A choice of global dimension

One of the great mutations of international politics under the impetus of Donald Trump is the attempt to reorder the world based on zones of influence. Once again, America would be for the Americans. Or for the North Americans. The dream of President James Monroe. The recreation of this hegemony is now known as the "Donroe Doctrine." In this new cold war, the continent must be recognized as a domain of Washington. Or as an exclusion zone for China. The proposal has a flaw. Without an alignment of Canada, Mexico, and Brazil with the United States, the experiment is a grimace of what it claims to be. This is the reason why the elections that Brazilians will take part in next Sunday to choose their president have a global dimension. Javier Milei intervened in that campaign in favor of the opposition candidate Flávio Bolsonaro. He insulted Lula da Silva and Judge Alexandre de Moraes, who has the former president and father of the candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, in prison. He did so raising his voice loudly, so that it would be heard in the White House. Trump was very eloquent in his support for Bolsonaro. He had an explicit intervention in the campaigning, which was launched unofficially on May 26, with a photo of him with the brothers Flávio and Eduardo Bolsonaro in the Oval Office. After Milei's incursion, someone who is usually silent spoke up. Xi Jinping demanded that there be no external interference in the Brazilian elections. Xi, who does not speak out even about what happens in the Middle East, came out in defense of his friend Lula. Once again: Brazil's ballot boxes are the battlefield of the universal conflict. All the polls predict two scenarios. That the race is tied. And that it will not be resolved in the first round. To clear up the mystery, we will have to wait until October 25, the date set for the runoff. The Bolsonaristas are hopeful that this parity is deceptive. They argue that the numbers do not take into account the levels of abstention that could be recorded in the northeast of the country, the traditional territory of the PT. They also admit that many citizens who detest Lula are ashamed to confess to pollsters that they will vote for Bolsonaro. A self-critical gesture that deserves gratitude. Experts linked to the government acknowledge that there may be some truth in those arguments. The same analysts close to the PT lay out the reasons why Lula may have a happier Sunday than expected. The main one: there are three candidates outside the main polarization who take votes away from Bolsonaro. They are Augusto Curi, Ronaldo Caiado, and Renan Santos. All are from the right. Curi registers an intention to vote above 5%. Caiado and Santos, 4% each. Is there any possibility that these proposals will improve their performance? If, in addition, those who detest the PT but are ashamed of Bolsonaro do not vote, could Lula win in the first round? The answer from a member of Lula's cabinet: "It is very difficult, but the probability is not zero." What campaign actions could alter the dominant landscape? Lula took a surprising measure aimed, above all, at the female electorate. He banned, with a stroke of the pen, online betting linked to sports competitions. In Brazil, as in the United States, the perverse relationship between these practices and the expansion of household debt has been demonstrated. Marketing experts say that those who suffer the drama most are wives, or mothers. Brazilian campaigning has become very dirty. Like never before. A trait that matches a hyper-polarized politics. It is the sign of the times. Hatred as the engine of public life has also reached a country whose sociability was always phobic about conflict. In recent weeks, the president's eldest son, Fábio Luis Lula da Silva, Lulinha, has been mired in scandal. He is accused of using his contacts within the government to favor private companies, among others, a supplier of cannabis-based products to the Ministry of Health. Flávio Bolsonaro also has his sleep disturbed. The day before yesterday, a former business partner of his appeared who is so embittered as to publish intimate details of the candidate's sex life, especially in relation to prostitution networks. For the representative of a movement that makes individual morality the main axis of its discourse, this could mean an erosion. At the same time that details of the right-wing candidate's basement were being leaked, social media went viral with false information: that, if Bolsonaro won, Our Lady of the Conception Aparecida would cease to be the patron saint of Brazilians. The claim is apocryphal. But there are reasons that give it plausibility. Bolsonaro said, last August, that "if I become president, one of my first acts of government will be to decree that Brazil belongs to Our Lord Jesus Christ." A principal peculiarity of Brazilian politics over the last 20 years has been the advance of evangelicals in the game of power. This is a religious current that condemns as idolatry any devotion other than that of Jesus Christ. Many with good memories exhumed these days the television images of pastor Sérgio Von Helder, who in 1995 kicked and insulted an image of the Aparecida in front of the cameras. Nossa Senhora da Conceição Aparecida is the Brazilian equivalent of Our Lady of Luján. That means that when Bolsonaro stated that with him Brazil would belong only to Jesus Christ, he was touching a subliminal nerve that the PT took advantage of to damage him. Independently of this controversy, religious alignment has become a great dividing line in Brazilian politics. Some 35% of the population of Rio de Janeiro today identifies as evangelical, versus 30% Catholic. Evangelicals are the Bolsonaros' most solid base. And they are characterized by a particular condition: pastors are decisive in the vote of their parishioners. A few weeks ago, visiting Buenos Aires, one of the officials in charge of monitoring the proper functioning of the Bolsa Família program in the interior of Brazil — the equivalent of Argentina's AUH — recounted: "In many localities it repeats that there are people who thank the government and Lula for the help they receive, but they clarify: 'I'm still going to vote for Bolsonaro because my pastor tells me to.'" This testimony would indicate that there is an "evangelical vote," just as there is no "Catholic vote." It is an invaluable advantage for the right-wing candidate, since religion allows him to reach regions and social classes that he perhaps would not reach with his secular preaching. Over the