Can Bolsonaro’s sound & fury hide his failures?

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s bet that adoring crowds on Independence Day would help him out of a tough spot didn’t quite go to plan. Tens of thousands did turn out in Sao Paulo and elsewhere, decked in the green-and-yellow flag. He responded with now-familiar attacks on the electoral system, his opponents and the Supreme Court, vowing he would never go to jail. “Only God,” he told his audience, could remove him.
But what was intended as a show of force revealed instead a figure isolated from all but die-hard supporters, relying on bluster and the looming threat of a coup to distract from the president’s inability to navigate Brazil’s messiest crisis in years, if not decades. Worse, by whipping up political ferment he has made it harder to resolve a deepening fiscal conflict and push through desperately needed economic reforms.
With an election just over a year away, it’s going to get harder to avoid reality. In addition to the disastrously handled pandemic that has claimed more than 580,000 Brazilian lives, there are metastasizing corruption investigations and a drought that has pushed up power bills as reservoirs run dry, worsened an already grim inflation picture and battered the crucial agricultural sector. Unemployment remains near record levels and, along with underemployment, has been crushing the informal workers who comprise two-fifths of the labor force.
Back in 2019, Bolsonaro brought hopes among investors that he and University of Chicago-trained Economy Minister Paulo Guedes could galvanise an ailing economy by overhauling pensions, boosting privatisation, cutting red tape and taxes and reining in government spending. The former army captain wasn’t exactly personally palatable, but the free-market, corruption-fighting credentials of his team inspired confidence and he was seen as the one who just might break with the graft and cronyism of the past. Brazil could finally move on from the recession of 2014-16 and up from the inglorious bottom of the ease-of-doing-business rankings.
That hasn’t played out. Early successes — specifically, pension reforms — have since been overshadowed by unmitigated disasters like the handling of the coronavirus. Bolsonaro denied the gravity of the illness, fought lockdowns, embraced quack cures and cycled through health ministers. Brazil has the world’s second-highest number of fatalities from Covid. More shots are now going into arms, but with fewer than one in three fully vaccinated, the country faces the prospect of continued high infection rates and a lingering risk of surges.

—Bloomberg