Will right-wing Brazilians call time on the Bolsonaros?

While Brazil’s left continues to celebrate president Lula’s epic come-from-behind victory in the recent presidential election, the country’s right is facing a reckoning.

It is rare after such a close, bitter election that the choice of 128 million voters, split 51.8 to 48.2 per cent, can be vindicated so quickly. But the refusal of senator Flávio Bolsonaro to recognise his defeat confirmed again the authoritarian DNA of the first family of Brazil’s far right.

The verdict delivered by voters helped preserve their democracy. Flávio’s subsequent flight from Brazil, just hours after posting a video dismissing rumours he was about to flee the country, underlined his reliance on blatant falsehoods over the course of his public life.

Running rather than staying to face the corruption investigations against him also left his political allies embarrassed and his almost 60 million voters abandoned.

Then his short-lived effort to declare himself president-elect from his exile in the United States not only highlighted his anti-democratic tendencies, but also showed his bravado far outstrips his scant political capabilities.

Under pressure from his hosts, he had to almost immediately downgrade his self-styled presidential status to “leader of Brazil”. The Trump administration has seen its none-too-subtle campaign to swing Brazil’s election in Flávio’s favour crash and burn. Now US president Donald Trump has already signalled that, while unhappy at the outcome, he sees Flávio as that thing he hates most – a loser – and will not be joining him on his crusade to overturn another Bolsonaro defeat at the ballot box.

This reflects the reality that the US has vanishingly few options that might conceivably force Brazil to revisit its vote. Brazil has the geographic and economic dimensions that guarantee it strategic autonomy.

With this comes the confidence to face down any bullying from Washington. It also has cards to play should the US opt for confrontation, principally that of deepening its good relations with China, something the White House will be eager to avoid.

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So Flávio and his family were welcomed to the US, but his stay there is likely to be a diminishing experience. Already the right-wing opposition back home is looking to move on from his defeat.

Finally, it seems that after two lost presidential elections under the Bolsonaros, significant players on the right are preparing to break with the family, whose patriarch, former president Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year sentence for a coup attempt, and his two most politically prominent sons are now in US exile.

This will require bravery. Much of the right’s popular base remains devoted to a clan that has always put its own interests first. There will be two Bolsonaros in the new senate and two in the lower house of congress, providing a Brazil-based focus for their more radicalised supporters.

If more moderate forces on the right want to bring down the curtain on the Bolsonaro era, a confrontation is probably desirable, if not inevitable. The need for a clarifying moment, one that might define what the right will be and not be, is best illustrated by the reaction to the defeat within the “bolsonarismo” political movement.

This saw a nationwide wave of vindictiveness unleashed by Bolsonaro supporters struggling to cope with their loss. After calls to punish those they see as responsible for Lula’s victory, this campaign has been directed at his voters, poorer Brazilians in general, and even charities devoted to helping them.

Among those impacted? A charity helping children with cancer was targeted by an online campaign. Most prominently there were calls for business owners to dismiss employees who voted for Lula.

Worse, there were multiple reports of this happening. Laís Jordy, the wife of one Bolsonaro-supporting senator-elect, justified this, arguing in a social media post that the vote of a Lula supporter “hurts your business, it hurts your family, it hurts your life”.

When her husband, Carlos Jordy, commented on her video, it was not to apologise, or generally disown a vindictive campaign that is not only illegal but reeks of Brazil’s old slave-owning mentality. Instead it was to rail against the abuse directed online at Laís for a post she quickly took down, another example of the far right’s fondness for playing the victim card.

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Since it emerged as a national force, bolsonarismo has stirred up the darker spirits in the country’s psyche – racism, misogyny, homophobia, violence – all to further the political ambitions of a deeply corrupt clan whose twin legacy after nearly four decades in politics is the degradation of civil norms and its own dubious wealth.

Having taken one chance on the family, with calamitous consequences when electing Jair Bolsonaro president in 2018, a majority of Brazilian voters have rejected the Bolsonaros in the two subsequent presidential elections.

Lula’s victory was also the victory of those Brazilians who voted for him not because they supported the veteran leftist, but because they rejected the obscurantist vision of bolsonarismo for their society. Now it appears the moment has arrived for the Brazilian right to do the same. Until it does so, its chances of leading the country again look much reduced.