Lula’s almost 50% Amazon deforestation cut failed to lift pro-forest candidates
Lula’s administration has reduced Amazon deforestation by almost 50%, yet that success secured little noticeable electoral traction for either Lula or pro-forest candidates in Sunday’s first round, where Flávio Bolsonaro — whom the Guardian describes as “far-right” — won 47% to incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s 44.2%. The result, the Guardian reported, is “an unnerving jolt” to climate and nature campaigners and, taken out of context, “appears to be a vote against the forest.” The contest, the Guardian wrote, appears “to be of far more concern to the outside world than to voters in Latin America’s biggest, richest and most biodiverse nation.”
Under Jair Bolsonaro’s four years in power, Amazon deforestation rose 59.5% — “roughly equivalent to destroying 2bn trees,” the Guardian reported. Flávio, the Guardian wrote, is the heir to his father’s political legacy and “has shown that he will be just as willing as his father to dismantle protections for climate and nature and allow illegal miners, loggers and land grabbers to invade Indigenous territories.” Flávio has pledged to free his father, who is imprisoned for plotting a military coup and attempting to annihilate democracy in Brazil, and has said Jair could have any position he wants in his administration. Flávio is part of Bolsonarism, which the Guardian describes as “geared towards maximising profits for extractive industries regardless of the environmental cost.” As a lawmaker, Flávio backed a 2019 bill to eliminate requirements for Amazon landowners to maintain a proportion of native vegetation. His presidential manifesto “completely ignored the climate crisis,” the Guardian reported, and he has courted support from some of the most predatory landowners in the rainforest.
The down-ballot results underscored the political shift away from forest protection. Former environment minister Marina Silva lost her bid for the Senate. Joenia Wapichana, former head of Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency Funai, failed to win a seat in Congress. Of 57 Indigenous candidates who ran Sunday, only two won.
The political ground around the Amazon itself has moved in the Bolsonarist direction. Bolsonarists now control seven of the nine states in the Brazilian Amazon and could win an eighth in the runoff. In Pará, gubernatorial winner Daniel Santos was fined $275,000 (£208,000) for clearing 280 hectares (692 acres) of his own land without authorization and has pledged to waive such penalties, the Guardian reported.
In Congress, the Bolsonaro family expanded its presence. The Guardian wrote that “Jair’s brother, Eduardo, and mother-in-law, Michelle, were elected to the Senate, while an uncle and brother won seats in the lower house of deputies.” Even before the election, the agribusiness-dominated Congress had been pushing to weaken environmental protections — a trend that will now be “almost impossible to stop,” the Guardian reported. The Supreme Court, which has served as a partial check on miners, ranchers, and monoculturalists, is described as in “chaos,” leaving Lula with limited institutional recourse even if he wins the runoff.
The Guardian identifies several structural factors behind the disconnect between environmental stakes and voter priorities. Social media, the paper reports, has been used “far more effectively by the far right” during the campaign. During Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, his sons participated in what the Guardian described as the “hate cabinet” that spread disinformation and fear through WhatsApp groups and other online channels, with environmentalists frequent targets. Carlos Bolsonaro, Jair’s second son, was indicted by federal police for leading the group. Lula’s own social media campaign “has not been as effective as that of the Bolsonaro team,” the Guardian wrote. US-style Pentecostalism is also steadily supplanting Catholicism across Brazil, particularly in the Amazon. The Guardian reports that the political and environmental consequences of that religious shift can be seen by comparing the pro-nature treatise of the past two popes with the sermons of many evangelical preachers who “encourage followers to seek wealth today as much as, if not more, than following moral creeds to ensure a good afterlife.”
The Brazilian election is unfolding within what the Guardian describes as “a broader pattern of the far right taking control to expand extractivism despite growing evidence that the capitalist economy is breaking planetary boundaries.” The paper reports that the geopolitics of the climate crisis are “exacerbating great power rivalry between the US and China” and amplifying extreme ideologies alongside extreme weather. In the past two years, Donald Trump has ripped apart environmental regulations in the United States and treated the rest of the Americas as his sphere of influence. Argentina has aligned with that posture; Venezuela has been invaded for its resources; and Colombia, Peru, and Chile have seen a sharp shift to the right. Brazilian intelligence has warned that the United States has attempted to interfere in the election. The Guardian reports that Jair Bolsonaro “went so far as to salute the US flag” and that his son Eduardo urged the US to apply tariffs on the Brazilian people to “punish” the government for imprisoning his father.
Lula’s path to a runoff victory is narrow. Most of the eliminated candidates were on the right, meaning their supporters are more likely to switch to Flávio. “No first round leader has ever failed to win the runoff of a Brazilian presidential election,” the Guardian noted. Lula could have a small chance if he can win over the many millions of voters who cast blank or void ballots. Lula, 80, has been slow to adapt — though the Guardian calls him “arguably the most iconic and successful Latin American politician of the 21st century” — and his messaging has landed less sharply with voters than in his earlier career. The Workers’ Party has struggled in an era of weaker unions and, in some ways, has been the victim of its own success — social policies that raised millions out of poverty have created greater expectations for consumption, and huge subsidies to rural producers have aligned them with the right.
The stakes extend beyond the Amazon itself. “It is not just the Amazon that is in peril, but all of Brazil’s biomes, its traditional peoples and the stability of the global climate,” the Guardian wrote. “If Bolsonaro wins, it won’t just be Lula that is finished, it could also be the Amazon and democracy itself,” the paper reported. Voters can change their minds on October 25 or, constitutionally, in four years, the Guardian noted, but the runoff will now determine how much longer that option remains available.