Brace yourself for a coup in Brazil

‘Jail, death or victory.’ These are the three alternatives Brazil’s incumbent leader says await him. It is an unusual rallying call for an election campaign, but this is Jair Bolsonaro, the ‘Trump of the Tropics’, and he may well be right. Bolsonaro was elected in 2018 when his initial rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the country’s former president, was jailed midway through the campaign on corruption charges. Bolsonaro, a relative unknown, beat the replacement Workers party candidate by a ten percentage point margin.

His formula was to focus on anti-corruption and conduct his campaign predominantly via social media. The use of YouTube, Facebook and, most importantly, the gargantuan WhatsApp groups that are part of daily life here enabled Bolsonaro to project different images to discrete sectors of society. Evangelical churchgoers got the faithful family man; gym bros and sertanejo country music fans were introduced to the gun-loving former military captain; the business world was presented with an anti-communist crusader.

Now, however, with spiralling inflation and a disastrous handling of the pandemic – some 685,000 Brazilians died – the President is finding it harder for his anti-politics message to cut through to all but hardened Bolsonaristas. Thirty-three million people face daily hunger. A senate inquiry into his failure to buy vaccines, in a country with almost no anti-vax movement, recommended criminal charges against him. Moreover, his old rival Lula is back in the running having been released from prison in 2019, corruption charges quashed. All polls are predicting the leftist, with his right-of-centre running partner, will win in the second-round run-off.

Drama enough? Not for Brazil. Bolsonaro has long been casting doubt over the integrity of the country’s electronic voting system, suggesting he will not recognise a vote that goes against him.