Jair Bolsonaro’s trial shows Brazil a way out from polarisation and stagnation

 

Moderates on both sides see a chance to draw a line, and start fixing deep-seated problems

BRAZIL’S CHIEF JUSTICE, Luís Roberto Barroso, did not receive an official notice when his American visa and those of his children were apparently revoked on July 18th. Like most of his colleagues on Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court, he learned the news from an online post by Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, who cited the court’s “persecution” of Brazil’s hard-right former president, Jair Bolsonaro.

Sitting in his vast office, Mr Barroso looks emotionally exhausted as he recalls how his son had to leave his career in America and return home. The room is sparsely furnished with just a few tables and black leather chairs. It has not been fully refurbished since it was trashed by a horde of Mr Bò supporters on January 8th 2023, in an insurrection that shocked the country, mirroring what had happened two years before in Washington, DC. On August 26th Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said his justice minister’s visa had also been revoked.

The visa bans are part of an astonishing attempt by Donald Trump to shield his friend and ideological ally, Mr Bolsonaro, from prosecution. On September 2nd the former president goes on trial on charges that he attempted a coup in order to remain in power after losing his re-election bid in 2022. He denies the charges, but there is a widespread expectation that he will be found guilty.

It is an extraordinary moment for Brazil. In a country with a long history of military dictatorships, it is the first time that anyone has been tried for plotting a coup. But it is also an unprecedented moment globally. America is using tariffs, sanctions and visa bans in its attempt to force a democracy to subvert its justice system.

On July 9th ministers were in a cabinet meeting when Mr Trump published a letter online announcing tariffs of 50% on Brazilian imports, citing a “Witch Hunt that should end IMMEDIATELY!” “At first, we thought it was fake,” says one minister. “We are living in a moment of irrationality,” he exclaims, throwing up his hands. Mr Trump followed up by imposing sanctions, under the Global Magnitsky Act, on Alexandre de Moraes, the supreme-court judge who has led the prosecution of Mr Bolsonaro. Such measures, usually reserved for genocidal generals, mean being frozen out of America’s banking system.

As we lay out in our investigation· this week, Mr Bolsonaro supercharged Brazil’s polarisation and strained the sinews of its democracy. Yet unlike other countries where illiberal populism has emerged, such as the United States, Hungary or Turkey, Brazil’s institutions, notably its supreme court, did not remain supine.

And now, though there is a possibility that Mr Bolsonaro’s supporters could rally around a new figure on the hard right, there are signs that Brazil is tiring of him and his family, and that Brazilians are weary after a decade of political upheaval. If he is found guilty, the country, divided though it is, could put the worst of the polarisation behind it. There is a growing consensus across the political spectrum of the need to restore the balance of power between the branches of government and to tackle Brazil’s economic weaknesses. If Brazil can find a path towards this destination, it will not only save itself another decade of strife, but perhaps show a way out of populism for others to follow.

Whether this is possible depends on how the country’s politicians, who are gearing up for a general election next year, respond to whatever judgment is handed down to the former president, and on whether they have the courage to argue for serious constitutional reform.

Trials and tribulations

If convicted, Mr Bolsonaro and seven others (who also deny the charges) face decades in prison on charges of masterminding the coup plot. Another 25 face lesser charges. More than 1,200 Brazilians have already been tried or entered plea bargains for taking part in the insurrection.

As the pre-trial investigations have progressed, Mr Bolsonaro has tried to enlist the help of allies. Last year he spent two nights at the Hungarian embassy, fuelling speculation that he might try to flee. On August 20th police found a draft letter to President Javier Milei of Argentina on his phone, in which he requested political asylum (it is not clear whether it was sent).

He has also turned to his sons. In March the most politically gifted of the four, Eduardo, took leave from his job as a congressman in Brazil and moved to Texas to lobby his friends in the MAGA movement to sanction Mr Moraes. On August 11th Scott Bessent, America’s treasury secretary, abruptly cancelled a virtual meeting with Fernando Haddad, Brazil’s finance minister

Instead he met Eduardo, who warned that Brazilian banks were not complying with sanctions on Mr Moraes.

Eduardo’s pleas have resonated with Mr Trump, who sees Mr Bolsonaro as his tropical mirror image. Both were victims of assassination attempts. After losing their respective re-election bids, both are accused of inciting their followers to riot, which they deny. If Mr Bolsonaro is convicted, he will be held to account in a way that Mr Trump was not after his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6th 2021.

Mr Trump has little patience for Lula, as Brazil’s current left-wing president is known. In Brasília officials huff that Mr Trump has closed all doors to them. The American president sees Mr Bolsonaro as having helped spread his flavour of populist nationalism abroad, and he sees Brazil as a large economy that he can bully without serious consequences, unlike China or Mexico. The tariffs have backfired. Lula is portraying himself as the defender of Brazil’s sovereignty (though officials remain keen to seal a trade deal). This has lifted his flagging approval ratings and put him in the lead ahead of next year’s election.

Escalation is a risk. Bolsonaristas in Congress want to pass an amnesty for those who participated in the January 8th insurrection. Dozens of senators are also trying to impeach Mr Moraes.

Barred from competing in next year’s general election, Mr Bolsonaro may anoint one of his sons or his wife, Michelle, to run. If he backs one of Brazil’s more moderate right-wing governors, they will probably have to promise to pardon him if they win. Right-wing parties could sweep Congress and pursue the impeachment of Mr Moraes. It is easy to imagine Brazil falling further into dark polarisation, and Mr Trump ratcheting up the fight.

