous.

“We were lecturing the whole world: ‘Argentina is doing great, Argentina is better than Sweden, it’s better than Uruguay, it’s better than Chile, it’s better than any other country in the world’ …. And now we are paying the price because we are the worst in the class,” says Adolfo Rubinstein, the country’s former Health Minister.

Argentina has recorded 1.3 million coronavirus cases and is reporting around 12,000 a day, more per million people than anywhere else in the Americas.

Like Colombia, mobility data illustrates why lockdowns failed to stem the virus’ propagation there. Activity plummeted in March when lockdowns began but slowly crept up and accelerated quickly around the two-month mark as people ran out of money and fatigue set in.

“It’s out of control; nobody is respecting the restrictions,” Rubinstein says.

Argentina’s government began relaxing lockdown in July when shops reopened and adults were permitted to exercise outside.

“Considering the final results and the situation we are facing now I would say that lockdown didn’t work,” says Rubinstein. The government’s “sin” was not that they implemented lockdowns but that they then “fell in love with them” and did not pursue a wider strategy, like tracing and isolating cases.

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Argentina is stuggling to test at the same rate as the virus spreads. The country’s testing fell behind in March when global supplies bottlenecked, Rubinstein says, leaving it stuck in a perpetual loop where it cannot test sufficiently and therefore cannot localise and manage cases regionally, leaving national lockdowns the only option.

The only South American country that has proven capable of keeping the virus under control is Uruguay, where 4,000 cases have been recorded in its three million population. Though Uruguay is wealthier and better-equipped, scientists attribute the success to quickly breaking transmission chains through swift and widespread testing while keeping the public well-informed. Though borders and places where large numbers of people could gather were closed the public were not ordered to stay at home.

Argentina and the rest of South America have not been as successful. With the virus’ spread seemingly out of control there is no obvious remedy.

The economic and psychological damage from the first wave of cases was high: The World Bank predicts a contraction of 7.2% this year, more than any other region. Now the second wave is coming governments may have played all of their lockdown cards too early, leaving little recourse. “There’s no appetite for another lockdown, for economic reasons, for psychological reasons, and for political reasons,” says Touchton. “Unfortunately, I think we’re going to see a rise in cases until there’s a vaccine.”

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Though Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia have secured access to a potential vaccine  under an international agreement it will arrive next year at the earliest. Administering it to diverse populations spread across vast areas will be challenging. Rubinstein fears things may get much worse in Argentina, with nightmarish scenes like those seen in Brazil, before they can get better.

“If there is an increase in deaths or the collapse of the healthcare system then people will probably make themselves more aware and shelter at home, but otherwise nobody’s complying,” he says.

If there is some cause for optimism, it’s not in ordering people to stay at home again, but in the weather, and lessons learnt elsewhere, Touchton says.

Summer arrives in time for Christmas in South America and should entice Argentinians, Brazilians and Peruvians outside, reducing the risk of virus transmission.

Informing the public clearly on how to make the most of the weather safely with face masks and social distancing while preventing “super-spreader” events could be the type of sustainable middle ground that has reaped success elsewhere. And it may save lives.

That’s also why the current shitshow taking place in Brazil is so captivating — and tragic. It’s an example of the state of emergency doctrine on crack. Suspension of normal order because of the coronavirus was forced upon Jair Bolsonaro’s populist Government from below; that Government responded with a scattershot of attempts to sometimes exploit, sometimes undermine protective measures. Meanwhile there have been conspiratorial murmurings, a scepticism of expertise rare even among anti-establishment populists, and a skyrocketing Covid-19 death toll, making Brazil one of the hardest hit countries worldwide. Rather than a display of power, the crisis is exposing a Government gripped by paranoia.

Granted, Bolsonaro had reason to fear even before the arrival of Covid in late February. Brazil appeared then to be heading into economic recession. In addition, on 14 March, Brazil’s Supreme Court initiated criminal investigations into networks allegedly promoting “fake news” and which were credited with assisting Bolsonaro’s election. Court-ordered police raids and inquiries targeted the President’s high-level supporters, including family members.

The President and his ministers responded by suggesting that police disregard orders from the judiciary, setting the stage for a constitutional showdown. Bolsonaro’s efforts to instal loyal police chiefs amid the turmoil led to the resignation of his popular minister of justice and the creation of a new investigation into his possible judicial obstruction and interference.

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But this whirlwind of political woes is only part of the reason for the President’s erratic response to the pandemic. First came a short-lived alarmist response channelling his law-and-order instincts; then, an attempt to downplay the need for lockdowns while prioritising economic concerns; then yet another stance, born of his penchant for conspiracy and rejection of scientific expertise.

