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.

More from this author

Are the Sixties finally dead?

By Nick Burns

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.

Suggested Reading

Bolsonaro is beyond rescue

By Christopher de Bellaigue

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.

More from this author

Test article

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.

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”.

More from this author

The self-help guru who conquered Brazil

By Alex Hochuli

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.

Suggested reading

Football died after Pelé

By Jonathan Wilson

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.

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.”

Suggested reading

What Western feminists can learn from Iran

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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.

Suggested reading

A Greek Watergate threatens the West

By Yanis Varoufakis

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.

Suggested reading

Feudal overlords still rule the world

By Mark Shiffman

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.

Suggested reading

The EU is sleepwalking into anarchy

By Thomas Fazi

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!”

Suggested reading

Will Putin's gamble pay off?

By David Patrikarakos

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?

This is not the mainstream view, to say the least, which is that the pandemic was especially disastrous in the United States precisely because the president was an incompetent populist. The same narrative was central to the way much of the British media covered the pandemic, at least until vaccines saved the day and the prime minister. Even so, it was notable that the parts of Dominic Cummings testimony that attracted the most attention were his criticisms of Boris Johnson as “unfit for the job” of prime minister, “smashing from one side of the aisle to the other,” like a rogue shopping trolley. The New York Times summary was that Cummings had “accused the British prime minister of incompetence that caused tens of thousands of extra Covid deaths”.

For liberal journalists and editors who already had an aversion to populist leaders, the temptation to pin the blame on them for last year’s high excess mortality has been irresistible. We can see the same narrative in Brazil, where Jair Bolsonaro is the populist with blood on his hands, and in India, where Narendra Modi gets the same treatment from his political opponents.

An example of where this assumption of populist guilt can lead even the most experienced writer was James Fallows’s article “The 3 Weeks That Changed Everything,” published in The Atlantic last June. According to Fallows, the poor performance of the United States in response to the spread of the novel coronavirus had one, and only one, explanation: the incompetence of the “person at the top of the system”. He quoted an unnamed “veteran of the intelligence world”— one of “some 30 scientists, health experts, and past and current government officials” he spoke to — who summed up his argument neatly: “Our system has a single point of failure: an irrational president.”

Fallows at no point asked himself why so many scientists, experts and government officials might be so eager to pin the blame on Trump. He was too pleased with the analogy between Trump and the pilot of an aircraft. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died prematurely, he concluded, because the pilot was tweeting when he should have been responding to an approaching storm.

You can find versions of the same piece about most if not all of the populist leaders. “Jair Bolsonaro apparently intended to lead the country to herd immunity by natural infection, whatever the consequences,” meaning that he “effectively planned for at least 1.4 million deaths in Brazil,” according to Vanessa Barbara in the New York Times. “In a series of stunningly reckless decisions,” wrote Sumit Ganguly in the Washington Post, Narendra Modi “invited the second wave that is now crushing the country”. This “colossal failure of policymaking” reflected Modi’s “general callousness, crass electoral considerations, and sheer ineptitude.”

The generalisation follows easily: populism kills. “Strikingly,” noted the Christian Science Monitor in April, “the top five slots in [the] mortality rankings all belong to countries run by populists when the pandemic began — the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, India, and Britain.” In the words of Yascha Mounk of the Council on Foreign Relations: “If you look around the world today, it becomes painfully clear that those countries that are ruled by populists have paid an especially heavy toll in economic damage, case load, and mortality.” Not only the Mexican president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), fits the narrative; so too do the leaders of Bolivia, Ecuador and the Philippines.

The necessary counterargument is not that these populist leaders did a good job and need defending. They all did terribly, with Bolsonaro only just edging out Trump for the number of unbelievably stupid, wildly irresponsible things he did. (The redeeming feature of Trump’s response was Operation Warp Speed, which unquestionably laid the foundation for this year’s very successful vaccination campaign. Bolsonaro’s government managed to bungle vaccine procurement, too.)