However a different outcome seems more likely. After Mr Bolsonaro’s trial, temperatures may cool. Fully 69% of voters say Eduardo is defending his family’s interests rather than Brazil’s. A majority supported Mr Moraes’s recent decision to put Mr Bolsonaro under house arrest and are against an amnesty for the rioters (see chart 1). The former president’s actions have focused the minds of those who know that Brazil needs to step back from the extremes. Though in public they seek his blessing, in interviews two right-wing governors who want to run for president distanced themselves from Mr Bolsonaro.

Courting trouble

Three crucial areas need reform: Congress, the economy and, especially, the supreme court. Unlike its counterparts elsewhere, the court combines three functions: it is the chamber of last instance for appeals; it rules on all matters related to the constitution; and it rules in criminal cases against politicians. Because of scandals in the past decade, it has become more visible in politics. After a massive corruption scheme was uncovered in 2014, the court sent dozens of politicians, including Lula, to jail (and then overturned his conviction on technicalities). Now it is dealing with Mr Bolsonaro. Many Brazilians, on all sides, have come to believe that the court meddles too much in politics.

It has such unusual powers because of the constitution of 1988. One of the world’s longest, it was written in the shadow of a two-decade military dictatorship and seeks to avoid men with guns ever ripping people’s rights away again. It does so by giving Brazilians a large number of rights and the government a slew of obligations.

In most countries, cases reach the top court only after filtering up from lower bodies. But in Brazil the constitution allows the president, state governors, bar association, trade unions and political parties to file lawsuits directly with the court. This has created a heavy caseload. It issued more than 114,000 rulings last year.

To handle this, judges are allowed to make decisions unilaterally. This has turned individual judges into stars. The court even has its own TikTok account, and livestreams decisions on YouTube. “Some people say we are even more famous than the national football team,” quips Gilmar Mendes, one of the justices. “I don’t see that as a good thing.”

As a result the court, not the legislature, “decides all important issues in the country: ethical, economic, political,” says Mr Barroso. There are pros and cons to having such a powerful court, he notes. But, in a country that had a tradition of coups d’état since the beginning of the republic in 1889, “We have now had 40 years of democracy and institutional stability.”

Mr Bolsonaro’s reign of intimidation led the court to give itself even more powers. His followers harassed the justices online and sent them death threats. In response, the court allowed itself to open investigations into online threats against itself, an unusual move that turned it into victim, prosecutor and judge all at once. Mr Moraes was put in charge of the probe, which became known as the “fake-news inquiry”. He has carried out his mission with unnerving zeal. Last year he shut down X, Elon Musk’s social-media platform, for more than a month in Brazil and threatened to fine anyone who tried to use it.

The probe remains sealed—it is now overseen mostly by federal police and the public prosecutor—and has crept into its sixth year with no end in sight. It is unclear how many accounts Mr Moraes has ordered to be taken down and why. He has been accused of overreaching, for instance by ordering accounts, not just specific posts, to be blocked.

Criticisms of the court are ten a penny from Mr Bolsonaro’s supporters. More striking, though, is that moderates are also now complaining. Many say it is possible for the court to have saved democracy, but for it also to be too powerful. “The court acted initially to defend democracy,” says one right-wing presidential hopeful. “But I think there’s been exaggeration in some cases.” One centre-left political analyst says, “Moraes has a heavy hand. The error is in the dose, not the prescription.”

Some scholars worry that a strong court is sapping faith in politics. When most political matters end up decided by the court, why vote? Others grumble about the judges being unelected rulers, and using their ability to try politicians as a cudgel to determine policy. Even the supreme court’s own judges think it does too much. “Here in the court, we all talk about the excessive judicialisation of politics,” says Mr Mendes. One proposal to rein in the court’s power would make it harder for politicians to petition. Another would limit its jurisdiction over criminal cases involving politicians, letting lower courts rule.

Putting the house in order

The second institution that needs reform is Congress, which has become easier to capture in the past decade. This happened not just under Mr Bolsonaro, but also Dilma Rousseff, a left-wing predecessor, and Michel Temer, a centre-right one. Congress, when faced with a weak president it did not like, gave itself more control over the federal budget, and used this power to splurge on its own pet projects. Successive presidents protected themselves by conceding such powers. Today, Congress directly controls around a quarter of discretionary spending in the federal budget, compared with 1% in the United States. This has made Brazil harder to govern.

Leaders on the right and left agree that congressional power must be trimmed. Congress has hijacked the federal budget, says the right-wing presidential hopeful. “They took all the power…but none of the responsibility.” Mr Haddad, the finance minister, fumes that parliament’s parochial interests make it harder for him to balance the books. Reining in Congress will require a more vigorous president with strong lieutenants in the legislature and even constitutional reform, a big challenge given that Congress itself would need to vote for it.

The third issue that badly needs reform is Brazil’s creaking economic model, which promotes cronyism and hampers growth, leaving many voters disenchanted with politics. These woes cannot be blamed on Mr Trump’s tariffs. Exports are equivalent to less than a fifth of GDP, compared with 90% in open economies such as Vietnam. Just 13% of exports go to the United States. And businesses with contacts in Washington have secured exemptions on 700 products, from planes to orange juice. Markets have therefore shrugged at the tariffs. Goldman Sachs, a bank, has not changed its growth forecast for Brazil this year

nstead, Brazil’s economic wounds are self-inflicted. Tax exemptions total 7% of GDP, up from 2% in 2003 (see chart 2). Dozens of sectors receive tax breaks or credit subsidies on the basis that they are national champions, or from “temporary” help that has never ended. Brazil’s courts cost 1.3% of GDP, making them the second-most expensive in the world, with much of that going on cushy pensions and perks. Some $15bn a year, or 78% of the military budget, is spent on pensions and salaries. The United States spends just one-quarter of the defence budget on personnel.