His opening moves came in early February, when he showed reluctance — citing logistical and health-related concerns — to repatriate Brazilians located in the epicentre of the outbreak in Hubei province, China. Any notion that this signalled a cautious approach disappeared in early March, when he described the threat posed by the virus a media “fantasy”. Days later, on 15 March, striking a more measured tone while questioning lockdown measures, he said that “the virus could turn into a fairly serious issue, but the economy has to function”. Then, following the first deaths, on 19 March, his Government strengthened all land borders and instituted restrictions for foreigners entering on international flights. Around this time, and against the wishes of his Health Minister, Bolsonaro began promoting the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine in public statements as a treatment for Covid-19.

In the absence of a national lockdown, state governors and mayors began instituting social distancing measures, notably in São Paulo on 24 March. A patchwork of lockdowns came to Brazil — driven from the bottom up. Bolsonaro condemned them as inflicting needless economic suffering on the country, even urging citizens to defy local decrees. On 16 April, with cases approaching 100,000, the economy contracting, and foreign investors fleeing, Bolsonaro fired his Minister of Health, Luiz Henrique Mandetta. By the end of the month, Brazil would have more confirmed cases than China.

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Was there a strategy behind all this? A video of a 22 April cabinet meeting, released by a court order, suggests that a growing fear of outside influence had infected the administration. In the meeting, Bolsonaro dwelt on the local leaders who were getting the better of the crisis and using it to subvert his agenda of a free-market liberty-loving society:

“These guys just want to take us from behind. It’s our freedom. This is the reality. This is what they’re doing with the virus. That piece of shit governor in São Paulo. That asshole governor of Rio, and the others, exactly this.”

Damares Alves, the socially conservative Minister of Women, Family, and Human Rights, fretted about other healthcare administrators and how they might exploit the situation: “Would they allow women who had coronavirus to abort in Brazil? It will be a free-for-all.” She also suggested political opponents were infecting indigenous people with coronavirus to hurt Bolsonaro.

In the midst of the exchanges, the Foreign Minister, Ernesto Araújo, referred to the outbreak of the “communavirus”. The day before he had published a statement describing the pandemic as having been appropriated by communist interests in an effort to erase national borders and institute a global reign of “sanitary correctness” where dissenting behaviour was punished. He argued that its goal was not only to vanquish capitalism but to “enslave the being human and transform it into an automaton devoid of a spiritual dimension”.

The apocalyptic language echoes that of Bolsonaro’s unofficial guru, the former astrologer and leader of a Sufi Muslim tariqa turned Catholic zealot Olavo de Carvalho, who looms over the nationalist, anti-China and pro-Trump wing of the Bolsonaro cabinet from his home in exile in Virginia. It was de Carvalho who recommended Araújo for the post.

The Minister of Education Abraham Weintraub, part of the same wing, made few comments at the late April meeting beside a call to jail Supreme Court justices. A few weeks earlier, however, he tweeted — in language mocking a Chinese accent — that the outbreak was part of the Chinese government’s plan for “world domination”. This strain of conspiracy theory buoys the cabinet’s rejection of international scientific expertise (one member at the meeting was recorded saying: “I already told my wife, if I have anything, I’ll take a litre of hydroxychloroquine”).

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The Bolsonaro Government seemed consumed with waging ideological battles against imaginary enemies. Only the Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles, realised that they could in fact take advantage of the situation. “While we have this moment of calm in terms of press coverage — because it’s only talking about Covid — let’s pass these bills soon, and change all the rules. Ease up the regulations,” he said to the Cabinet. Deforestation in the Amazon, indeed, has continued its acceleration throughout the pandemic.

In the weeks following the meeting, the virus ravaged the rural northern Amazonian states and pushed intensive care units to capacity in major cities. The situation was more in line with that of Italy than Brazil’s Latin American neighbours.

Meanwhile, the President continued to erode the governors’ and mayors’ protective measures by expanding the list of essential businesses in the country; continued pushing hydroxychloroquine while upping its domestic production and securing a major delivery of the drug from the United States; witnessed the resignation of his new Health Minister after just four weeks and replaced him with a military general lacking any medical training; initiated retaliatory, though not baseless, investigations of corruption among his political rivals; and participated in mass anti-lockdown protests where he shook demonstrators’ hands.