Further reading

How America turned into the EU

By Joel Kotkin

Yet to conclude from the populists’ countless sins that the countries in question would have fared much better under different leaders is to draw a dangerously erroneous inference. It would lead you to conclude that, by replacing Trump with Joe Biden, American voters have solved the problem that caused so much illness and death last year; and that Brazilian, Indian and Mexican voters can solve their problems in the same manner when their populists come up for reelection.

There are three flaws to this reasoning, leaving aside the point (made by Brett Meyer in a smart paper for the Tony Blair Institute) that not all populist leaders downplayed the threat posed by the pandemic, while a significant number favoured stringency over laxity. The first is that it is not clear that the countries run by populists did fare decidedly worse than other countries, at least in terms of excess mortality — the best measure of how a country has fared in the Plague Year. The second flaw is that, on close inspection, the mistakes that caused the bulk of premature deaths during the pandemic cannot easily be attributed to presidential or prime ministerial decisions. More often than not, the mistakes were made further down the chain of command, by public health officials and scientific advisers who profoundly misjudged the problem they were facing. Thirdly, and finally, the counterfactuals of better outcomes with different leaders do not stand up to close scrutiny.

Let’s begin with excess mortality data. One study of 32 countries in 2020, which calculated excess age-standardised mortality, arrived at the following worst ten (in terms of mortality per 100,000: Bulgaria came first, followed by Poland, Chile, the United States, Slovenia, Belgium, Czechia, Spain, England and Wales, and Scotland. One might argue that the governments of Bulgaria, Czechia, Poland and Slovenia were led by populists, along with the U.S. and England; but Chile, Belgium, Spain and Scotland?

Or consider the latest excess mortality figures from the Financial Times, which go up to 5 May. The UK and the U.S. are in the middle of the table with excess mortality of, respectively, 17% and 18% above the baseline. Bolsonaro’s Brazil is worse (34%) and AMLO’s Mexico worse still (55%). But excess mortality has been even higher in Peru (123%), Ecuador (67%), Bolivia (56%), Armenia (43%) and Azerbaijan (42%). The problem in each of these countries was not a powerful populist leader.

In Peru, to give just one example, it is Congress that wields the power, so much so that it has brought down three of the country’s last four presidents, including Martín Vizcarra, who was impeached twice last year and finally forced to resign despite an approval rating above 60%. In the case of Ecuador, too, Lenín Moreno did not conform to the populist stereotype last year. In Bolivia, the pandemic struck after the populist Evo Morales had been ousted from power.

In any case, the idea that presidents are to pandemics what pilots are to severe turbulence or engine failure is, to the historian’s eye, deeply misleading. The reality is that the man or woman at the top is struggling to manage multiple government agencies with “stakes” in public health, to say nothing of state or provincial governments.

In practice, as any serious student of modern government knows, the critical decisions in a public health crisis are not made at the top: it is the scientific advisers and principals of the relevant agencies who must decide on the seriousness of the threat and the policy response to recommend. A president or prime minister becomes involved only if there is a fundamental disagreement within the relevant group of expert and officials, or between the Cabinet-level principals. If there is a consensus in favour of a “herd immunity” strategy, as appears to have been the case in London in the first two and half months of 2020, then a prime minister is highly unlikely to overrule that consensus, regardless of whether he is being distracted by a book deadline, a disgruntled girlfriend, or an outsized interior décor bill.

Further reading

The ideology that broke Britain

By Aris Roussinos

Anyone listening closely to Cummings’s testimony last month, or reading the long Twitter thread which preceded it, will understand that he was not in fact laying the blame for last year’s debacle on Boris Johnson. “Critical as I am of the PM in all sorts of ways,” Cummings wrote, “it’s vital to understand the disaster was not just his fault.” On the contrary, the entire system failed: not just the elected politicians, but the civil servants and the public health experts—all fell “disastrously short of the standards that the public has a right to expect.”

In other words, Boris was a comorbidity. To some extent, the same may also be true of Bolsonaro, Modi and AMLO.

