Today, Explained - How to run for president from a hospital bed

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

One candidate was stabbed. Another is sitting in jail. His replacement was slapped with corruption charges. Just your friendly neighborhood candidates for president in Brazil. *********** Correction: This episode mistakenly notes that a leading presidential candidate died in a helicopter crash in 2014. Eduardo Campos actually died in a plane crash. *********** Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's still pretty much a brand new month, the month of October, and every month Audible members get one credit for any audiobook they choose, plus two Audible Originals from a changing selection that they can't get anywhere else. You can start a 30-day trial and your first audiobook is free at audible.com slash todayexplained or when you text todayexplIN to 500-500. Brazil's got a presidential election coming up on Sunday. It's the usual drill. There's a first round if no one gets more than 50% of the votes.

There's a second round later this month. Whoever wins gets to lead the country for the next four years. But here's where things get interesting. One leading candidate campaigned from a hospital bed and another campaigned from jail. This has been a dramatic and tumultuous election in Brazil for a number of reasons. Sarah Maslin is The Economist's Brazil correspondent. Brazil's in a really tough place right now. It has gone through the deepest and longest economic recession in its history. And voters are extremely frustrated because of that

and also a series of interlocking corruption scandals known as the Lava Jato or car wash operation. What many believe to be the biggest corruption scandal ever anywhere in the world. This bribery and money laundering scheme spread throughout Latin America, but the epicenter is in Brazil and it has already cost that country billions of dollars. Basically tarred nearly all of the major political parties, and given the sense that politics here is just extremely rotten. Starting in 2014, prosecutors revealed kickbacks between politicians from nearly all of the major parties and private companies whereby bribes or campaign donations from those companies would then lead to government contracts or laws that were good for their businesses. And it's just an

absolutely massive thing. You know, even to this day, there's sort of more cases coming out on a pretty regular basis related to the car wash scandal, which is where it all began in a car wash that was used to launder money. It all began in the capital city of Brasilia in the most mundane of places, a gas station that had once housed a car wash. In what came to be known as Operation Car Wash, the police tapped the phones of a money transfer business housed there,

and in 2012, they heard the voice of Alberto Youssef, an infamous money launderer, The New York Times reported. Anyone linked to him immediately came under suspicion. The effect that it has had on Brazilians is a real sort of sense that corruption is the basis of the entire political system and they blame the economic recession and crisis on corruption, which isn't quite right because, you know, to be honest, the recession also has a lot to do with legal distortions where companies were given subsidies and there was irresponsible budget

management and lending. But, you know, a lot of Brazilians, they're struggling to buy everything they need at the supermarket. And to them, you know, the corruption is the explanation for why the economy is struggling. And that sort of comes as a surprise, right? Because Brazil was doing really well there for a minute? Absolutely. So Brazil had a really exciting rise in the early 2000s where their economy was doing well. While the U.S. economy is slumping,

the economies of some nations are booming, among them Brazil's. And it began to take sort of a leadership role on the international stage. So for a lot of Brazilians, it feels like a pretty deep fall to where they are now. And, you know, there's hope that someone will be able to bring the country back to that kind of prosperity. But before that, there's just some pretty serious problems to fix. So who are the candidates who are offering to fix it? Who are the frontrunners? The two leaders in the polls are a far-right candidate named Jair Bolsonaro and a leftist candidate named Fernando Haddad. Começa agora o programa Haddad Presidente.

And they couldn't be more different. Bolsonaro is an outsider. He has promised to shake things up and rid the country of corruption. And then the other candidate, Heredity, is the representative of a party that many Brazilians see as responsible for all of the corruption. And then other Brazilians see as responsible for the prosperity. So I would say the principal factor of this election is stark polarization and a real divide in the vision for what Brazil is going to look like in the future. And each of their campaigns has sort of been wild in totally different ways, right? Well, this election has had some crazy twists and turns. First of all, until just a few

weeks ago, Haddad wasn't even the candidate for the Workers' Party. They were running with the ex-president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, very popular politician, but actually in jail. The Supreme Court narrowly voted against his petition to remain free while he appeals a 12-year corruption conviction. This means Brazil's most popular politician and the frontrunner for October's presidential election must go to jail. Which eventually meant that he was barred and Haddad was swapped in. He's been in jail since April, but his party, knowing that he was just such a popular politician, kept him as a candidate until the bitter end. And his candidacy was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court. But they were running campaign ads showing Lula with Haddadji and then sort of in the background Haddad's actual vice presidential candidate. And these ads say things like Haddadji is Lula and Lula is Haddadji.

