Is this the end of Bolsonarismo, that exotic compound of big business, violence and God that propelled its eponymous figurehead to the presidency of Brazil, and now to the edge of oblivion? In January 2023, following electoral defeat at the hands of his Left-leaning opponent, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the previous October, Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters ransacked Brasília’s main government buildings, emulating MAGA’s invasion of the US Capitol two years earlier. Since then, however, the destinies of Donald Trump and Bolsonaro have diverged.
While Trump’s eventual return to the White House saved him from prosecution for trying to overturn the US government, Bolsonaro enjoys no such immunity. He is being tried for masterminding a failed coup d’etat by Alexandre de Moraes, a shaven-headed bruiser on the country’s supreme court, and will probably be sent to jail for a long time. And as if that were not destabilising enough for Latin America’s biggest and most complicated country, Trump is now waging diplomatic and economic war against the government of President Lula.
The crisis started on 9 July, when Trump sent Lula an open letter announcing 50% tariffs on Brazilian products, among the highest he has applied. For all Trump’s talk of a level playing field, this has less to do with trade — the US runs a surplus with Brazil — than with taking down a titan of the global Left and aiding a fellow Right-winger in difficulty. Trump called Brazil’s treatment of Bolsonaro a “witch hunt”. That’s the very term he used to describe his own legal travails.
But if Trump expected Lula to scurry to Washington D.C. for a dressing down, he misread this grizzled opponent of the country’s former military dictatorship, who has himself seen the inside of a jail cell after being engulfed in a corruption scandal. Not for Lula the toadying of a Keir Starmer or an Ursula von der Leyen; in a televised address to the nation on 18 July, he denounced Trump’s “unacceptable blackmail” and “attack on national sovereignty”, adding in an interview with CNN, “if Trump was Brazilian… he too would be on trial”.
For his part, de Moraes, the kind of man who arranges the office furniture so as not to be surprised by a possible assailant, ordered Bolsonaro to wear an ankle tag to stop him absconding — as he did, to Florida, during the debacle of January 2023.
From his position on one of the most powerful courts in the world, “Big Alex”, as he is known, has punished US tech companies and Bolsonaro supporters, who had fired off scurrilous posts from America, with fines and other restrictions. Last year, meanwhile, he blocked access to X in Brazil until the platform complied with his order that it ban accounts spreading the fallacy that the 2022 presidential election was rigged. From exile in Washington D.C., where even de Moraes cannot reach him, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the ex-president’s son and a deputy in the Brasília parliament, calls the judge a “psychopath out of control”.
It was lobbying by Eduardo that persuaded the US government, on 30 July, to impose sanctions on Big Alex — who promptly placed the elder Bolsonaro under house arrest and seized his mobile phone. On 6 August, Trump’s tariffs came into effect, albeit with exceptions that include Embraer aircraft, orange juice, iron ore, wood pulp and petroleum. Brazilian coffee producers have started panic selling while, as Elizabeth Johnson of TS Lombard, a veteran Brazil analyst, told me, “the mango farmers of northeastern Brazil will have no alternative but to bury their rotting fruit in the ground”.
Wary of fuelling inflation — already running at 5.4% — by imposing reciprocal sanctions, and with his fellow Bric leaders absorbed in tariff negotiations of their own, Lula’s ability to retaliate either unilaterally or in concert is limited. According to the Sao Paulo newspaper Estadao, the government is steeling itself for additional tariffs later this year, when Bolsonaro’s trial may conclude in a judgement that is politically fatal to him and objectionable to Trump.
All this said, the size of Brazil’s internal market makes it reasonably well placed to weather external shocks. Last year, after all, exports accounted for less than a fifth of GDP, of which just 12% went to the US, compared to 28% to China. Furthermore, as Diego Sartorato, a former staffer in Lula’s office, told me, while agribusiness — Bolsonaro’s natural constituency — will suffer as a result of the new tariffs, “the effect on inflation has already been positive”. As Sartorato points out, the price of a 500g pack of coffee has fallen from over $9 to around $7 — “and Brazilians love their coffee”.
If this, then, is what a breakdown in relations between the two largest economies in the Americas looks like, it also shows how events might help a physically frail, 79-year-old, third-term president win back lost support in time for his re-election bid in 2026. “Trump is making Lula great again,” Johnson went on, alluding to a recent opinion poll showing Lula’s approval rating above 50% for the first time this year. “What could be better for an embattled politician than to have an external enemy and for his main rival to be the cause?”