Perhaps the best way to show the weakness of the populist pandemic hypothesis is to contemplate the counterfactuals. If, thanks to some kink in the space-time continuum, Joe Biden had been inaugurated in January 2020, would U.S. excess mortality have been significantly lower? It is easy to claim, as an eminent TV anchor said to me the other day, that it would have been, because Biden and his administration would have “followed the science.”

Yet Ron Klain, Joe Biden’s chief of staff, acknowledged in 2019 that, if the swine flu that struck the U.S. in 2009 had been as deadly as COVID-19, President Barack Obama’s administration would not have done much better: “We did every possible thing wrong. And … 60 million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time. And it’s just purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. Had nothing to do with us doing anything right. Just had to do with luck.”

And how did the Obama administration do when faced with an opioid epidemic? More than 365,000 Americans died of drug overdoses between 2009 and 2016. Each year saw more deaths than the year before. The most affected age groups were those between 25 and 54, for whom the overdose rates in 2016 were between 34 and 35 per 100,000. For that reason, the total of life years lost may well have exceeded those lost to COVID, albeit over a longer period of time. Yet I have never read an article blaming the opioid epidemic on “pilot error.”

To repeat, I am not here to defend Boris, Trump et al. I am merely arguing that is too easy — and also downright misleading — to lay all the blame for the excess mortality of 2020-21 on populist leaders, though their erratic leadership undoubtedly added some percentage to the body count. What happened in most Western countries, regardless of whether they were led by a populist, a liberal or a technocrat, was a systemic failure of the public health bureaucracy. There were pandemic preparedness plans; they simply did not work. Testing capacity was not built swiftly enough; contact tracing was barely attempted; quarantines were not enforced; the vulnerable (especially in elderly care homes) were not protected but exposed.

Further reading

This is Britain's 9/11 moment

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

These were the costliest mistakes in terms of loss of life, and it is not plausible that presidents or prime ministers were personally to blame for any of them. The most parsimonious interpretation is that the public health systems in Taiwan and South Korean learned from the experience of SARS and MERS, while ours did not.

To conclude that getting rid of the populists at the top will ensure that we do better when the next disaster strikes is not merely a delusion. It guarantees that, on both sides of the Atlantic, we shall fail to identify where the real points of failure have been and to do something about them, as soon as we possibly can, in every domain of our manifestly dysfunctional systems of government.

That, I think, was what Dominic Cummings was trying to tell us. “The official plan was disastrously misconceived,” he wrote, “DHSC/CABOFF did not understand this or why, & a PlanB had to be bodged amid total & utter chaos.”

This was because Plan A — to go for herd immunity rather than suppress the virus — “was supposed to be ‘world class’ but turned out to be part disaster, part non-existent. … If we’d had the right preparations + competent people in charge, we would probably have avoided lockdown1, *definitely* no need for lockdowns 2&3. Given the plan was AWOL/disaster + awful decisions delayed everything, lockdown1 became necessary.”

Further reading

Dominic Cummings is writing history

By Ed West

According to one poll, 75% of Britons do not trust what Cummings had to say about the government’s handling of the crisis. This is unfortunate, because what we were presented with last month was a rare, unfiltered glimpse into the reality of life in the corridors of power when a full-blown national emergency strikes. If you think it would have gone much better with David Cameron, Theresa May or (imagine it) Jeremy Corbyn in No. 10, then I have a pandemic preparedness plan to sell you.

In any case, the Cummings critique of the British state has never really been about the personality of the prime minister. His question for years has been: “How does the deep institutional wiring of the parties/civil service program destructive behaviour by putting the wrong ppl in wrong jobs with destructive incentives?” Why are “SW1 incentives … ~all about rewarding *process + fake signals*”? These are the right questions to ask, and a similar set of questions could and should be asked about the Washington Beltway.