It seemed almost like the actions of someone who had stopped caring (“We are all going to die some day,” the President once responded to reporters’ questions about the pandemic). But as domestic commentators such as Oliver Stuenkel have pointed out, the aimlessness of the President’s response allows him to benefit politically from a range of outcomes. The economic crisis looming since before the outbreak? Bolsonaro can now blame it on lockdowns. If the death rate turns out to be catastrophically high? The lockdowns didn’t work — he told you so!

Bolsonaro’s future depends on his ability to position himself in relation to the wave of pain — of one form or another — that Brazilians seem destined to face.

Haddad, for his part, looks hopeless. On Monday, his own campaign event turned against him, as a planned endorsement from the Democratic Labour Party candidate Ciro Gomes spun into a diatribe about Haddad’s failings. “You’re going to lose the election, and it’s your fault,” Gomes shouted.

Bolsonaro’s spectacular rise raises key questions about the appeal of authoritarianism – in Brazil and around the world. Who constitutes Bolsonaro’s base? Why are they turning toward such violence and bigotry? And what can it tell us about new populist movements emerging in advanced democracies today?

To make sense of these questions, I revisited the data from the World Values Survey (WVS), collected in over 60 countries between 2010 and 2014. Focusing on the sample from Brazil, I examined the relationship between respondents’ self-placement on a left-right spectrum — ranging from 1 to 10 — and their support for democracy.

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The main finding? It is moderates, not extremists, who are most excited about authoritarianism in Brazil.

I began my analysis by looking at general attitudes toward democracy. The survey asks: “How important is it for you to live in a country that is governed democratically?”

Plotted against the Left-Right spectrum, the responses form a striking V-shape. People who identify at the extremes of the political spectrum are far more likely to value democracy than those who identify at the centre. While 56.4% of the far-Left and 60% of the far-Right view democracy as “absolutely important”, only 37.5% of the centre agrees.

Source: WVS

But perhaps this question is too abstract: respondents may not know what it means, exactly, to be governed democratically. To address this possibility, I turned to a more concrete question about democratic governance. How important is it, the survey asks, that “people choose their leaders in free elections”?

Here again, we find that support for democracy caves at the centre. Compared to 67% at the far-Left and 69% at the far-Right, only 46% of the centre believes that free elections are an “essential characteristic of democracy”.

Source: WVS

Finally, I turned to respondents’ attitudes toward authoritarianism. What do Brazilians think of “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections”?

Once more, it is at the centre where authoritarianism finds its strongest support. A total of 76.6% – over three-quarters – of self-identified centrists view “strong” leadership as a “very good” or “fairly good” way to govern their country. In other words, these respondents are not just critical of democracy – they are actively enthusiastic for an authoritarian transition.

Source: WVS

On the topic of strong men, however, the differences between groups are significantly smaller. Seventy-two per cent of the far-Left support a strong leader, and 70% of the far-Right. Even among respondents who sit at centre-Left and centre-Right, overall support does not dip below 60%.

Such widespread support for strongman politics is staggering. Compare Brazil’s numbers to the United States, where less than 28% of respondents view this system of governance favourably. In Brazil, just one-tenth of all respondents believe that a strong man who does not bother with parliament or elections is, in fact, “very bad”.

Source: WVS

These figures provide an important clue to Bolsonaro’s success and the trends are backed up by more recent evidence. Nostalgia for Brazil’s military dictatorship is on the rise: according to a 2017 poll, 43% of Brazilians support bringing it back, compared with just 35% a year earlier. Their nostalgia heavily favours Bolsonaro, who has long considered himself a torchbearer for Brazil’s dictatorship. “Voting won’t change anything in this country. Nothing!” he screamed back in 1999. “Things will only change, unfortunately, after starting a civil war here, and doing the work the dictatorship didn’t do.”

The data on democratic attitudes, of course, cannot tell the whole the story. Bolsonaro’s candidacy has also been bolstered by a general wave of anger toward the political class. According to one recent survey, roughly a third of Brazilian voters were planning to cast a null vote in the presidential election. Bolsonaro – who has positioned himself as an outsider, railing against the corruption of Brazil’s political establishment – feeds from their negative partisanship. There, are, then, both push and pull factors at play.

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But the findings from the World Values Survey suggest that Bolsonaro’s is not a coalition of crazies – lashing out from the margins of society – but one of “sensible” people. Election polls paint this profile in striking detail: Bolsonaro voters are on average wealthier, better educated, and more urban than Haddad’s.

