Why a Bolsonaro power grab remains a long shot

Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro is not exuding confidence. Mingling with supporters outside the presidential palace in Brasília last week, he said that “either we have clean elections in Brazil or we don’t have elections at all.” 

This threat comes as Mr. Bolsonaro increasingly seeks to stoke the baseless notion that Brazil’s elections are riddled with fraud. He has asserted, for example, that Congressman Aécio Neves rightfully defeated Dilma Rousseff in 2014, when he did not. Even though Mr. Neves openly questioned the results of the election that he lost, he and his former running mate have both publicly acknowledged in recent days that the vote was clean. 

Whatever political gifts he may have, Mr. Bolsonaro has never stood out as a particularly subtle or strategic actor. His intentions are clear: sow doubt about the country’s institutional capacity to conduct free and fair elections so that he can plausibly reject the outcome should he lose reelection next year. 

There is obviously plenty of time for circumstances to change, but current polling indicates Mr. Bolsonaro will lose handily to former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2022. Aggravating matters for the president is the fact that the Senate inquiry into his administration’s pandemic handling has been a slow-motion train wreck, revealing several instances of Mr. Bolsonaro doing nothing to stop the country from going off the rails since the pandemic began. 

According to recent polls, less than a quarter of the population now supports him, with more than half disapproving of his work as president. It is hard to envision his electoral prospects improving dramatically in the months ahead. 

Mr. Bolsonaro’s anti-democratic outburst raised alarm in Brazil and abroad. Brian Winter, the editor of Americas’ Quarterly, tweeted that “if the world’s not paying attention yet, it should.” Historian Federico Finchelstein observed that “this is how fascist propaganda operates. Fascists present the impossible and illegal as a possibility. They want to test the waters and then destroy democracy if nobody resists.” 

This concern is obviously understandable given both...