The irony is that, back in 2016 and 2017, people voted in populist leaders in large measure because they felt frustrated by the dysfunctional inertia of the “deep state,” whether in Whitehall, Washington, Brasilia, or (for that matter) Brussels. The events of the past 16 months have proved that, as was obvious at the outset, the populists were not a real solution to that problem. But the pandemic has also shown us the deadly consequences of leaving the problem unsolved — which is precisely what we shall do if we conclude that the premature deaths were all the populists’ fault.

Niall Ferguson’s new book DOOM: The Politics of Catastrophe has just been published by Penguin Press.

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.

suggested reading

The paranoid populists who run Brazil

By Benjamin Teitelbaum

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.

suggested reading

Is the lockdown doing more harm than good?

By Tom Chivers

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.

Suggested reading

'How to end lockdown' is the only story in town

By sam Leith

“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.

Suggested reading

How the far-Right is fighting the corona war

By Gavin Haynes

“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.

Suggested reading

What Lockdown and Prohibition share

By mark Forsyth

“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.

Suggested reading

Why heroes should wear masks

By Peter Franklin

“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.

Suggested reading

The Covid-19 class war

By James Bloodworth

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.

Suggested reading

Africa's catastrophic Covid response

By Ian Birrell

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.”

Suggested reading

The trouble with 'Covid denialism'

By SALONI DATTANI AND MATTHEW LESH

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.

Suggested reading

The surprising supporters of the strongman in Brazil

By David Adler

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.

Suggested reading

Covid has exposed America as a failed state

By Aris Roussinos

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”).

Suggested reading

The obscure mysticism of Steve Bannon

By Gavin Haynes

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.

His bad week kicked off with Donald Trump threatening tariffs of up to 100% on a large number of those French goods that actually do sell well abroad — from yoghurt to luxury handbags, champagne, cheese, and cosmetics. This was a retort to France’s unilateral 3% “digital tax” on sales (not profits) on those internet giants, all American, as it happens, with global revenues above €750 million and above €25 million in France.

This “GAFA tax” in turn was a result of French annoyance at the OECD’s perceived inability to come up with effective guidelines for international digital giants to pay tax in the countries they operate in. Other European countries (Italy, Austria, Spain, Belgium) have similar plans, although few have taken the drastic (and very French) tack of a tax based on turnover, not profits. So Macron decided to go it alone, and to go it first.

Suggested reading

Could Macron prove more dangerous than Trump?

By John Lichfield

Trump, the man who once dreamed of having a military parade in Washington modelled on the Bastille Day one, evidently decided to make an example of France, pour encourager les autres.

Then the French President even managed to irk Merkel. It takes talent to annoy the German Chancellor. But she finally snapped  in response to that Economist interview, in which he declared Nato to be “brain-dead”. “I understand your desire for disruptive politics, but I’m tired of picking up the pieces,” she told him. “Over and over, I have to glue together the cups you have broken so that we can then sit down and have a cup of tea together.”

Macron knows that Mrs Merkel is scheduled for departure next year; he’d probably already been briefed, ahead of speaking to the Economist that her GroKo (Great Coalition) was threatened by her SPD partner’s Left. Typically, for a top of the heap Frenchman of his particular stripe, he saw her as “a loser”, and dumped on her accordingly. It’s the sort of venomousness they all learn at ENA, the elite government school Macron attended.

Meanwhile, at home, his popularity is tanking. An Odoxa poll last week gave his negative opinions at two-thirds of the voters (with just 34% favourable); another Ifop poll gives his favourables at 33% against 65% negatives.

Suggested reading

How the gilets jaunes went up in flames

By John Lichfield

The French are unhappy with him and the “Jupiterian” (his own word) persona he constructed to counter the appearance of youth and inexperience. As they see it, the country is careening from one crisis to the next, with a chest-thumping president leading a weak government of clone-like technocrats. Added to which is an even weaker parliament full of inexperienced, first-term Macronistas rubber-stamping most of his legislation, and occasionally indulging in woke amendments (the one last week calling to outlaw any advertising for Black Friday in a good example). Absolutely none of this resonates with the country’s concerns, real or imagined.

