BY OLIVER STUENKEL | DECEMBER 2, 2020
Bolsonaro looks beatable in 2022 if Brazil’s opposition manages to overcome its internal divisions. Don’t count on it.
https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/searching-for-a-brazilian-biden/
SÃO PAULO – It is not surprising that many Brazilians eagerly followed the recent U.S. presidential elections – after all, President Jair Bolsonaro projects himself as a “Trump of the Tropics” and openly rooted for another Trump victory. When President-elect Joe Biden was declared victorious, it was only natural that numerous commentators in Brazil wondered which takeaways the U.S. election offered to the country’s opposition, eager to oust Bolsonaro in 2022.
Some lessons seem fairly straightforward: Biden, it was noted in Brazil, was sufficiently centrist and moderate to build a broad “democratic front”, stretching all the way from the center-right (such as the Lincoln Project) to the left (including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) that, despite many internal disagreements, united around the sole purpose of defeating Donald Trump. Contrasting the U.S. president’s polarizing style and anti-establishment rhetoric, the Democrat represented a calm and almost tedious alternative, attractive to those who had grown tired of Trump’s non-stop provocations.
At first sight, emulating Biden’s strategy in Brazil seems like a good idea given the many similarities between Trump and Bolsonaro. Just like Biden benefited from Trump’s…
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