Even the beneficiaries of these perks admit this is unwise. “I have no doubt that for the Brazilian private sector it would be better to give up short-term benefits in exchange for a thriving country in the long run”, says Beto Abreu, the boss of Suzano, the world’s largest cellulose producer.

Yet perhaps the biggest reason spending is high is that the constitution requires it. The charter mandates an extraordinary 90% of all federal spending. Notably it ties most public pensions to wage growth, and requires health and education spending to rise in line with revenue growth. If Brazil were to end most tax exemptions and undo these two policies, its debt-to-GDP ratio, which is already above 90%, would be almost 20 percentage points lower by 2034 than it would be without any reform, reckons the IMF. To deal with all this, what is really needed is to amend the constitution.

High spending and a tangle of subsidised credit schemes also reduce the effectiveness of monetary policy. That means the central bank must increase rates even higher to control inflation. Brazil’s real interest rate of 10% is among the highest in the world. Such rates cripple investment and drag down growth, while well-connected businessmen can get their hands on artificially cheap rates.

Among those who must pay the full rate is the government itself. It is thus stuck in a cycle: it issues debt to finance high spending, and must then pay eye-watering interest payments. The government spent 30% of revenue in 2023 on interest payments. This makes it harder to afford spending that could boost productivity, such as education and infrastructure.

Tackling these problems would help unlock growth in Brazil, which has lagged behind almost all other major developing economies in the past two decades, including those of China, India, Indonesia and Turkey. Growth, in turn, would make it easier to escape the calculus of zero-sum politics, since rising prosperity dulls the appeal of the politics of grievance.

The prerequisite for such changes is pragmatic politics. To amend the constitution in order to rein in the power of the supreme court, the profligacy of Congress and the vast mandatory spending requires a three-fifths majority in both legislative houses. That is daunting, but possible. In 2023 Lula’s government passed a tax reform through a constitutional change. Brazil’s constitution has been amended over 140 times since 1988. The trouble is that those amendments often just tweak policy. Bolder reforms that excise some of the endless policy prescriptions from the constitution would reduce the court’s power and make cutting spending easier

Brazil’s political landscape has been in disarray for much of the past decade. Intense polarisation has made it harder to pass reforms. Mr Bolsonaro’s removal from public life could give the country a chance to tackle these problems. It will take boldness, vision and compromise. But politicians on both sides appear ready to try. ■

ECONOMIST  

 

  

 

 

 

How to Try, and Fail, to Carry Out a Coup

 

 

By Ana Ionova

Jair Bolsonaro had just nine weeks to pull off a plan that was both risky and extraordinary. With the help of allies, prosecutors say, he was intent on overturning the October 2022 presidential election he had lost.

A close aide came up with a sinister solution: poisoning Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had defeated Mr. Bolsonaro, before he was sworn in as Brazil’s next president on New Year’s Day 2023, according to a document that had been printed at the presidential offices while Mr. Bolsonaro was in the building.

“Lula does not walk up the ramp,” referring to the sloped path to the presidential offices, said another document seized during a police raid on Mr. Bolsonaro’s party headquarters.

Mr. Bolsonaro, who denies plotting to kill Mr. Lula, will stand trial on Tuesday before Brazil’s Supreme Court on charges that he oversaw a sweeping plan to cling to power in a case many see as a crucial test of the country’s young democracy. With a vast trove of prosecutorial evidence, most analysts say he is almost certain to be found guilty and could face decades in prison.

To piece together the case against Mr. Bolsonaro, The New York Times reviewed dozens of hours of testimony and hundreds of pages of police and prosecution documents from an investigation spanning nearly two years.

Prosecutors and Mr. Bolsonaro’s defense each point to the evidence to tell sharply diverging stories.

To investigators, Mr. Bolsonaro and dozens of ministers, military officials and aides worked doggedly to sow doubts about the election result; tried to enlist military leaders in overturning the vote; and drafted plans to jail, or even assassinate, perceived enemies.

To Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies, the case is built on lies and weak evidence with the aim of sabotaging his political comeback in next year’s presidential elections. He denies plotting to kill Mr. Lula and says what the police portray as a coup attempt was simply his efforts to study “ways within the Constitution” to remain in power after losing an election he claims was stolen from him.

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Mr. Bolsonaro at a rally earlier this year. He faces years in prison if he is convicted of plotting to overturn the presidential election.Credit...Dado Galdieri for The New York Times

The plan to keep Mr. Bolsonaro in power went into high gear in late October 2022, after Mr. Lula was declared the winner of the election, according to testimony given to investigators by Lt. Col. Mauro Cid, the president’s personal secretary.

Colonel Cid was in the room during many discussions among those accused of plotting a coup, and his testimony, which is part of a plea deal, is key to the prosecution’s case against Mr. Bolsonaro.

Mr. Bolsonaro first sought to discredit the results, Colonel Cid told the police, and he seized on Brazil’s electronic voting machines, which he had claimed for years were rigged, despite providing no evidence. He began planning an official complaint with electoral authorities, claiming that hundreds of thousands of votes had to be voided because of faulty machines.

Social media amplified claims of fraud, and supporters set up camps in front of army headquarters, demanding that the military nullify the results.

But the plan being hatched by Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies, investigators say, went far beyond trying to provoke a popular revolt.

At 9:23 a.m. on Nov. 9., 10 days after Mr. Bolsonaro’s defeat, a document, later found on a cellphone seized by investigators, was created at the presidential offices. It sketched out an extreme plan calling for the “extinction of the winning ticket.”