The French worry about jobs, insecurity, immigration, the economy, crime; they’re angry about the degradation of public services they used to take for granted, from vanishing country train lines to overcrowded and understaffed hospitals. They complain, bitterly and incessantly, of deep “inequalities” — even though France is in fact more redistributive than Sweden.

Macron has argued back that the French economy is doing better. It’s largely true, but his problem is that it’s not perceived as doing well, partly because some stubborn problem areas remain, with an EU record number of long-term unemployed seniors, young people, minorities. Unemployment has slipped from 10% in 2016 to 8.4%, but uncertainty on too many economic variables (taxation, regulation, social climate) means the very last investment businesses make is manpower.

Suggested reading

How the gilets jaunes could save Macron's skin

By John Lichfield

Hence the surprising amount of support for any kind of social protest in the past year. It would be a mistake to believe that because their weekly demonstrations now only gather a few thousand people, the Gilets Jaunes themselves are no longer a headache for Emmanuel Macron. “The Gilets Jaunes aren’t a movement, they’re a symptom,” says a Préfet who received many delegations of his département’s protesters. “They are a clear manifestation of a deep state of discontent, they’re not a coherent party. Among Thursday’s strikers, officially answering a call by the unions, you’ll find many of the same people who were once stopping traffic on provincial roundabouts.”

He points out that, significantly, 60% of the French support the national strike; and that the strikers’ motives and sociology will, in fact, be quite close to the GJ’s. In his view, the current porous anger (superbly theorised by the American analyst Martin Gurri  in his prescient book,  The Revolt of the Public) is expressed in many ways, from the Left to the Right, to the violent and inchoate. The Gilets Jaunes shape of this has run its course; the motivations, which are a mix of reality-based complaints and deep misperceptions, remain.

Paradoxically, Emmanuel Macron’s chief problem may be that he has essentially destroyed any form of democratic opposition. Whenever someone on the Left or on the Right seemed promising, he co-opted them into his Cabinet, and he continues to do so. As a result, voters find themselves inexorable herded toward a single, unpalatable choice. It’s not clear whether Macron has realised that the wasteland he’s leaving in parliamentary politics will drive people away from the democratic process — making them ripe for a Bolsonaro or an Orbán. The scene will be set for a populist to sweep in.

Suggested reading

Is there still room for the Republicans in France?

By Marie le Conte

This doesn’t yet mean Macron won’t be re-elected in 2022. In all likelihood, he will be up against his favourite opponent, Marine Le Pen, but it will be a much closer shave than before. She’ll lose. But not because she is seen as a Fascist danger. She’ll lose because of her incompetence. Her 30-year-old niece Marion Maréchal, whose turn will come five years later, may become the Matteo Salvini of France — within the far more stable Fifth Republic constitutional system.

Like her father, she’s a good public speaker, but her policies have wobbled depending on which adviser had her ear (pro- and anti-“Frexit”; pro- and anti-euro) or where she was campaigning: in her Northern constituency, most of her electorate once worked in mines or textile factories, now closed; and like to hear of more state aid; in the South-East Rassemblement National bastions, the burning issues are immigration and crime. Few believe she has effective policies to change either.

But another eventuality is currently terrifying the Elysée tacticians. These thirtysomething white men who all look and sound like Macron are said to be working on pre-emptively neutralising what they call the “clown candidate“: a possible run by a non-politician, probably a popular performer (TV presenter, actor, singer…), à la Beppe Grillo or Volodimyr Zelensky. It could be what the French public is waiting for.

Suggested reading

What does it mean to be French?

By John Lichfield

Yet on Macron proudly strides — with Europe in his sights. Even though he is struggling at home, the President, a petit-bourgeois liberal, imbued with his own undeniable but narrow intelligence, considers himself to be Europe’s natural leader. Since Germany will be preoccupied with its difficult political transition, facing signs of an early recession, and with the UK gone (the UK will be gone, won’t it?), who else is there, after all?

