In a famous preface to Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s classic Raízes do Brasil (1936), Antonio Candido reminded readers in 1967 that the book concludes on a note of doubt with regard to ‘the conditions for democratic life in Brazil’. Buarque acknowledged that in the cities, the old aristocracies were being replaced by cadres coming from below, tempered by the difficulties of work and capable of establishing an egalitarian political order. At the same time, he noted the persistence of older personalist and oligarchic forms. Which of these impulses would prevail remained uncertain.footnote¹ The Brazilian elections of October 2022 were a dramatic actualization of this question. The largest country in Latin America—some 215 million inhabitants, an economy ranked thirteenth in the world—commemorated the bicentenary of its independence with a new lease of life for violent forms of sociability. Moving in the opposite direction, a species of democratic concertación, or coalition—though far less formalized than its counterparts in Chile—swept the former metalworker Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva into the Presidency for the third time, by 51 to 49 per cent of valid votes in the second round on 30 October 2022, on a turnout of 79 per cent. A sigh of relief with a samba beat could be heard around the world.

Yet nearly half the electorate—led by military officers and rich businessmen from the agro-industrial, service and construction sectors, followed by an enraged middle class and low-income workers swayed by the theology of prosperity—opted for the autocratic politics of Jair Messias Bolsonaro, who got 58,206,354 votes to Lula’s 60,345,999. The 67-year-old former paratrooper became the first incumbent president to fail to be re-elected since 1988. Nevertheless, the military-religious-agribusiness juggernaut succeeded in returning the largest bloc in Congress, putting the right in a strong position to obstruct any attempt at structural change. Supporters of Bolsonaro won the gubernatorial elections in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, the three wealthiest states in the country.

After his victory, Lula delivered a carefully written speech in which he promised that ‘the wheels of our economy will start turning again, with job creation, rising wages and a renegotiation of debts for those families who have been losing purchasing power.’ Discontented Bolsonaro supporters nevertheless blocked motorways and camped outside barracks to protest against the result, while the defeated President decamped to Florida. Bolsonaro’s vice-presidential running mate was a retired general, Walter Braga Netto; however, the military appeared to accept the election outcome. In an interview with O Globo another general, Hamilton Mourão, who had been Bolsonaro’s vice-president from 2019 to 2022 and had just been elected as senator for Rio Grande do Sul, turned the page on the issue.footnote²

The politics of what I have elsewhere called an ‘autocracy listing towards fascism’ came one step short of inaugurating a new midnight in Lusophone America.footnote³ This contribution, written as these events were unfolding, attempts to make some sense of the tangled mass of interests, ideas and tactics. Going back and forth across the data, the first section looks at the central role of the poor in the democratic coalition; the second sketches the configuration of the bolsonarista bloc; the third and final section returns to the winning alliance, looking at the class imperatives that dominate it and trying to anticipate the challenges it will face. Quickfire assessments of events that are still underway may, of course, prove partial or exaggerated; what follows is an attempt to assist the process of thinking through contradictions whose ultimate resolution is still a long way off.

Two rival alliances coalesced to fight the battle of October. According to the opinion polls, the poor had made up their minds as early as April 2021, when Lula, his ‘Lava Jato’ conviction annulled by the Supreme Court, promised that if he won there would be ‘beer in the glass and meat on the table.’footnote⁴ In a country that is the world’s largest producer of animal protein, domestic consumption of red meat had fallen to its lowest level since 1996. One opinion poll after another showed around 50 per cent of respondents confirming their intention to put Lula back in the Alvorada Palace, the official residence of the Brazilian president. With a substantial advantage in the polls, Lula went about building an ad hoc coalition that grew ever broader over time. He supported a combative left-wing candidate, albeit sponsored by the tepid Brazilian Socialist Party (psb), for the governorship of Rio de Janeiro. At the same time, he backed a centre-right heavyweight, a populist with links to the dominant local football club, for the governorship of Minas Gerais. Having chosen Geraldo Alckmin as his running mate at the end of 2021—a former governor of São Paulo, current member of the psb and long-time pillar of the centrist Social Democratic Party of Brazil (psdb)—Lula wove around himself a vast patchwork of groups of every kind.

However, the layer of the ruling class that acts as the central nervous system of the Brazilian bourgeoisie—and whose interests (in banking, manufacturing, heavy industry, culture) are most directly related to the nucleus of global capitalism, especially through financial intermediationfootnote⁵—was reluctant until the very last to join Lula’s cross-section of supporters. There were a few exceptions, such as Gustavo Ioschpe, scion of an automotive-component manufacturer, who said as far back as July that he would vote for Lula. But the organized bulk of this class fraction remained aloof, notwithstanding Alckmin’s best efforts. They pressed Lula for explicit, detailed and concrete concessions in his economic policy—which were not forthcoming. This may be the ultimate reason why the race went to a second-round run-off. Lula won 48.43 per cent of the vote on 2 October, falling just a fraction short of the 50 per cent needed to win on the first round; another 1.6 per cent would have secured an immediate victory for the Lula–Alckmin ticket.

In the second round, when push came to shove—and for reasons that have to do with politics, not economics—bankers found themselves momentarily aligned with trade unionists and the movements of landless and homeless workers; the most advanced sections of industry united briefly with women, blacks, indigenous peoples and lgbtqia+; the media conglomerates made common cause, for an instant, with university students. The unity of this concertación lasted as long as an ice cube (as in Joaquín Sabina’s song): just long enough to evict Bolsonaro and safeguard the institutions of representative democracy—the grounds on which the modern bourgeoisie was willing, however unintuitive it may have been, to press button 13, Lula’s candidate number, in the polling booth on 30 October.footnote⁶ The honeymoon period, if there was one, lasted no more than ten days, at the end of which the partners resumed their public contest over the direction of the economy, as discussed below.