Mr. Lula and his running mate, Geraldo Alckmin, would be assassinated using “poison or chemical agents” or “lethal weaponry, such as explosives,” said the document, written by Gen. Mario Fernandes, a top aide to Mr. Bolsonaro.

A Supreme Court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, who had made decisions aimed at blocking online misinformation from Mr. Bolsonaro and his right-wing allies, was to be placed under surveillance, then jailed or killed, according to the document.

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Lt. Col. Mauro Cid, Mr. Bolsonaro’s former personal secretary, has provided crucial testimony to investigators who assembled the case against the former president. Credit...Evaristo Sa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

After a day of editing, General Fernandes printed the proposal at 5:09 p.m., investigators say. Forty minutes later, Gen. Fernandes arrived at the presidential residence, where Mr. Bolsonaro and Colonel Cid were present.

But General Fernandes says the document was nothing more than musings and that he never showed it to anyone, including Mr. Bolsonaro, according to his testimony during a Supreme Court hearing in July.

“I printed it for myself,” he testified. “Soon after, I tore it up.” The visit to the presidential residence, he said, was “a coincidence.”

Three days after the plan was drafted, Gen. Walter Braga Netto, Mr. Bolsonaro’s running mate and former chief of staff, called a meeting at his home to discuss implementing it, Colonel Cid testified. He told police that he and General Braga Netto were joined by two members of an elite special forces unit of the army.

General Braga Netto has denied the meeting ever took place, accusing Colonel Cid of lying to cut a deal with prosecutors.

As plans were made behind closed doors, the camps of protesters in front of military buildings were growing. Mr. Bolsonaro called the demonstrations “the fruit of indignation and feeling of injustice, regarding how the electoral process took place.”

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According to prosecutors, Mr. Bolsonaro’s running mate, Gen. Walter Braga Netto, left, called a meeting at his home to discuss implementing an assassination plot.Credit...Evaristo Sa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Bolsonaro’s inner circle continued pursuing their targeting of opponents, investigators say. On Dec. 6, General Fernandes printed the assassination plan at the presidential offices for a second time, according to investigators. Mr. Bolsonaro was in the building, the police say, citing signals from cellphone towers.

At the same time, Mr. Bolsonaro and his aides were also busy trying to recruit the military’s help, investigators say.

Early on Dec. 7, Colonel Cid signed into the presidential residence for an important meeting, according to text messages and entry records recovered by the police. Soon, the leaders of Brazil’s three military branches began arriving.

During an hourlong discussion, Mr. Bolsonaro presented the top military brass a legal decree calling for the declaration of a state of emergency and new, “clean” elections, according to Colonel Cid and what one commander present told the police. He would remain in power until a new vote was held. The decree, which Colonel Cid said Mr. Bolsonaro edited after it had been drafted, also called for the jailing of Justice Moraes.

Mr. Bolsonaro has said, in court and in the media, that he never discussed doing anything illegal at meetings with military leaders but was instead exploring legal measures within the Constitution, including “a state of siege,” as he sought to remain in office while challenging election fraud.

This measure, which temporarily grants special powers to the president, is intended to be used only in times of great crisis or war. And, by then, electoral authorities had already concluded that there were no signs of any irregularities.

At the meeting, the proposed decree drew mixed reactions. The commander of Brazil’s navy supported the plan and placed his troops at Mr. Bolsonaro’s disposal, investigators say. But the leaders of the army and the air force flatly rejected the idea.

After the meeting, the group around Mr. Bolsonaro planned their next steps. On Dec. 8, General Fernandes sent a voice message on WhatsApp to Colonel Cid, recounting a conversation he said he had with Mr. Bolsonaro. The two, he said, had discussed the timing of the assassination plot.

“I said, ‘Come on, President,’” General Fernandes said in the message. “‘We have already missed so many opportunities.’”

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Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva arriving for his inauguration in January 2023. Prosecutors say the plot to keep Mr. Bolsonaro in power included a plan to assassinate Mr. Lula before he took office.Credit...Eraldo Peres/Associated Press

But prosecutors say the failed pitch to the commanders worried the group because their plan to overturn the election would likely not succeed without the military’s support.

So, over the next week, the decree was tweaked and softened, according to Colonel Cid and digital records recovered by police. Plans to arrest Justice Moraes and other high-ranking figures were scrubbed from the text. At a second meeting, on Dec. 14, Mr. Bolsonaro pitched the revised plan to the three military commanders, the colonel said.

Gen. Marco Antônio Freire Gomes, the Army leader, again said no, telling Mr. Bolsonaro that his forces “would not act in anything that exceeded its constitutional authority,” he testified at a Supreme Court hearing. He told Mr. Bolsonaro that his plot carried legal consequences.

After the police found a copy of the decree declaring a state of emergency in Mr. Bolsonaro’s home during a search in February 2024, the former president questioned if it was really a plan to thwart democracy as prosecutors claim. “You call that a coup decree?” Mr. Bolsonaro said. He never edited the document, he added, and only printed it “to see what it was.”

Mr. Bolsonaro has also rejected accusations that he took part in drafting or approving plans to assassinate his rival. “If it had been proposed,” he told the Supreme Court during a hearing in June, “it would have been rejected, with immediate action taken.”

After military commanders refused to become part of any effort to subvert the election, prosecutors say that Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies abruptly dropped their plans.

Two days before the end of his presidential term, Mr. Bolsonaro flew to Florida. Breaking with tradition, he would not hand the presidential sash to Mr. Lula as he was sworn in on Jan. 1, 2023.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters, though, would not give up the fight.