In other words, he is consolidating precisely the constituency that most commentators in advanced democracies like Britain believe to be the backstop against authoritarianism. This is one of the key takeaways from the Brazilian election: our faith in the middle class is misplaced. Strongmen often find support among middle-class moderates, who trust them to advance middle-class interests against the redistributive preferences of the poor.

Even before taking office, Bolsonaro is rewarding them for their support: the stock market soared after his first-round victory, and Brazil’s business community is “rallying around” his candidacy.

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In Brazil, we are reminded that capitalism and democracy have no inherent compatibility. Above all, markets love stability, and authoritarians love to promise it. In this sense, the Brazilian story is not so far from the American one. In the election of Donald Trump, we saw a radical candidate convince millions of moderate voters that Right-wing authoritarianism was the best bet for their policy priorities.

From one angle, this looked like the radicalisation of the centre ground. From another, though, it was a revelation that the centre ground was never committed to moderate principles in the first place.

The primary difference between these cases, then, is historical context. The Trump presidency, for all its madness, has not been able to undo two and a half centuries of democratic consolidation: the roots are simply set too deep for such sudden change.

Brazil’s democracy, by contrast, is in its infancy: it is less than 30 years since its constitution was ratified. If elected next week, Bolsonaro may well rip these shallow roots from the ground, inaugurating a period of darkness, violence, and political repression across the country. Whether by cluelessness or conviction, Bolsonaro’s base is bringing Brazil to the brink.

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Next Sunday, Brazil’s almost 150 million voters will go to the polls in the most inauspicious of circumstances.

Economic growth has stalled, corruption is rife and crime on the rise. The recent spectacle of the country’s cherished National Museum being reduced to charred rubble amid claims of mismanagement and corruption is a metaphor for Brazil’s general malaise: a country facing the darkest of moments, unable to celebrate the glories of the past.

If the polls are to be believed, the man likely to place first is Jair Bolsonaro, a politician who has been variously described as “the most misogynistic, hateful elected official in the world”, an “apologist for dictators” and a “racist”. Much has been written about his record in recent weeks, yet little commentary has been dedicated to the reasons behind his rise or his appeal to a country in crisis.

As with most practitioners of Latin American political machismo, Bolsonaro’s image has been carefully-honed: hard-line former paratrooper, family man, devoted Christian and outspoken anti-corruption campaigner in a Federal Congress full of bandidos.

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The sense of bewilderment, from foreign correspondents and many affluent Brazilians, that a figure as coarse and vulgar as Bolsonaro could be on the verge of securing the presidency of the world’s fifth-largest country is palpable. The parallels with the American election two years ago are hard to ignore.

The 800,000-strong town of Nova Iguaçu, roughly an hour outside Rio de Janeiro, is solid Bolsonaro territory. Largely made up of low-quality housing and devoid of any cultural attractions, its residents have seen their real-terms incomes fall by more than 10% since 2014. Violent crime has increased markedly in recent years as a combination of police incompetence, corruption and starvation of resources have begun to bite.

There are only two enterprises in the city that have grown in recent years: the unemployment office and the ranks of the myriad evangelical churches lining its streets. In this respect, Bolsonaro has a message that appeals to both of these communities: the dispossessed and the newly-possessed.

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The country’s burgeoning Pentecostal Christian community is critical to Bolsonaro’s standing. The largest of these evangelical forces, the Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, has attracted millions of new followers in recent years at the expense of the more austere Catholic Church – largely by propagating fears of witchcraft and making theologically-dubious pledges to deliver salvation (after the payment, of course, of a regular tithe) that have resonated among the poor and vulnerable.

On the stump, Bolsonaro’s rhetoric mirrors the fire and brimstone approach of the Igreja Universal’s preachers; evoking appeals for the defence of traditional family values, a condemnation of lifestyles considered ‘deviant’ and talking up the prospects of divine intervention as a means by which to boost personal incomes. On the ballot paper, Bolsonaro appears not as the candidate for his own, small Social Liberal Party but as the nominee of a coalition entitled ‘Brazil above everything, God above everyone’.

The successful harnessing of the evangelical community for political ends is an increasing phenomenon in Brazil, with a number of evangelical ministers and soi-disant bishops now sitting in the Federal Senate and holding influential executive roles, such as the mayoralty of Rio de Janeiro. As voting takes place on a Sunday, many ministers guide their parishioners from the pages of the Bible to the polling booth with seamless ease.

Law and order is another bulwark issue for Bolsonaro. Few solid details about his plans to cut crime have been outlined – but his rhetoric suggests his approach is more likely to emulate that of the Philippines President, Rodrigo Duterte, who has faced allegations of extra-judicial killings, than the targeted approach of the Uribe and Santos administrations in neighbouring Colombia.

