A few short years ago, Brazil was a vibrant democracy. Today, following a highly disputed election, it looks much different. Paulo Figueiredo, popular Brazilian media commentator, sees some disturbing parallels between his home country and America.
Script:
There’s a nation I dream about.
I want to live there one day.
It is a representative democracy with three branches of government.
It recently had a populist president who rose to power amidst widespread discontent with the ruling left-wing party.
This populist president began to fix many of this nation’s endemic woes.
Its patriotic spirit flourished.
Its economy boomed.
But the left-wing legacy media hated the man who led this revival.
And the entrenched establishment — government bureaucrats, unions, the educational elite — feared him.
They harassed him throughout his first term in office. They forced him to fend off slander after slander, investigation after investigation. And yet, despite their best efforts to derail him, even impeach him, he advanced his agenda.
When new elections rolled around, the president’s enemies saw their chance. They had a plan. Change the election rules to favor their candidate. It worked.
They won — just barely.
Many of the president’s supporters weren’t convinced, however.
Everywhere they looked, they saw fraud. The election was rigged, they said. Others used a harsher word — stolen.
Upon the new president’s inauguration, tens of thousands protested. Some stormed the capital. Many were arrested; many were thrown in prison.
But the now former president refused to fade away. This infuriated the new left-wing regime. They accused him of inciting the rioters. Using the courts, they tried to bankrupt him, remove him from the ballot, and imprison him — anything to stop him from returning to power.
The nation I have described is… Brazil.
It’s my home country. My roots go very deep. In fact, my grandfather was the President of Brazil from 1979 to 1985.
I was the host of Brazil’s top-rated political TV show. I had 5 million followers on social media. In the election of 2018, I supported the populist candidate Jair Bolsonaro. I supported him again in 2022 against a left-wing opponent, Lula da Silva.
Da Silva, or Lula as he is commonly known, is a committed socialist. He and his party ran the country from 2003 to 2016. During that time, Brazil faced the worst economy in a century. Corruption, which was always a problem, got even worse.
In 2017, Lula was convicted of money laundering and bribery. He was sentenced to 9 years in prison. But in 2021, Brazil’s Supreme Court, which Lula and his allies had packed with leftists, invalidated his conviction.
So now Lula was free to run for office again. Having trashed the country once, he was ready for a second go.
The media and the bureaucracy backed him all the way.
But that wasn’t Lula’s greatest asset. He had control of the electoral process which in Brazil is fully electronic and centralized. The man running this process, Alexandre de Moraes, was a sworn enemy of Bolsonaro.
The fix was in.
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