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On Jan. 8, 2023, supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro stormed the presidential offices, the Supreme Court and Brazil’s Congress, an event that echoed the assault on the U.S. Capitol two years earlier.Credit...Adriano Machado/Reuters

A week after Mr. Lula was sworn into office, they stormed the presidential offices, the Supreme Court and Brazil’s Congress in a destructive riot that echoed the assault on the U.S. Capitol two years earlier.

After hours of chaos, the army finally arrived and began arresting the rioters.

In the United States, Mr. Bolsonaro was silent for hours. When he finally spoke, he condemned the destruction but rejected any responsibility. He had always operated, he said, “within the lines of the Constitution.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES  

 

 

 

He Faced Down Trump. Now Comes His Biggest Challenge.

 

 

By Andre Pagliarini

 President Trump seems to have it in for Latin America. Not since the darkest days of the Cold War has Washington pursued a policy of such hostility toward its southern neighbors. Yet one country has emerged as a special target of Mr. Trump’s ire: Brazil. In July he threatened 50 percent tariffs unless the authorities there halted the prosecution of the former president Jair Bolsonaro, accused of plotting against democracy after his 2022 defeat, and overturned a Supreme Court ruling on social media content.

The country’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, flatly refused. Instead, full of righteous indignation, he seized the nationalist mantle and cast himself as the defender of Brazilian sovereignty against Washington’s heavy hand. “At no point,” he told The Times, “will Brazil negotiate as if it were a small country up against a big country.” The eye-watering tariffs were duly imposed, though some exemptions softened the blow. Yet Mr. Lula’s refusal to be bullied and insistence that Brazil play an independent role on the world stage have brought him a bump in support at home.

He’s going to need it. Next year, at age 80, he will seek an unprecedented fourth term when Brazilians go to the polls. The election will not merely decide the fate of the government or Mr. Lula’s legacy. It will determine whether Brazil, the world’s fourth-largest democracy, will join the authoritarian chorus reverberating across the Western Hemisphere. For Mr. Lula and his country, the stakes could not be higher. The Brazilian president may have faced down Mr. Trump, but his biggest challenge is still to come.

For much of his third term, Mr. Lula has struggled with middling poll numbers. Despite low unemployment, inflation has been a nagging issue. There has also been a feeling among a considerable slice of the electorate that his foreign policy priorities, such as an early attempt to broker a settlement between Russia and Ukraine, as well as his trenchant criticism of the Israeli government, were quixotic and unproductive.

But things are looking up. A majority approve of his conduct on the world stage, and many back his handling of the spat with Mr. Trump. Recent polls also show him beating every tested matchup for 2026, including the São Paulo governor, Tarcísio de Freitas, a Bolsonarist die-hard seen as Mr. Lula’s most formidable challenger. The public mood, too, has shifted: More Brazilians say they fear a comeback for Mr. Bolsonaro than worry about Mr. Lula staying in power.

The president is now less a fading incumbent than a resilient front-runner. Improving consumer confidence explains some of it, but the broader political picture is just as important. With Mr. Bolsonaro barred from office until 2030, his son relocated to the United States to lobby the White House full time. His efforts appear to have paid off. But the Trump administration’s attempt to cow Brazil into dropping charges that may imminently lead to a long prison sentence for Mr. Bolsonaro has backfired. Despite the Bolsonaro family members’ endeavors to blame Mr. Lula, more Brazilians fault them for Mr. Trump’s costly tariffs.

The wind may be at Mr. Lula’s back, but considerable challenges remain. For one, the coalition that led him back to office three years ago is extremely fragile. His party alone cannot deliver a majority in today’s fragmented political system. Victory next year will require stitching together a broad alliance ranging from the center-left to pragmatic conservatives, the same unwieldy bloc that sustained his comeback in 2022. That means tending constantly to centrist governors, congressional leaders and business groups, whom the current crop of would-be opposition candidates are also courting. Can Mr. Lula convince centrists that democracy is on the ballot even if Mr. Bolsonaro is not?

It remains to be seen, too, how Mr. Trump’s commercial assault on Brazil will play out. Thanks to a concerted effort to diversify its trading partners, Brazil is much less reliant on the U.S. market than it once was. Still, there is a fine line between a principled defense of one’s national interests and political posturing in the face of calamity. Mr. Lula insists that he is perfectly willing to speak with Mr. Trump and has introduced a contingency plan to help with the fallout. For the moment, that is going over well enough. But if the tariffs prove lasting and more painful than expected, his unflinching approach may grate.

The right, meanwhile, is far from finished. Mr. Bolsonaro may be hobbled by legal troubles, but Bolsonarismo — a noxious blend of conspiracy, resentment, religious fervor and nostalgia for military order — is not so easily contained. While 39 percent of voters in a recent poll identified with Mr. Lula’s party, 37 percent favored Mr. Bolsonaro. The most credible heir remains Mr. de Freitas, a technocrat who owes his political career to the former president. Polling competitively, he must decide whether to tack toward the center in next year’s contest or pledge himself ever more faithfully to Mr. Bolsonaro’s reactionary movement.

If that strategic dilemma will define the opposition campaign, Mr. Lula’s will depend on whether he can keep the economy steady enough to blunt attacks on his management and frame the election as a referendum on democracy itself. He has already begun to do so, presenting himself as the bulwark against foreign interference and authoritarian relapse. If he can make 2026 about whether Brazil continues as an independent, pluralist society or veers back toward a pattern of democratic erosion that defers to the interests of the United States, he stands a decent chance.

Mr. Lula has always thrived on long odds. He rose from poverty to the presidency, returned from prison to defeat an incumbent for the first time in Brazil’s postdictatorship history and has outlasted every obituary written for his political career. Yet the election ahead may be his greatest trial yet. Mr. Trump and his allies will surely seek to influence the race in some way, putting the Brazilian incumbent’s famous campaign skills to the test.

