Brazil’s Polarization Is Here to Stay Even As Politicians Have (Mostly) Dialed Down the Rhetoric
The political debate in Latin America’s largest democracy looks less destructive than it used to be.
SÃO PAULO — Over recent days, political debates in Brazil briefly seemed to have returned to the heyday of polarization before the 2022 presidential elections. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s decision to compare, in off-the-cuff remarks during a trip to Africa, Israel’s war against Hamas to the Holocaust set off heated debates between his supporters and those who criticized the president. Less than a week later, ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, with a fiery speech to thousands of supporters in São Paulo, briefly led to people mutually accusing each other on X of lying about the exact number of people who attended the former president’s rally. Emblematically, there is reason to believe that Lula’s comments about Israel helped boost attendance numbers at the rally.
Little suggests polarization has gone away since the highly contentious election cycle in October 2022. Polarization in Brazil seems to have “calcified“: A poll in December indicated that more than 90% of people who had voted for either Lula or Bolsonaro did not regret their choice, even though Bolsonaro had been convicted for abuse of power and barred from holding office until 2030 by then.
And yet, while both Lula and Bolsonaro possess an unrivaled capacity to mobilize their respective supporters and single-handedly produce confrontations on social media, a broader analysis reveals that the intensity of polarization in Brazil, in many ways, seems to have declined considerably over the past year. Perhaps the most relevant example is the cordial and professional relationship between the two most powerful politicians in the…