Almost trying to suggest to voters that they're voting for Haddadji, but really it's going to be Lula who's running the show. Wow. So there's no subtlety there. Not at all. none at all. So who is Haddad and how is he faring as sort of the stand-in for Lula? So Haddad is extremely enigmatic. We all want to know who Haddad is. We have to tell the people that we are feeling that same pain, but that it's not time to go back home with our heads down.

It's time to take to the streets with our heads high up to win this election. And we will win it for Lula, for the Workers' Party, for the Community Party, for all social movements, and for Brazil. He was a minister under Lula and then the mayor of Sao Paulo. People who worked with him said that he was a responsible leader and effective and a good negotiator. All kind of qualities that you want in a leader. However, he comes from this party that has kind of refused to come to terms with its participation in these massive corruption scandals, which sort of leads to this question of how much Haddad will be able to strike his own path if he's elected or how much he'd just be sort of a puppet of the workers' party.

So on the left, you have this candidate who's currently in jail slash his replacement stand-in. How are things going on the right? I wish I could tell you that things were calm on the right, but it has been crazy there as well. Bolsonaro is this far-right congressman, but hasn't gotten that much play in the public eye until the past couple of years when he's managed to cast himself as this outsider, traditional values, iron fist approach to crime, and has skyrocketed to the forefront of this race, casting himself as the guy who can come in and fix things here. That has gotten him a ton of support, especially among younger male, higher educated voters. But it's also gotten him some real pushback. And even, you know, a month ago at a campaign rally, while he was being carried on the shoulders of his supporters, he was stabbed.

A shocking moment caught on camera. A leading presidential candidate in Brazil stabbed during a campaign rally. Cell phone video from various angles capture him clutching his abdomen in pain. His supporters rushed him into a waiting ambulance amid panic and confusion. Bolsonaro's son posted a photo of his dad in the hospital saying the stabbing injured his liver, lung, and intestine. We don't really know what the motivations were. It seems the person who attacked him may have had sort of mental health problems,

but it certainly has been a volatile and tense campaign. How does not only getting stabbed, but then fulfilling the rest of your campaign from a hospital bed affect people's vision of whether you're going to be healthy enough to run a country? Well, you know, it actually seems to have had the opposite effect. After Bolsonaro was stabbed, you sort of started to see this real crystallization of his polling numbers.

Being stabbed meant that he was all over the media. And it also made it difficult for the other candidates to attack him and, you know, go negative, as the political consultants say. So what you saw in the weeks after he was attacked was he actually got more popular. What is it about Bolsonaro that is engaging younger voters and especially younger male voters? Right. So, I mean, you see sort of different voters who like Bolsonaro for different reasons. But with Bolsonaro, you've got both this nostalgia for a time when Brazil had more, quote, traditional values. So you do have some older voters in that sense. But I think the younger voters, it's just real frustration and being fed up. These are voters who kind of came of age when Brazil was was doing well and was you know the economy was was soaring and the economist

had a cover of the famous Christ statue in Rio de Janeiro taking off like a rocket but then then the corruption scandal came and the recession and it was almost as if all of that was sort of fake and all of that was a lie and underneath it all the politicians was sort of fake and all of that was a lie. And underneath it all, the politicians were sort of helping themselves to the government coffers. And I think for young, educated Brazilians who have been following this rise and fall, there's a real kind of sense of betrayal and of wanting someone who doesn't look at all like any of the other politicians. And for some of them, that is Mr. Bolsonaro. What about him looks so different from the sort of norm in Brazil? I mean, part of it is just his rhetoric.

And he doesn't worry about political correctness. He says offensive things. He has cast himself as someone who's very different and uniquely capable to shake things up. But I think, I mean, there's also this kind of darker element. You know, he's spoken about the 1964 military coup as, you know, a necessary thing for Brazil that was sort of the only solution to what he kind of considers this communist terrorist threat at the time. He said that police officers should be able to shoot criminals without worrying about getting in trouble for it. He's spoken about gays and

women and blacks as sort of lesser citizens and said really offensive things about these groups and also sort of snubbed the need to protect minorities. And there's some things he's been saying about the results of the election that he wouldn't accept anything other than his own victory. It's going to be very close, and so it could get quite messy. Up next, democracy in Brazil is really young, and that's what makes this election so consequential. This is Today Explained. Vanderplug! Sean! It's a special day today.

