The first round has been and gone, and, to the surprise of many, after all the failures of his government over the last four years, Jair Messias Bolsonaro still won the votes of more than 50 million Brazilians. This is a particularly striking number if we take into account the innumerable polls published before the election pointing to the possibility of a first round victory for Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The activists and supporters of the Worker’s Party (the PT) set off on an intense race for votes, and in the end, little over 1% more would have secured a first round victory for Lula. However, as we know, that’s not what happened. Whether to the joy or sadness of many, the fact is that Bolsonaro took nearly 44% of votes and Lula nearly 49%. However you cut it, it was a historic election, whether in terms of participation, or the low number of blank and null votes.
Before the electronic ballots were even verified, our tropical air was dense with tension. There was a silence, a held-back cry on both party fronts, which stretched across the final minutes of the election. During the meeting of the Superior Election Tribunal (TSE), after 1700h Brasília time, anyone walking along the Brazilian streets would feel the tension that hung under the “beautiful, clear and smiling sky” of the old tropical Vera Cruz. If nails started to be bitten then, none would be left by the time the final result flashed up on TVs in living rooms, bars, and organized public meetings across Brazil. The practice of creating collective spaces in these moments of high tension and uncertainty reveals a lot about Brazilian society, and is often badly understood. On the one hand, it reveals the difficulty of dealing with these results individually, whether in delight or misery, on the other, it shows an instinctive communitarian instinct that borders on the religious and devout … it is almost a searching to see our beliefs testified to, and maintained.
I heard a supporter of the Bolsonaro government say that the country stayed silent because, in the end, Lula’s performance presaged, in a relatively vehement, although still uncertain, way a historic victory in the second round. Last Tuesday, the 18th, the PT former President broke the audience record on the FlowPodcast channel on YouTube. Nonetheless, it falls to us to ask: would this really be a historic victory? Faced with a senate so in hock to an infamously Bolsonarist Liberal Party (PL), it is difficult to assume that after the 30th October “the future will mirror this greatness”. And what greatness? It is important that we ask.
Among the various influencers (where Bolsonaro has a huge public), we find different kinds of pronouncements. Behind the endless Fake News propaganda, there is a narrative of a declaration of war, a winding, ideological chronicle of a death almost foretold. On the one hand, so-called “leftists”, “petistas” [PT-ites], and “communists”, among other names to denote those who defend abortion, the ideology of gender, the liberalization of drugs, etc. On the other hand, the so-called “fascists”, “bolsonaristas”, “nationalists”, and other names that, similarly, denote those who defend the fatherland, the traditional Brazilian family, Christianity, etc. Put this way, the numbers in the first round seem to demonstrate, quite effectively, within the margin of error, a supposed polarization that is imposing itself on Brazilian society. On the one hand, 49%, on the other, 44%. In between, the 2% and 3% of blank and null votes, respectively, are lost in this ideological dance.
Are we, in fact, mathematically and geographically, faced with ideological polarization? Is this a war of the good against the bad, and vice versa, that we have heard about in various debates and electoral propaganda across Brazil? It is important to ask, because we find that Lula has much greater support in the regions of the Northeast (67%) and the North (47.1%) and Bolsonaro in the regions of the South (54.6%), Southeast (47.6%) and the Centre West (53.8%). But what is behind the numbers in these early results? What can be seen around the borders of this geographical and statistical information?
In the image that began this text, taken through the blinds of a rented window, we see a white woman, around 60 years old, an inhabitant of the North Fluminense region of Rio de Janeiro. She is hanging out a towel with the image of the current President, Jair Bolsonaro. Alongside, we see the flag of the Federal Republic of Brazil, a symbol that has been taken hostage in recent elections as a nationalist representation of the right, of which Bolsonaro is the representative. Printed on the towel is the endlessly repeated electoral slogan of the PL candidate, which extends its nationalist and religious meaning: “Brazil above everything, God above all”. So, we would not be wrong to assume, from this side of the window, that this is a Christian woman, who defends “good customs” and self-declares to be a “good citizen”. Whether she is “good” or not is not for us to judge. However, we can ask: what are the forces that make this woman, many times a day, go to her veranda and straighten out, dust off, and rearrange her towel? What is it that passers-by see, other than the face of Bolsonaro? Is this a representation of the symptomatic polarization of feeling in the Brazilian elections?
It seems to me that, rather than offer a direct response to these questions, we are faced more with a Bolsonarist rationality than with a polarization. If the statistics and the geography of the Brazilian elections demonstrate a particular condition of Brazilian subjectivity, this should push us to conduct an analysis that breaks with the key idea that Bolsonarism emerged as a “response to PT-ism”, or to the “generalized corruption” of the Worker’s Party. Rather, it is more an expression of values that are impregnated in our subjectivity. The cartography designed by the woman and imagined by us can serve as an image-thought of what it is we cultivate when we constitute a “Brazilian us”. As Michel Foucault might put it, an alethurgy and a hegemony proper to the form of governmentality that we are faced with.
In other words, beyond a mathematical analysis of the results of the election (and its common sense), we need to understand these facts as the expression of a rationality that is composed inside the actualization of totalitarian and colonial regimes, rather than simply as a local response to the actions of a particular party. This would explain, for example, how it was that in the first round some Brazilian states elected more PL parliamentarians and yet voted markedly for the PT in the Presidential election. That is to say that there is a subjective question at stake. In a kind of overlapping movement, the 44% and the 49% coexist to demarcate not a polarization, but a contingency in Brazilian subjectivity. Or rather, Bolsonaro’s rising electoral numbers represent the bringing up to date of a badly told (though much practiced) story, more than the eventualization of a supposed mass anti-PT sentiment. This is because Brazilian subjectivity enables a degree of violence to coexist within an apparently democratic structure of the rule of law. For example, it is very common to find Bolsonaro voters who say that they do not agree with everything that he says, while asserting that they are completely against the idea of having a “convict” (as they call Lula) take up the Presidency. They say that the place for a convict is prison. “A good bandit is a dead bandit”.
In this way, though the results may be positive for the PT in the second round of the Brazilian elections, it is up to us to ask what will be done in the face of the immanent and unignorable 44%. Alongside the 2% and 3% of blank and null votes, they remain a contingency for the 49% to reckon with.
Translated by Archie Davies