Bolsonaro’s engagement with Putin in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine was bizarre, to say the least. The Brazilian president’s visit to Moscow last week, where he expressed “solidarity” with Putin, took place at a time when the invasion was still uncertain but clearly more likely than not. After the invasion was underway, on February 24, Bolsonaro discredited his vice president’s position that Brazil opposed the invasion, saying that only he – the President – had the constitutional authority to speak about this issue. In doing so, Bolsonaro also implicitly delegitimized his own foreign ministry’s call for a suspension of hostilities, and raised questions about how Brazil will behave in today’s UN Security Council vote to condemn the invasion.
At an individual level, it made little sense that the former right-wing Army captain, an apologist for the anti-Communist military regime that governed Brazil until 1985, was now aligning himself with a former Soviet intelligence officer. Aligning with Putin put Bolsonaro in a camp that included several of his regional rivals, such as Venezuela’s Maduro. As a matter of Brazilian foreign policy, the invasion of Ukraine also seemingly offends two important pillars of Brazilian foreign policy: for decades the country has espoused a non-interventionist foreign policy, and more recently, it has been working for closer ties with the US and Europe (in 2019, it was named a major non-NATO ally, and in January 2022, after years of Brazilian efforts, the OECD opened accession talks).
Why, then, might Bolsonaro have stumbled into the strange position of cozying up to Putin and throwing his (and Brazil’s) implicit support to Russian thuggery?
Catherine Osborn of Foreign Policy offers one possible explanation: “a big bilateral visit could theoretically demonstrate international clout ahead of Brazil’s presidential elections.” Bolsonaro has been diplomatically sidelined by the West, in contrast to his likely opponent in the October elections, former President Lula, who has been feted by a number of powerful European presidents. Perhaps sharing a table with Putin offered a photo opportunity too good to pass up before the October election.
A second possibility is that closer ties to Russia were seen as a way to buy space to counterbalance Brazil’s relationship with the United States in a multipolar world. Such reasoning might be in keeping with Brazil’s nearly decade and a half long participation in the BRICS grouping, as well in line with its efforts to build significant economic and foreign policy ties to extra-hemispheric actors, like China. As Osborn points out, this strategic logic has the support of a number of Brazilian diplomatic greybeards, including Lula’s former foreign minister, Celso Amorim, who defended the trip.
Bolsonaro’s decision to follow on his visit to Putin with a visit to Hungary’s Viktor Orban suggests a third possibility: solidarity among right-wing rulers of an authoritarian bent. Like Donald Trump, Bolsonaro’s affinity for the Russian strongman and the Hungarian hardliner often seems more driven by personality type than by grand strategy.
Finally, credible journalists in Brazil, drawing on the insight of foreign policy scholar Felipe Loureiro, have speculated about a fourth possibility: that as he looks ahead to what looks like an electoral thrashing in October, Bolsonaro is pulling out all the stops to salvage a second term. Might his pilgrimage to the Kremlin been intended to enlist the support of Russia’s influential fake news purveyors and cyber warriors for a seemingly long-shot candidacy?
These possible explanations are not mutually exclusive, of course. Taken together, they point to the strange threat that Bolsonaro poses to Brazilian democracy in the final year of his first term, when no contortion seems too great to justify the end. They also suggest that once the October elections have passed, the Brazilian foreign ministry will face the demanding challenge of regaining the strategic coherence that has marked the country’s foreign policy during many of the years since the return to democracy.
Image: Alan Santos, Agência Brasil.
