Bolsonaro’s Increasing Electoral Mischief

In their influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die” Levitsky and Ziblatt argued that rather than staging an open coup, modern leaders may subvert the democratic process by repeatedly undermining institutions. In the runup to the October election, Bolsonaro appears to be following their script closely, and his electoral mischief continues apace, along at least three distinct axes. 

First, as scholars Fiona Macaulay and Cláudio Couto highlighted in an important article on The Conversation, throughout his presidency, Bolsonaro “has repeatedly questioned both the electronic voting and vote-counting process and the impartiality of the electoral courts that organize and regulate elections in Brazil…” Repeatedly casting doubt on the electoral system, the president has stated that he might not accept the 2022 results unless paper receipts were printed alongside the electronic vote, even though the electronic voting system has been shown to be effective against fraud. 

Second, Bolsonaro has repeatedly ratcheted up tensions with the electoral courts. When the Brazilian Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) extended an unpreceded invitation for the European Union (EU) to send a monitoring mission to the presidential elections taking place next October, Bolsonaro’s foreign ministry pushed the TSE to retract the offer, arguing that because Brazil is not a member of the EU, the invitation would place Brazil in a “position of subordination.” In the meantime, the TSE has been demonized by Bolsonaro and his followers on a variety of media platforms. A study by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) revealed that Facebook posts about this issue – most of them mirroring the president’s opinion – drastically increased in the past 15 months. Nearly 400,000 posts were published by 27,840 accounts, generating more than 111 million interactions. Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes last week stated that misinformation would be the most significant threat to Brazilian’s democracy in the election, and argued that anyone spreading fake news about fraud in the electoral system should be arrested and have their political rights suspended. Bolsonaro publicly reacted: “I believe everything needs to be questioned. Are you going to arrest me?,” and went on to argue that the Army should oversee the election.

Third, and related, Bolsonaro has increasingly courted the military, and troublingly, some members of the military high command seem to have responded in line with his critique of the electoral courts. The courting is well-documented: in addition to nominating a record number of military officers to political appointment slots over the course of his presidency, this week journalists revealed the extent to which Bolsonaro’s legal decrees have been used to boost high-level officers’ salaries, in some cases by as much as R$350 thousand in a single year. When Supreme Court Justice Luís Roberto Barroso worried out loud in April that the military might be influenced to undermine the electoral process, the defense ministry’s response was not to ask how the military could better ensure a clean election, but instead to declare the statement a “grave offense” against the armed forces. This week, in a highly unusual move, the military questioned seven aspects of the electoral process. The TSE responded by emphatically rejected the premise for three of the questions, while noting that it was already proactively addressing the others, but the institutional damage was done. 

Bolsonaro last year said that he saw only three possible outcomes for this election: electoral victory, death, or prison. At present, the first option seems unlikely, with electoral polls narrowing, but continuing to favor Bolsonaro’s chief opponent, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, by nearly 9 percentage points. With his likely defeat in mind, democrats both in Brazil and abroad must work to ensure that Bolsonaro finds other more palatable options that imply far less institutional turmoil than either death or prison. In the event of an electoral defeat, Bolsonaro and his followers must be convinced that their best option is a dignified retirement, and perhaps a return to the comfortable congressional seat Bolsonaro occupied for a quarter century, where he engaged in occasional mischief, but on a much smaller scale. 

^{Image: Marcello Casal Jr., Agência Brasil}