{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/a-bolsonaro-is-back-can-the-brazilian-left-recover-opinion-oliver-basciano/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":129469,"slug":"a-bolsonaro-is-back-can-the-brazilian-left-recover-opinion-oliver-basciano","title":"A Bolsonaro Is Back. Can the Brazilian Left Recover?","excerpt":"A far-right victory in the country will be a disaster for workers – and artists","content":"\n

Going into second round of Brazil’s elections, Oliver Basciano reads the writing on the wall – for the nation’s culture industry, workers’ rights and social justice at large

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Supporters of President Lula unfurl the Brazilian flag ahead of the election. Photo: Oliver Basciano
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It is a curiosity of São Paulo that all major protests and rallies in the city converge on its museum of art. While this is a product of urbanism and practicality – the great hulking red pillars of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) stand smack in the middle of Avenida Paulista; the undercroft that raises the galleries from street level allows the crowd to swell into the space – it nonetheless feels symbolic: so many political battles in Brazil are fought over different visions of what defines the country’s ‘culture’.

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This past Saturday, the thousands who stretched the length of the city’s most important thoroughfare, and who I later followed as they marched downtown to Praça Republica, were bedecked in the colours of the Workers’ Party (PT), as if to match MASP’s distinctive red exterior. The rally was the last stop in incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s reelection tour. Chants of Olê, olê, olê, olá, Lu-la, Lu-la reverberated far beyond the art institution as the three-time president and veteran leftist climbed onto a float to make his election-eve speech. By the following evening, the celebrations had turned sour.

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As the numbers on the electronic voting machines, from the Amazon to Pampas plains of the south, were tallied, a new reality began to take shape: the far-right, Donald Trump-backed Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair (currently jailed for attempting to orchestrate a coup upon being ousted in 2022) had won 47 percent of the vote against Lula’s 45 percent. The margin between the two in the bellwether central mining-state of Minas Gerais was even greater (voting is mandatory, but 21 percent of voters nationally abstained). Flávio and Lula will now go to a second round in three weeks’ time, but the situation for the left – and with them those invested in indigenous rights and land demarcation, the rights of LGBTQ Brazilians and Brazilian economic independence from the US – is grave.

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The arts matter little in competition with such existential issues, but the diverging cultural priorities of the two candidates is emblematic of their wider attitudes towards social justice and workers’ rights. The Flávio campaign has been curiously muted about culture, with none of the rallying against ‘big time’ artists that Jair made prior to his election. For the dictatorship-romanticising Bolsonaro patriarch, culture wars were a calling card: back in 2018 there was barely a week in which I wasn’t reporting on an exhibition picketed by his supporters, artists receiving death threats or a theatre production branded parasitic on the Brazilian taxpayer. For the former army man, such attacks constituted an appeal to the powerful evangelical Christian vote and an easy foil against the metropolitan elite. There have been moments recently when I thought this kind of rubbish would return: in June a politician from Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party tried to kick up a stink about the works by La Chola Poblete, a queer indigenous artist currently showing at MASP (the sexually explicit drawings invoke Christianity). But the protest fizzled out, and Flávio’s campaign did not make much of an effort to amplify it.

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In Junior’s manifesto, the arts are afforded a mere two paragraphs of beige copy, with no concrete promises, other than to look after ‘historical heritage’ without ‘subordinating it to political agendas’. With a tired electorate, the backing of Trump – whose politically motivated, crippling tariffs against Brazil have been championed by younger brother Eduardo Bolsonaro and his MAGA circle in the US – plus Flávio’s links to Rio de Janeiro’s militias (organised crime groups made up of current and former police officers), he doesn’t need to resort to such small-fry tactics. Where his father closed the Ministry of Culture with a flourish on day two of his presidency, the son is more likely to kill the arts through neglect.

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Union workers rally in support of President Lula. Photo: Oliver Basciano
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Until Saturday – too late – the major problem with Lula’s campaign had been a failure to energise the wider base: PT supporters who might spread the word to their cousins and coworkers, mothers and manicurists. There’s an ageing nub that still goes out on his behalf, hands out leaflets and organises rallies all year round, but sectors like the artworld have done little to engage this time around (a few days before the election, Brazil’s commercial galleries wrote an open letter… not in defence of democracy to their monied and influential patrons, but to moan about the price of booths at the local art fair).

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A key manifesto pledge for Lula this time around has also been the 6×1 constitutional amendment bill – introduced by veteran PT deputy Reginaldo Lopes and fellow leftwinger Erika Hilton (a PSOL party deputy, she is also one of the most prominent transgender political figures in Latin America), in which the standard weekly working hours would be reduced from the current six consecutive days and just one day of rest, to five with a mandated two paid rest days a week. Flávio and his colleagues have consistently voted against the bill, and this basic bit of civilisation is certain to be killed if the right wins the second round of the elections. The 6×1 amendment would obviously be of benefit to all employees, including those working in the precarity of the culture industry, but it has obvious merits for any aspiring artist from a working-class background: a weekend that affords time to study, to practise, to rest.

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In Brazil, art was long the sport of the elite. Successive Lula governments did a huge amount to widen the game, however, from the local scrappy DIY ‘culture points’ instituted by his 2000s minister of culture, the singer Gilberto Gil, to the current initiative by Margareth Menezes, the incumbent in the department (also a singer), which brings substantial arts funding to the country’s favelas. Perhaps even more important than those banner arts policies, however, has been Lula’s long-term support for public education, through which artists from a much wider base have emerged: compare this to Jair’s commitment to cut all public universities and federal institutes by 30 percent, with particular emphasis on subjects Flávio’s father declared to be ‘communist’.

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On Saturday’s march, I ran into the artist Carolina Cordeiro with her daughter, the latter toddling along with a red balloon in support of Lula. Born in 1983 and one of the most conceptually rigorous Brazilian artists of her generation, Cordeiro is soon to have an exhibition at Pinacoteca de São Paulo, channelling a practice honed via a BA, an MA and a PhD all taken at public universities. There are countless other examples of artists, all of them children of PT, who widen the demographic of who gets to show in Brazilian galleries and museums beyond the oligarchic offspring of previous times. Sort life out on the ground, create the opportunities and elite institutions like galleries and museums will benefit.

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If, come the 25 October second round, the left can’t recover, Lula’s trickle-up economics will be replaced by Flávio’s nepo authoritarianism. And it won’t just be artists and artworkers who suffer.

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Read next Dark Horse, the Bolsonaro biopic you have to see to believe

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