It is certainly getting harder for Bolsonaro to square his slogan, “Brazil above everything!” with his embarrassing devotion to a foreign leader intent on crippling the Brazilian economy. And yet, at an estimated 37,000, the crowd of Bolsonaro supporters that converged on central Sao Paulo on 3 August to protest against their hero’s house arrest was three times the size of a similar gathering — this one with Bolsonaro himself in attendance — at the same location in June. In Rio, a demonstrating Bolsonarista told France 24 that she agreed “100%” with the US sanctions on de Moraes, adding that “since no solution was found here, it had to come from elsewhere”.
“It is certainly getting harder for Bolsonaro to square his slogan, ‘Brazil’ above everything!’ with his embarrassing devotion to a foreign leader intent on crippling the Brazilian economy.”
For all the dedication of Bolsonaro’s core supporters, however, the Lula government is riding a wave of patriotism, one lent additional power by a US investigation into a wildly popular Brazilian payment system on the grounds that it may discriminate against US alternatives.
As for Lula himself, his TV address last month showed him punchy and alert — useful for preempting comparisons with “sleepy” Joe Biden, his old friend from the gerontocracy of the Left. Meanwhile the political tyro Bia Lula — the President’s 30-year-old granddaughter — has been having fun at Bolsonaro’s expense. “He’s constantly putting his feet where his hands should be,” she chuckled in a recent video, “and now he’s at home with his ankle tag and without a phone… congratulations, champ!” Then, turning her attention to Eduardo: “you spent two billion reals [$363 million] on lobbying in the United States. And the result? Father arrested and assets blocked. Total success!”
Amid the knockabout, Bolsonaro’s trial grinds on, and the charges could hardly be graver. The former president is accused of trying to destroy Brazil’s democracy. He is also accused of plotting to assassinate Lula and de Moraes. On 28 July, one of his co-defendants accepted the authenticity of a “coup plan” envisaging the imprisonment of several supreme court judges. Bolsonaro himself has acknowledged that he took part in meetings to discuss “alternative ways” of staying in power, the options including the deployment of military forces and suspension of civil liberties — but stopping short of an actual coup. “A coup is something abominable,” he told de Moraes from the stand, “and such a hypothesis was never even considered.”
That Big Alex is presiding over the trial of a man accused of plotting to kill him is not the only peculiarity of a case whose proceedings are broadcast live, with much incriminating evidence deriving from plea bargains, and whose final judgement is the subject of opinion polls. The most recent, conducted in late July, found that 48% of Brazilians want Bolsonaro to be sentenced to prison for his role in the alleged coup; 46% do not. That such polls are even conducted illustrates how public opinion is both grit and lubricant in the machinery of Brazilian law.
His conviction and imprisonment seemingly preordained, and his social media accounts silenced by Big Alex, Bolsonaro is running out of road. And yet, whether he is succeeded as figurehead of the far-Right by Eduardo or another of his sons of varying flamboyance and dissipation; the more straightforwardly conservative governor of the state of Sao Paulo, Tarcisio de Freitas; or someone we haven’t heard of yet, the answer is probably no: Bolsonarismo isn’t going away. Through his rhetoric, his undermining of environmental regulations and his support for the mining, farming and gun lobbies, he has vitalised a body of opinion, anti-woke, pro-wealth and fervently evangelical, that will retain its potency for years to come.
And what of the man himself, with his infantile smile and fragile amour propre, his alliances with agribusiness and evangelists who hold their noses at his incoherent speeches stippled with obscenities intended to curry favour with the plebs, a favourite being porra, meaning “semen”; the man of the immortal line, uttered to a female political opponent, that she was too ugly to consider raping? While he was never — even as president — in charge of the movement that takes his name, the former paratrooper did more than most to bring into existence the Brazil of deforestation, expulsion of indigenous people and farms the size of Luxembourg, the Brazil of soaring gun ownership where 600,000 people were murdered over the course of a decade, and where, in the year ending July 2024, 83,988 cases of rape were reported.
Opposite the presumed felon stands the dinosaur Lula, who for all his ancientness and his tolerance of corruption represents the Brazil of affability, multilateralism and care for the poor — and now of wounded pride. And, everywhere, the mutual animosity of the bald judge and the foreign president, spreading like an oil slick over the waters of the western hemisphere.