Mr. Lula is undoubtedly a legendary figure of the country’s past. Now he must convince voters that he can lead it into the future, too.

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

 

Why R. Crumb Worked With a Biographer

 

 

 

By Molly Young

How fortunate that my first parasocial relationship, as they’re now called, was with a genius. I encountered Robert Crumb’s work at the age of 8 or 9, when his comics could be found — lurking and sweating — in the “Counterculture” section of my local used-book store in San Francisco. Frightening stuff for a kid. Titillating, too. But “Counterculture” was crammed with scary and spicy material. Only Crumb’s work, specifically the autobiographical comics, wormed under my skin.

The worming occurred, I understood much later, because of the material’s intimacy. Few artists have the technical ability, desire, intellect and courage (or berserk compulsion) to render their souls legible on a page — not to mention their kinks, agonies, protruding Adam’s apple and sub-ramrod posture. What I was sensing in my bookstore adventures with Crumb was an early glimmer of what it might mean to truly know a person, with all the joy and terror that such knowing entails. It hardly mattered that I would never meet the man.

Except, 30 years later, I did. One morning in April an elegant figure in a fedora strolled up Avenue A in the East Village. He was instantly recognizable for his spidery hands and Coke-bottle glasses. With him was the author and curator Dan Nadel, who has written “Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life,” a superb biography of an artist who, starting in the 1960s, changed the shape of comics in every decade that followed. Nothing escaped the penetrating eye of Crumb, whose work took on liberal hypocrisy, sexual and racial violence, Christianity, drugs, the C.I.A., existential distress, love, consumerism and death.

To help promote the book Crumb had flown over from France, where he has lived since 1991 in a house that his late wife, the influential artist Aline Kominsky-Crumb, found for the family.

We met at the restaurant Superiority Burger, where the artist and his biographer slouched in a red booth and deplored the state of modern pants.

“Modern pants are stingily designed,” Crumb, 81, griped. “They have a low waistline and a high crotch, so your junk is all bunched up in there. Are they supposed to be sexy or what?”

“It’s a complicated thing, getting dressed,” Nadel said.

Crumb: “It shouldn’t be, but it is.”

“You want to look like an adult.”

“A dignified adult,” Crumb said. “People these days wear untucked T-shirts with some stupid logo on it and shorts and sneakers. Clown outfits. They look like idiots. Fools. You can’t look intelligent in an outfit like that.”

“Tell that to Zuckerberg,” Nadel said. They chuckled.

In person, as on the page, Crumb has a charmingly rude ’tude and a steel-trap mind.

By the time Nadel conceived of the biography, other writers had been circling, but none had the encyclopedic knowledge of comics history required for the job. “When Dan came forward, he already knew all that stuff,” Crumb said.

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Crumb spoke about his wife and collaborator Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who died in 2022. “To be in Aline’s presence, you felt like life was going to be interesting.”Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times

Still, the six-year process had a slow start. Nadel wrote a letter to Crumb on stationery and mailed it off. No response. A few months later, he followed up by email. A reply came: If Nadel was serious about the project, he had to come to France. In the days before traveling, Nadel grew so nervous he choked on a piece of lamb and wound up in the emergency room. The trip was postponed.

Eventually he made it to Crumb’s village in southern France. The two had dinner, played records and came to an agreement the following morning: Nadel could write the biography under the condition that he address the (plentiful) charges of sexism and racism against the artist’s work head-on, as Crumb had no interest in brooking a hagiography.

Unlike paintings or novels, comics hit the beholder with a double whammy of visual and verbal expression, and the result can electrify as swiftly as it can alienate. Over the decades, many have been alienated by Crumb, whose Dürer-level hand is attached to a mind that rages and leers as often as it probes and theorizes.

Part of Nadel’s motivation, he said, was to contextualize a figure who had zigzagged from the margins to the mainstream and back. “There was this idea that Crumb was a bad boy breaking all the rules of the form,” he said. “Actually he’s a traditionalist who figured out a way to use the language of comics to say entirely new things — to deal with adulthood in America in a frank and confrontational way, while maintaining unbelievable formal rigor.”

To write the book, Nadel submerged himself in a colossal archive. Because Crumb doesn’t own a computer or smartphone, he reads email on printouts provided by his assistant, Maggie. He then composes a response by hand, which Maggie types and sends. Hard copies of both messages are then filed in boxes. Nadel estimated that he had read between 3,000 and 4,000 pages of correspondence alone.

“You buried me in paper,” Nadel said over coffee and French fries. “I didn’t know how I’d swim through it all.”

“What amazes me is that you did.”

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There’s gold in them thar rubbish bags. Nadel and Crumb examine a found object — and decide to keep it.Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times

After lunch the two went for a walk. Despite earlier flirtations with spring, the temperature had sunk to 34 degrees and New York’s organisms were suffering from confusion: The daffodils drooped, the humans shivered in light jackets and only one of dozens of cherry blossom trees in the neighborhood had mustered itself into bloom.

On East Fifth Street Crumb spotted a faux-African statue buried in a heap of trash bags. He strolled into the rubbish and lifted the statue, brushing away coffee grounds and a lemon peel. “This is so wacky,” he said in delight, tucking the statue under his arm.

Next on the itinerary was a visit to the apartment of Crumb’s friend and bandmate John Heneghan, who is a collector of rare 78s. Heneghan answered the door with his wife, Eden Brower, who sings and plays ukulele and guitar in Eden & John’s East River String Band, along with Crumb and other guests.

“I found this on the street,” Crumb announced, presenting the statue as a house gift. It was admired and displayed in the apartment kitchen.