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Sarah, how old is democracy in Brazil? Brazil sort of had throughout the 20th century back and forth between democratic rule and military rule. But most recently, there was a dictatorship that started in the 1960s and lasted until the 1980s. Brazil's military dictatorship committed crimes against humanity, so says the country's National Truth Commission. It says there's proof that more than 400 people were killed or disappeared between 1964 and 85, but the real figure is undoubtedly higher. Democracy came back with the 1988 constitution. So, you know, it's pretty young. Yeah. And fragile, it sounds like.

Yeah. And I don't think anyone would have said that until very recently. The institutions in Brazil have proved themselves pretty successful. The biggest example of that being that the judiciary over the past few years has really gone after politicians and revealed these corruption scandals and attempted to hold people accountable for it. So that is something to remember and that is sort of a positive thing going forward. Between the late 80s and now, have there been like glory days for Brazilian democracy? I think that if I were a correspondent here in, you know, during the time when Brazil was, you know, was leading up kind of world initiatives on climate change and on poverty. And the economy was doing well and business was flocking to Brazil, which is not so much of a distant memory. That was just sort of less than a decade ago. I would have said absolutely, democracy is thriving.

But what we didn't really know was that that whole time there was this sort of massive corruption happening just beneath the surface. And so it's hard to say. I think it's not as simple as sort of it's either democratic or it isn't. But, you know, I think that the corruption scandal and now this kind of, you know, this specter of a candidate who has expressed support for something other than democracy and has really seen people sort of react positively to that shows that the democracy is young and that it's still got a long way to go.

So how did it get to this point where this far-right candidate can make appeals to a military dictatorship and, you know, lead the polls? I think what you have to remember is that, you know, in Brazil, as sort of everywhere else, people vote on emotion and on fear. You know, if you asked Brazilians to sort of, you know, whether they want to live

under military dictatorship, I think all of them would absolutely say no. But if you ask how to get out of this crisis, or what the solution is, they just they want change and they want something different. And the current round of politicians have proved themselves to be mostly interested in their own preservation, not in any sort of reform that would help Brazil become a more prosperous and a more equal and more fair country. I think that most who will vote for Bolsonaro will do so because they think that he can solve this problem without resorting to some sort of a military solution. But are people scared that Bolsonaro might end up going that way? Absolutely. You saw this kind of real fear of Mr. Bolsonaro and what

he might mean for Brazilian democracy this past weekend when hundreds of thousands of Brazilians in cities throughout the whole country took to the streets. People shouted, Bolsonaro, you can cry, women will take you down. Waving banners with the hashtag Elenau, which means not him, and slogans about accusing him of being a fascist or an extremist. They chanted, Bolsonaro, you fascist, women will put you in line. Or sort of a torture because of his associations with the dictatorship. There's a fear that his kind of flirtations with past moments of undemocratic rule would make him more likely in the case of a kind of chaotic situation or when crime and the economy aren't shaping up to take some sort of a dramatic action.

And Brazilians are certainly scared of that as well. And that's sort of the source of this huge outcry and social movement against his candidacy. I do have to say, though, that there's fear of Haddad as well. Some people believe, especially people who are more kind of economically conservative, they believe that Haddad would be a real risk of, you know, they compare him to Venezuela. They say kind of Brazil could become a socialist country. And I think a lot of Brazilians are trying to decide not necessarily which one of these two they kind of feel the most represented by, but rather which one is, in their opinion,

sort of a bigger danger or a bigger threat. And is that just par for the course in Brazilian presidential politics? So, you know, it's pretty crazy. That said, I have to say, Brazilians seem to kind of accept that. And, you know, they remind me that last time in the 2014 election, and are absorbed into some sort of a normality. Sarah Maslin writes about Brazil for The Economist. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Thank you. Change it, no questions asked. Plus, there's a 30-day trial, and your first audiobook is free when you go to audible.com slash todayexplained or text todayexplained to 500500.