[With the leftist Lula set to win Brazil’s presidency, far-right
leader Jair Bolsonaro is sowing doubts about the election process. So
now, Bernie Sanders is putting Bolsonaro on notice and insisting the
US oppose any government that takes power illegitimately. ]
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BERNIE TO BOLSONARO: STOP UNDERMINING DEMOCRACY  
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Andre Pagliarini
August 16, 2022
Jacobin
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_ With the leftist Lula set to win Brazil’s presidency, far-right
leader Jair Bolsonaro is sowing doubts about the election process. So
now, Bernie Sanders is putting Bolsonaro on notice and insisting the
US oppose any government that takes power illegitimately. _

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks in Pontiac, Michigan on July 29,
2022., (Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)

 

On November 8, 2019, former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva was released from prison after serving over five hundred days on
dubious corruption charges that have since been dropped. Lula’s
imprisonment had galvanized much of the international left, including
many of its most recognizable figures. Jeremy Corbyn, Jean-Luc
Mélenchon, Noam Chomsky, Argentine president Alberto Fernández all
expressed enthusiastic support for Lula during his incarceration. His
most vocal supporter in the US government during that dark time was,
perhaps unsurprisingly, Senator Bernie Sanders.

Sanders has long championed the kind of working-class political
project that Lula led for decades as the national face of the
Workers’ Party (PT), which governed Brazil from 2003 until 2016.
“During his presidency,” Bernie tweeted
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Lula’s release from prison, “Lula da Silva oversaw huge reductions
in poverty and remains Brazil’s most popular politician. I stand
with political and social leaders across the globe who are calling on
Brazil’s judiciary to release Lula and annul his conviction.”

In a remarkable political turnaround, Lula now seems poised
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win the presidential election this October, besting the far-right
incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in every poll taken this year. And once
again, Sanders is lending his voice to a growing chorus of observers
in Brazil and abroad concerned about the fate of Brazilian democracy.

Bolsonaro has been all but announcing his intentions to subvert
Brazilian democracy for months. In addition to calling for a greater
military role in the vote-counting process, he has openly debased his
country’s electoral institutions in the hopes of throwing a race
that does not currently favor him into disarray. On July 18, he
convened foreign diplomats stationed in Brazil and expounded on absurd
and already debunked conspiracy theories about vulnerabilities in
Brazil’s voting system. Thanks to Bolsonaro, in Brazil, like the
United States, the idea that the voting system is routinely
manipulated by corrupt officials and unscrupulous partisans has become
a delusion of the right-wing hive mind. This cynical strategy has
produced actual violence and could well lead to more.

Last month, Sanders and key staffers met with a delegation of
Brazilian activists who urged Congress to pay attention to
Bolsonaro’s actions and the presidential campaign in the world’s
fourth-largest democracy. The visit was organized by the Washington
Brazil Office [[link removed]] (WBO), a new
progressive think tank. (Full disclosure: I am a faculty fellow of the
WBO and coeditor of its weekly election newsletter.)

Sanders has since said
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will present a “Sense of the Senate” resolution after Congress is
back in session next month to demonstrate “support for a free and
fair election and call on the U.S. to break ties with Brazil if it’s
led by an illegitimate regime.” The visiting activists, who work in
areas like environmental protection, LGBTQ rights, indigenous
resistance, and racial justice, also met with Maryland congressman
Jamie Raskin, a vocal opponent of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.

Predictably, Bolsonaro supporters are decrying the WBO as a puppet of
George Soros and — even more cynically given the US history of
backing right-wing coups in the region — a fresh attempt at election
manipulation by Washington. Still, Sanders seems to recognize the
delicate nature of a US politician commenting on an election abroad.
Asked why he is pushing “a non-binding resolution when he could put
forward a bill with more teeth,” as _Politico _put it, Sanders
replied that “this is a start . . . it’s important for the people
of Brazil to know we’re on their side, on the side of democracy and
we can go further.” The senator is surely wary of playing into
Bolsonaro’s self-victimizing narrative that he is being targeted by
a nefarious cabal of international leftists.

But solidarity is not imperialism — it is its antithesis. “It
would be unacceptable for the United States to recognize and work with
a government that actually lost the election,” Bernie argued after
the meeting organized by the WBO. “It would be a disaster for the
people of Brazil, and it would send a horrific message to the entire
world about the strength of democracy.” With Lula comfortably ahead
in the polls, there is little ambiguity in what Bernie is saying: the
former president — who left office in 2011 with an approval rating
in the eighties — should be allowed take power if so elected.

In a pleasant surprise, the Biden administration appears to be on the
same page. In May, Reuters reported
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CIA director William Burns explicitly urged top Brazilian officials to
stop questioning their country’s ability to carry out a free and
fair election. That the CIA would apparently weigh in on the side of
democracy struck many as a welcome shift from its long history of
supporting right-wing autocrats around the world. Others found the
news either unconvincing, self-serving, or ridiculous.

The point, however, is not that the CIA are suddenly “the good
guys,” as some skeptical commentators put it disbelievingly. It’s
that the CIA — and, by extension, the Washington establishment —
currently sees no benefit to its interests in President Jair
Bolsonaro’s antidemocratic meddling. That’s objectively good news
not only for the Brazilian left, but the vitality of Brazilian
democracy.

There is a broad front emerging against Bolsonaro, both in Brazil
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internationally, and it will have to continue from now, during the
campaign, through Brazil’s inauguration day on January 1, 2023.
Sanders, a lifelong champion of progressive and left-wing causes
abroad, is a natural partner in this struggle. His forthcoming
resolution is a welcome reminder that these bonds of solidarity must
be built and maintained in union halls, international left
organizations, and yes, even the corridors of power in Washington.

_Andre Pagliarini is an assistant professor of history at
Hampden-Sydney College and a faculty fellow at the Washington Brazil
Office._

* Elections in Brazil
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