The three men and Brower, who wore an ethereal pink skirt, settled into the living room and stared down Heneghan’s collection of records: rows and rows of fragile discs in brown sleeves, all neatly labeled and arranged beneath portraits of bluesmen by Crumb.

They played Daddy Stovepipe, the Tennessee Chocolate Drops, Gus Cannon, Bradley Kincaid. Crumb closed his eyes and hummed along, knees bouncing, ecstatic in aural submission.

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The gang laughed when Crumb revealed his (negative) opinion of the film “A Complete Unknown,” which stars the actor Timothée Chalamet — “Timothée Whatshisface” to Crumb — as Bob Dylan.Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times

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A gallery of heroes — some in two dimensions, some in three — at Heneghan and Brower’s apartment.Credit...Graham Dickie/The New York Times

It was time for the journalist to see herself out, leaving the aficionados to their mournful jug tones and melodic plaints. Earlier in the day Crumb had confessed bafflement toward the ongoing interest of the media, or biographers for that matter, in his life.

“There’s no more public person than me,” he said, alluding to decades of radiological self-exposure. “Everyone knows more than they care to know about my private life.”

“Why did you agree to let me do this book?” Nadel asked.

Crumb thought about it for a moment, worrying the fabric on his fine trousers.

“I guess I felt sorry for you,” he decided. They both cracked up.

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

 

VITRA - The Brazilian Artist Who Listens to Minerals

 

  

 

By Siddhartha Mitter

The car sped southward from Belo Horizonte, the highway climbing out from Brazil’s third-largest city into the surrounding hills. Red dust from oncoming convoys of heavy trucks drifted onto the windshield. On board, Luana Vitra — one of Brazil’s fastest-rising young artists and the offspring of a long lineage of manual workers in this rugged, iron-mining region in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais — was offering a quick précis of the land and local temperament.

“We have a culture that is made from iron,” Vitra said. “What our ancestors lived inside the mines made us the way we are now.” People in Minas Gerais, she said, were shaped by a legacy of watching out for others and forming survival strategies in mines where labor was exploited and collapses were frequent. Her grandfather, she added, attributed his longevity to the prayer to Saint George — who is associated in Afro-Brazilian religion with Ogun, the spirit of iron and metallurgy — that he kept tucked in his helmet. “Iron is very much in my history,” she said.

The daughter of a carpenter and a teacher, Vitra grew up in Contagem, a city in the Belo Horizonte agglomeration known for its concentration of heavy industry. Now, at 30, she has emerged as one of the most visible and distinctive — in Brazil and abroad — of a wave of young Black Brazilian artists who are finding new languages with which to explore their histories and connect to the world.

She places her region’s materials — particularly iron ore and copper — at the heart of elegant, often room-scaled installations, their characteristic reddish tones set against deep blue fabric or painted backgrounds. The compositions extend to beads, ceramics, glass and clean-drawn lines on various surfaces. They favor symmetry, with a ritual feel that nods to Afro-Brazilian religion — the metal arrows, the talismans — but also to broader and nonspecific sacred geometries.

Shaping every installation, she said, is an “equation” — not mathematical but metaphorical, calibrating the emotional architecture that results from particular material combinations, as if working from “a periodic table with feelings connected to minerals.”

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Two of Luana Vitra’s works at SculptureCenter: “Dança” (“Dance”), foreground, and “Terremoto” (“Earthquake”), background, both from 2025.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

This season, Vitra — who has already shown in prestigious venues like the 2023 São Paulo and 2025 Sharjah biennials — has taken over the main space of SculptureCenter in Queens, through July 28, with “Amulets,” one of her largest installations to date, and one that is characteristically precise.

Metal arrows rise from urns or dangle from textile-swaddled stems. They pierce iron rocks or hold the center of anchor bowls set with crystals and stones. Clay vessels are wrapped in white fabric and studded with nails. Iron, crystals and gemstones — selenite, sodalite, kyanite — are arranged on rectangles of sand. Walls of feathers, dyed white and deep blue, soften the space.

Though the materials were assembled on site, they were shipped from Minas Gerais — a prerequisite for Vitra, for whom local minerals carry histories as specific as her own. Her region’s iron tells its own distinct story; her position is to listen and channel this information. “I’m interested in the perspective of the matter,” she said. “I’m thinking about its desire, trying to understand its subjectivity.”

For Jovanna Venegas, the SculptureCenter curator who organized the show, it’s Vitra’s insistent commitment to her terrain that makes her art resonate beyond the region. “So much of Luana’s work is about Minas,” Venegas said. “It departs, of course, into other dimensions, of materiality and sculpture and spirituality. But it was important that the iron come from there.” (Only the sand was sourced in New York, Venegas said.)

On the road, Vitra noted a row of trees along the highway. They concealed an enormous open-pit iron mine, Capão Xavier, one of many in this area, known as the Iron Quadrangle, whose scale is undeniable on satellite images even if hidden at ground level.

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A detail from Vitra’s “Terremoto.”Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

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Walls of dyed feathers soften the space.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

“They’ll plant trees to block it,” she said. For all the verdant beauty, she said, many of the surrounding mountains were similarly ravaged. “That’s the reality of the landscape here,” she said. “Everything is super beautiful, but completely destroyed.”

The minerals, she noted, were here long before humans intervened. “The minerals exist,” she added. “Sometimes I think that all we do is disorganize everything. Other times I think we are part of it: We have these minerals inside us. Still, when I look at the mines, I can get a bit angry about humanity.”