Some of his arrogance comes naturally, but some is theorised: why would he go against the tactics defined by de Gaulle, and followed by Giscard, Mitterrand and Chirac? The assumption that nuisance value gives you more clout in international politics has always been a mainstay of French power projection. Macron is simply continuing the tradition.

But alienating friends and not influencing people is all too often coupled with a lack of effort to understand how France’s partners think. And given that many decisions have to be taken unanimously by the EU27, it’s hard to see how he’d make a success of European leadership.

Macron does have a unique way of ruffling feathers — from his Nato remarks to his recent veto against EU membership application for both Albania and North Macedonia and his rudeness to Mrs Merkel. It will trip him again and again: the President will never be a team player. So as the country literally grinds to a halt, Macron stands alone with only his ambition and acolytes for company.

Yet there is very little focus on the issue of how this political extremism grows: that it is not something that only happens to other people, but something that can theoretically grow in any of us; that it is worth trying to work out when or if your own side may have gone too far.

One of the best guides we have is the experience of people from history.

Also by this author

The dark games played by political extremists

By Douglas Murray

The diplomat, politician and author Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) was a relatively minor figure in the 20^th century. But a knack for knowing all the right people and being around them at crucial moments helped make him a superlative diarist. He was at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and was a friend of almost everyone of significance in literature as well as politics. One of the most interesting aspects of his life was his friendship with Oswald Mosley.

Mosley was first elected to Parliament, in 1918, as a Conservative – but he soon became an Independent, and by 1924 had joined the Labour Party. In 1929, he was appointed Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with special responsibility for unemployment in the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald. It was the Great Depression, and between 1929 and 1931 the number of people out of work in the UK tripled to almost three million. MacDonald’s government was out of money and his socialists had no answers to the unemployment problem. Mosley had his own ideas of how to solve the unemployment problem and in 1930 resigned in frustration from the government. In 1931, he founded the New Party.

The New Party is a fascinating corner of British politics. At this point, Mosley was still a reputable figure. All three main parties were in contact with him, and his personal relations with politicians across the political divide remained remarkably close. It was during this period that Harold Nicolson was closest to Mosley.

It is clear from his diaries of the period that Nicolson was deeply impressed by Mosley and found him an energetic figure who had answers in a period otherwise dominated by enervation and dithering. Nicholas Mosley – Oswald’s son from his first marriage – once told me that he thought that the bisexual Nicolson may have been in love with his father. And it is certainly possible. So, when the New Party was formed Nicolson accepted Mosely’s invitation to join.

Nicolson tells his diary of his decision to join the New Party on February 4, 1931. Soon, he is meeting other prospective members, both with and without Mosley. By May he is telling his diary that Mosley is having difficulty restraining “the more active members of the party” who are begging him to do something dramatic. The party is at risk of attracting “eccentrics and people with a grievance”, in Nicolson’s view. But if they keep their heads, he counsels his friend, “we shall attract more serious people”. On May 30, Nicolson meets Harold Macmillan on a train:

He takes the usual young Tory view that his heart is entirely with the New Party but that he feels he can help us better by remaining in the Conservative ranks. He does not hesitate to admit that if we could obtain a certain number of seats in Parliament, most of the young Tories, all the Liberals and a large proportion of the youngish Labour people would come over to us. He anticipates the present Government being in power for another two years, followed by a Tory administration lasting some three years. He feels that five years from now, the New Party will have its great opportunity.[1. All quotes taken from Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930-39, edited by Nigel Nicolson, Collins (1966), pp 68-115]

But Mosley is not that patient. In June, another party member, Allan Young, invites Nicolson to join the party’s council and confesses to being uneasy about the possibility that the party might swerve to the Right “and be forced into Hitlerism”. Though there is talk of a potential revolution breaking out in Britain, Young “does not approve of the idea that we should meet communist force with fascist force”. Nevertheless, there are problems with the ‘Youth Movement’ of the party and questions start to arise about the ‘active forces’ that they seem to be becoming.

