In 2022, Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right president of Brazil, went all in on a strategy of sowing doubt about his country’s ability to conduct a free and fair election. Fuming at the Federal Supreme Court (STF) for investigating him and his allies for antidemocratic words and deeds, including their participation in a vast conspiracy to disseminate fake news during the 2018 presidential election, Bolsonaro urged his supporters to publicly challenge the highest court of Latin America’s largest nation on September 7, 2021, Brazil’s Independence Day. The intended show of strength largely fell flat.¹ Consistently trailing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the polls, Bolsonaro spent the campaign all but announcing his intentions to subvert Brazilian democracy, resorting to openly debasing his country’s electoral integrity in the hopes that there would be real questions about who won in October 2022. In Brazil, like in the United States, the idea that the voting system is routinely manipulated by corrupt officials and unscrupulous partisans became a delusion of the right-wing information ecosystem. Bolsonaro frantically kicked up dust to throw the race into disarray.

As expected, however, Lula, the former factory worker who governed Brazil from 2003 to 2011, won with sixty million votes to Bolsonaro’s fifty-eight million. Some interpreted his narrow victory as a sign of weakness. After all, despite presiding over a calamitous response to the pandemic and earning universal condemnation for Amazon deforestation, Bolsonaro had helped elect several key allies at different levels of government. On the one hand, even in defeat he had unquestionably demonstrated surprising strength. On the other, considering that no sitting president had lost reelection since the constitution first allowed incumbents to seek a second term in 1997, Lula’s victory was no small feat. His Workers’ Party (PT) had governed Brazil from 2003 to 2016, when his handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff, was ousted by a reactionary Congress. Years of hysterical anti-PT fervor followed, pulling Brazilian politics sharply to the right. Now the candidate with deep roots in organized labor and social movements had returned to the peak of national power.

“Starting on January 1, 2023, I will govern for the 215 million Brazilians, not just the ones who voted for me. There are not two Brazils. We are one country, one people, one great nation,” the president-elect proclaimed in his victory speech on election night, working immediately to advance his own patriotic framing in the wake of the Right’s seizure of patriotism in its yearslong rhetorical war on the Left.² Lula’s victory was a validation of his broad-front campaign strategy, which involved naming his former rival Geraldo Alckmin as vice president and courting support from other prominent center-right voices like senators Simone Tebet, who mounted a surprisingly strong third-way campaign; Aloysio Nunes, the vice-presidential nominee of the center-right Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB) in 2014; and former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who implemented a suite of neoliberal reforms in the late 1990s. Running not as a leftist but as the arbiter of a great national effort at reconciliation, Lula achieved a remarkable turnaround that seemed unthinkable just a few years earlier.