The left underestimated Bolsonaro and is paying the price

As the polls closed in Brazil on Sunday, thousands of Workers’ Party supporters flocked to São Paulo’s iconic Paulista Avenue. They were hoping to celebrate an outright victory by the party’s boss, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who polls suggested was on the verge of clinching the election with an absolute majority. But that landslide never was. In fact, Brazil ended up having the tightest first-round vote in its democratic history.

In many ways, what happened on Sunday epitomizes the Workers’ Party’s hubris. 

For nearly four years, the most prominent left-of-center political force in Brazil — and the only Brazilian party with programmatic coherence and grassroots presence — watched the Jair Bolsonaro administration from the sidelines, sure that the unsophisticated president would burn out on his own after leading an inept government.

Mr. Bolsonaro did indeed preside over a government that set new lows for policymaking. But he didn’t burn out. Instead, despite leading a dumpster fire of a government, he brought the far-right into Brazil’s political mainstream. 

Until today, Jair Bolsonaro has never faced an organized and competent opposition. Not in the molds of the Workers’ Party’s relentless defiance of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government in the 1990s. 

The crises faced by Mr. Bolsonaro were largely self-inflicted. From clumsy attempts to intimidate Congress at the beginning of his term, to his clashes with the Supreme Court, and his denialist and illogical stance on Covid. 

But despite the president committing a slew of impeachable offenses,...