A month later, on July 17, 1931 Nicolson writes: “I think that [Mosley] at the bottom of his heart really wants a fascist movement, but Allan Young and John Strachey think only of the British working man. The whole thing is on extremely thin ice.”

But it isn’t until September that the crucial moment comes.

That month Mosley had a public meeting in Glasgow. One of his colleagues claimed 20,000 people in attendance. But opposition to Mosley had been growing and word came that communists planning to disrupt the meeting had razor blades on them. As Mosley went into the crowd, there were stones and punches thrown. A meeting of the party is called in the aftermath and Mosley says that “this forces us to be fascist and that we need no longer hesitate to create our trained and disciplined force”.

Nicolson writes in his diary on September 21: “We discuss their uniforms.” To his shame he adds, “I suggest grey flannel trousers and shirts.”

Also by this author

'Nazi hunts' are a sign of our hyperventilating times

By Douglas Murray

This is – whether Nicolson could admit it to his diary or not – the central moment. Now that the New Party has not only a youth wing, but a youth wing to protect the leader, and dress in uniform, this is no longer a normal political party or movement.

The realisation doesn’t drop until the next month. On November 2 Nicolson writes that he realises that what he is involved with is not a party but “a rather sly little movement”:

I am loyal to [Mosley] since I have an affection for him. But I realise that his ideas are divergent from my own. He has no political judgement. He believes in fascism. I don’t. I loathe it. And I apprehend that the conflict between the intellectual and the physical side of the New Party may develop into something rather acute.

Which proves astute. Some months later, in April 1932, there is a New Party meeting in Westminster. Mosley says that he has been invited by both the Conservatives and the Labour Party to rejoin their ranks. But he wants to rejoin neither. Instead he wishes to bring together all fascist groups in the country and form “a central fascist body under his own leadership”. Nicolson tells his friend that this is a mistake and that he will never be able to rejoin any of the parties if he takes this road.

Mosely is certain. He is certain that British politics is going to enter a phase of “abnormality” and that he must not be associated with the old parties and the old regime. Besides, he says, more can be achieved as a leader of a fascist movement than as a backbench MP. So, Mosley decides to take the risk. In his diary entry on April 19, 1932 Nicolson describes what he told his friend:

I again say that I do not believe that this country will ever stand for violence, and that by resorting to violence he will make himself detested by a few and ridiculed by many. He says that may be so, but he is prepared to take the risk. I say that on such paths I cannot follow him.

And that is that. Within 14 months the whole trajectory has been achieved. Within those 14 months, everything about Mosley had become clear and everywhere he was heading – from the British Union of Fascists to alliance with Berlin and eventually Brixton Prison and obloquy – had become foreseeable.

It’s easy to criticise Nicolson – now as then. At best, he had put his career recklessly in the hands of a maverick. And we now know where fascism would lead. But he kept his political and moral antennae alert and eventually chose to abandon his friend rather than follow where he was leading.

Certainly, there were greater acts of heroism from that period. But perhaps, since small acts are the only ones most of us will ever be capable of, these ones are just as worthy of study and certainly worth remembering today.

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.

Further reading

Is Brazil about to vote for its very own Trump?

By Daniel Hamilton

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.

Further reading

How Latin America's Pink Tide turned

By James Bloodworth

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.

Further reading

It's not just the economy, stupid. Cultural factors and disdain for politicians also drive "populism"

By Matthew Elliott

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.

Further reading

Why do some countries have strong populist movements but not others?

By Peter Franklin

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.

Suggested reading

Is Sweden about to have its Trump moment?

By Tino Sanandaji

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.

Suggested reading

Just how 'religious' are Trump's evangelicals?

By Giles Fraser

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.

Suggested reading

Why we should welcome the populist victory in Mexico

By Charlotte Pickles

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.

Suggested reading

Three books to explain the Summer of Populism

By Henry Olsen

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”.

Suggested reading

A new party could save politics from the extremes

By Ian Birrell

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.

Suggested reading

How the populist era could revive liberal democracy

By Peter Franklin

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.