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Electorally-speaking, this isn’t a particular problem for Bolsonaro. Indeed, such speeches about the execution of drug dealers and the deployment of army battalions to crack down on violent crime don’t particuarly concern the type of voter who may be inclined towards him; it warms the cockles of their hearts. Indeed, his stabbing at a rally a fortnight ago, which confined him to a hospital bed, has only served to show the necessity of his stance.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Nova Iguaçus across Brazil – and they are willing to give Bolsonaro and his message a hearing – however dark it may be. Indeed, parallels could easily be drawn between Nova Iguaçu and the ‘forgotten’, blue-collar towns in Michigan and Pennsylvania whose primal scream against the establishment handed Donald Trump his victory in 2016. And just as in the case of Trump’s most fervent supporters, Bolsonaro inspires slavish loyalty from his base and horror from his detractors.

To a great many, the rise of a figure like Bolsonaro is the fault of the political class. Nowhere is that disconnect between the aspirations and anxieties of the people and views of the elite better represented than in the form of Geraldo Alckmin – the man who had been expected to coast to a spot in the second round of the presidential race without breaking a sweat.

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A solid yet staid, four-term governor of prosperous São Paulo state, Alckmin’s centrão (‘big centre’) coalition has successfully marshalled moderate to centre-Right parties to row in behind his bid, on the understanding that the spoils of office – chiefly, government ministries – would be equitably allocated among them in the event of his victory. In return, each party would then pledge to support the government’s legislative programme in Congress.

The political apparatus surrounding Alckmin’s candidacy is emblematic of the country’s political crisis – and part of the reason Brazilian voters are rejecting his candidacy. For many, the “coligação” system symbolises constant congressional vote-buying and endless ideological malleability at a time when Brazilians are demanding decisive change.

Few believe that Alckmin, if he won, would really deliver on a programme to eliminate corruption when the parties making up his coalition are mired in it? Is reform of the country’s constitution and its multitudinous sacred cows really possible in an administration comprised of nine separate political movements? Can a new politics really be possible with the same tired, cynical voices around the table? According to the polls, Brazilians are saying “no”.

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With Alckmin’s campaign floundering and other challengers fading fast, Bolsonaro’s chief opponent appears to be the former Mayor of São Paulo Fernando Haddad – the anointed pick of the jailed former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva and his Leftist Workers’ Party (PT).

Notwithstanding some credible achievements during his spell as Mayor of the country’s richest city, where average earnings comparable favourably with those of mainland Europe, Haddad is an uninspiring candidate running on a predictable platform to reverse the badly-needed public spending freeze imposed by incumbent President Michel Temer. Such is his weakness as a candidate and campaigner, he secured only 17% of the vote in his 2016 re-election campaign.

The only electoral asset Haddad has in his armoury is his throaty endorsement from the former president, who is currently serving a 12-year sentence for money laundering and accepting kick-backs from property developers.

Lula despite his conviction, remains a popular and respected figure among many Brazilians. This reputation is partly deserved. During his first term in office, Lula was able to successfully reign in the most dramatic impulses of his socialist coalition to court international investment and introduce social programmes which had a profound impact on reducing social inequalities and boosting average incomes.

Regrettably, in a manner akin to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Lula’s initial pragmatism ultimately gave way to vast expansions of unfunded state entitlements and a culture of cronyism that has brought the country to its knees. Many of the social problems Brazil faces today can be laid squarely at the door of Lula and PT.

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Despite his public protestations to the contrary, a Haddad victory would likely result in a full presidential pardon for Lula. The societal impacts of such a move should not be underestimated; it risks further widening the chasm that already exists between the country’s rich and poor, its prosperous south-east and impoverished north, and private sector and state employees.

Among Lula’s critical electoral base, he retains deity status; a man whose inexorable rise from illiterate peasant to union leader to President puts him beyond reproach. To his opponents, he is a charlatan who used public office to enrich his cronies and consolidate power in the hands of a discredited cabal. Both views are held by roughly 35% of Brazilians.

The candidacies of Jair Bolsonaro and Fernando Haddad may strike differing ideological tones – but what they offer Brazil is the same thing: the politics of division and a rejection of the radical reforms the country really needs to truly develop into the global economic powerhouse it has long threatened to become.

There is a famous Brazilian proverb: “a esperança é a última que more” (“hope is the last one to die”). Given the choice voters face next Sunday, perhaps it just did.