PT's campaign command hovers a very contemporary ghost: the fear that Sunday's election will be crossed by external interventions through the digital system. The recent past guarantees that these vices exist, especially in the Brazilian far right. The electronic misdeeds of Fernando Cerimedo in favor of Bolsonaro père were investigated by the courts. Cerimedo, who admitted to commanding an army of trolls, was later a tentacle of Santiago Caputo, the "Magician of the Kremlin." In recent months he rose to fame due to the suspicion that he might have ordered the murder, in Bolivia, of his pregnant ex-girlfriend. His record reached The Washington Post last week, where he was portrayed as a promoter of the MAGA movement in Latin America. Trifles. Cerimedo's army today is a boy scout patrol compared to the services that a giant of manipulation like Peter Thiel and his empire, Palantir, can provide. Pay attention to Elisa Carrió. When Xi warned about foreign interference, was he talking about Milei's rhetoric or that technological apparatus at the service of Trump? Don't the Chinese also type on their own console? Or is that only a Russian thing? The persecutory feelings of Lula's collaborators are fed by a precedent, which is this: the President of the United States stated that "all the candidates I have supported in Latin America have won." Is he determined to do anything to keep this law fulfilled? Maybe not. In recent weeks Trump has no longer referred to the Brazilian contest. And speaking with a banker friend who operates in Brazil, he admitted to him: "I respect Lula a lot." Before the same banker, who commented on their conversation at an informal meeting in São Paulo, Trump confessed his curiosity about whether Milei will be reelected. Trump's silence in the face of the confrontation between Lula and Bolsonaro may be fed by his own ordeal. With the numbers very, very tight for the legislative elections of November 3, the Republican leader may not benefit at all from inoculating himself with the result of someone else's contest. This does not mean, by any means, that a change of government in Brazil will not modify that country's foreign policy. Even more so if the reports are confirmed that anticipate that the foreign minister of Flávio Bolsonaro would be his brother Eduardo, the closest to Mar-a-Lago of the whole family. Begging pardon for the insistence: on the Brazilian board a global chess game is being played. But this does not mean that a pro-Trump turn will mean a disconnection from China. For several reasons. One is that among the sectors supporting Bolsonaro is the agricultural one, deeply intertwined with the Asian economy. Furthermore, a conflict with Beijing would imply an unthinkable decision, one that not even Jair Bolsonaro thought of during his term: withdrawing Brazil from the Brics group. On the other hand, the country's economy is increasingly connected with Chinese investments. Here there is a novelty: the presence of those capitals is not limited to infrastructure works or providing imports. Given the size of the Brazilian market, many Chinese companies are settling there to produce their manufactures and sell them throughout Mercosur. Such is the case of the automaker BYD, which established a plant in the state of Bahia to offer its vehicles from there to domestic buyers, to Argentina, and to Mexico. Great Wall Motor bought the Mercedes-Benz factory in Imacerápolis, São Paulo, with a production capacity of 50,000 units per year. Midea, dedicated to home appliances, established itself in Minas Gerais with its sights set on the whole region. Next Sunday's elections hold questions and lessons for Argentina. An elementary unknown: for Milei, who would it be convenient to win? It seems like a wild question. He is a friend of the Bolsonaros and campaigned for Flávio. However, an ultra-right government in Brasília can represent an eclipse for an ultra-right government in Buenos Aires. Especially if one reads the map with Trump's ultra-pragmatic gaze. The president of Brazil has an international presence derived from the size of his country. Whatever his ideological creed. Example: at the last UN General Assembly, last week, Lula had 20 top-level bilateral meetings. Milei met only with Benjamin Netanyahu, who today is not so socialized either. The game of desires is also paradoxical when viewed from the left. It is obvious that Cristina Kirchner will rejoice at a PT victory. Even though that affinity was scratched by Lula's predilection for Alberto Fernández. However, she will be very attentive to an experiment: to what extent the prodigy of the transfer of votes from Bolsonaro, barred from running by a criminal sentence, to his son will materialize. So far that transfer seems to be happening. In contrast, Lula at the time failed to bring to power, from prison, Fernando Haddad, his current economy minister. It is a crucial matter for La Cautiva, who continues to seek power with her usual obstinacy, even from confinement. Is it also a crucial matter for Máximo, her "Flávio"? The problem of Mrs. Kirchner contains a broader message for the performance of democracy in Latin America. Corruption has advanced so much in the region that it overflows the moral and economic field to the point of introducing a distortion into the system. It is healthy for the Justice system to be capable of sanctioning powerful figures like Lula, Bolsonaro, or Cristina Kirchner. But the sanction, being correct, introduces a delicate problem: enormous masses of voters lose the possibility of choosing their favorite candidate. That means that corruption ends up, by decree of the institutional circuit, causing a black hole in the legitimacy of power. It is a problem that is not only difficult to solve. It is difficult to even think about. One would have to hope that the bilateral relationship with Brazil will normalize, whatever the outcome of the electoral process. Lula's ambassador in Buenos Aires, the talented Julio Bitelli, remains in his country, afraid to return. What is that fear due to? Very logical: that if, once he resumes his functions, Milei insults Lula again, the reaction will no longer be for Itamaraty, the Brazilian foreign ministry, to call him "for consultation." The next step, at that point, is to break off relations. If the next president is Bolsonaro, the relationship will be reconstituted. One would have to assume the same will happen if there are four more years of Lula. Brazil and Argentina are condemned to be united for millions of years. It is the inflexible determination of geography. BrazilLula da Silva