Minas Gerais — the name means “general mines” — has been an extraction zone since its first gold rush in the 17th century. It became Brazil’s largest destination for enslaved labor, a practice that was only formally abolished in 1888. Today the region produces half of Brazil’s iron, plus gold, zinc, lithium and niobium. The environmental fallout includes horrors like the Brumadinho dam disaster of 2019, where 272 villagers perished in a toxic surge of liquefied iron-mining waste when an iron-ore tailings dam collapsed.

Vitra won’t look away. But where some artists might channel such material into visual investigations rich with documentary footage and interactive databases — think of the work of Forensic Architecture on petrochemical pollution and its disproportionate racial impact in south Louisiana, for example — her method is at once more personal and more abstract. Minerals, she argues, shape us in more ways than economics or public health can grasp.

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Luana Vitra’s “Equilibrio” (“Equilibrium”), 2025. The materials were assembled on site but were shipped from Minas Gerais, a southeastern state in Brazil.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

For Hélio Menezes, former director of the Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo and a curator of the 2023 São Paulo biennial — where Vitra’s installation included silver and copper canaries, alluding to both the danger of suffocation in mines and dreams of freedom — she has “dismantled in a very sophisticated way” any remaining art-world assumptions that work by Black artists — particularly Black female artists — be principally figuration or self portraiture.

Instead, Menezes characterized her work as a way to imagine a relationship beyond exploitation for humans and minerals. “When she researches metals and minerals, she thinks of them not in economic terms, but asks if we could speak their language, what would they tell us? She opens a speculation on how to create a vocabulary, a common language between metals, minerals and us.”

Vitra prepared the SculptureCenter show in residence at JA.CA, an art center in Nova Lima, outside Belo Horizonte, built from colorfully accessorized shipping containers; one served as her apartment, up a staircase with a mine view. When we met in April, the work was en route to New York, but she pointed out leftover materials — chunks of hematite rock, rust-red with gray speckles — and she estimated their iron content and where on the mountain they came from.

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Iron-rich rocks used for Luana Vitra's sculptures, seen at the art center in Minas Gerais where she prepared her new works.Credit...via the artist; Photo by Nina Morais

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A supply of metal arrows, a frequent element in Vitra’s installations.Credit...via the artist; Photo by Nina Morais

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Another detail from “Terremoto” with clay pots arranged in a cross. Vitra’s work is both personal and abstract; at home in Brazil, she said, “When I look at the mines, I can get a bit angry about humanity.”Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

The Minas Gerais terrain and history have inspired distinctive art practices. One of Vitra’s teachers at the art school of the State University of Minas Gerais was Solange Pessoa, whose sculptures often refer to the area’s natural materials and its architecture and archaeology. Around town, Vitra often saw Paulo Nazareth, the multidisciplinary artist who journeys by foot and bus across the Americas when not in Palmital, a hardscrabble hillside settlement where he hosts community gatherings; he became a mentor and friend.

But as Vitra’s own visual language took shape, she found a key prompt at home. Amid her father’s bric-a-brac on their terrace were rusted metal cans — improvised planters from a project he once envisioned of planting trees in the neighborhood. Years of oxidation had left them jagged; when they were flattened, Vitra found, they resembled ridges and tree lines.

It was as if the manufactured product, now decaying, yearned to go home. This insight — part material, part poetic — would birth “Desejo-Ruína” (“Ruin Desire”), a series of works debuting her artistic engagement with iron. “When natural materials are removed from their origin,” she wrote in a description of that series, “they carry within themselves a desire for ruin, which is what returns them to their original state.”

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Installation view of “Giro,” 2023, Luana Vitra’s ongoing exhibition at Inhotim, the contemporary art museum and botanic garden in Minas Gerais state, Brazil.Credit...Victor Galvão

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The series “Desejo-Ruina” (“Desire-Ruin”) is made from rust-eroded metal cans that Luana Vitra flattened into wall-mounted pieces, having observed that their jagged forms recalled mountain ridges and tree lines. It marked the start of her work with metals and minerals.Credit...via Tomie Ohtake Institute

Nowadays Vitra operates at large scale. (In addition to SculptureCenter, she has an ongoing installation at Inhotim, the art institution and botanic garden outside Belo Horizonte, that fills a former wood shop; later this year she will appear in the Thailand Biennale, in Phuket.) But her relationship to the materials remains intimate, attentive to the poetic and spiritual possibilities connecting them.

“Copper is softer than iron,” she said, as an example. “When you touch it, if your hands are warm, it will warm very fast; iron will not.” Properties like density, resilience, conductivity, carry meanings far beyond economic use. Thus, to connect copper with clay is to join a material that is conductive to one that isolates. “Both energies are necessary for transcendence,” she said.

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The artist, walking through her installation, “Amulets,” through July 28 at SculptureCenter. “I want to understand how the invisible moves,” she said.Credit...Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. for The New York Times

Running through Vitra’s project is the belief that relations among beings and with nature can be far richer and more reciprocal than the violence of extraction. This is, in some ways, an age-old notion in many traditions. But for Gabi Ngcobo, a South African curator who runs Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam — where she held an exhibition by Vitra in 2024 — it’s also a growing interest, driven by young artists in the Global South.

“Luana has an ability to translate ancestral intelligences,” Ngcobo said. “I see that as a movement of a lot of artists, in Brazil but also on the continent in Africa, who are not shy to go toward these questions in order to understand something about the future.” “It’s very futuristic to use these technologies that were stripped away from us to reconnect or remember,” Ngcobo added.

Having refined her method in Minas Gerais, Vitra is exploring other knowledge systems — of Zulu bead-makers in South Africa, weavers in Ghana. “I want to understand how the invisible moves,” she said, paraphrasing the Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva: “Our work is to return complexity to the world.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES