Regional Inequality and the State

Looking at Brazil’s five macro-regions — the Northeast, North, Central-West, Southeast, and South — the first round broadly reflected a continuation of recent presidential election results, albeit with some important shifts. Lula’s strongest performance came in the Northeast, Brazil’s poorest region and its second most populous. The Northeastern states have given the PT healthy majorities in all presidential elections since the 2000s, and continued to do so in 2014 and 2018, even as support for the party sharply declined in all other regions. From already high levels in 2018, support for the PT across the region has grown again this year.

Take the state of Piauí, for example, where 63 percent of first-round votes in 2018 went to the PT, and this has increased to a huge 74 percent this year. Even the Northeastern state that gave the PT its lowest vote, Alagoas, still recorded a higher percentage than any state outside of the region, and preferred Lula to Bolsonaro by a margin of more than twenty points (57 percent to 36 percent).

While it may seem intuitive for Brazil’s poorest region to vote for the country’s principal center-left party, this was not always the case. In the 1990s, the Northeast, like the rest of the country, overwhelmingly favored center-right candidates. Its more recent loyalty to the PT represents the consolidation of a strong regionwide identification not only with Lula (himself a Northeasterner) but with the party as a whole. It reflects the historical emergence of a political culture that recognizes the gains made under PT rule and which seeks to defend and renew that legacy.

Of course, the salience of partisan identification in Northeastern politics should not be overstated, and local clientelist dynamics persist, particularly in legislative elections. Nonetheless, the PT’s continued hegemony out of office belies the facile, widely repeated but unsubstantiated claim that the votes of the poor can be bought with small cash transfers paid by incumbent governments — a strategy Bolsonaro has attempted, but with little success to date. Northeastern voters have come to expect a more sincere and sustained commitment to building a redistributive social state.

However, this relationship between regional inequality and voting preferences does not hold up everywhere. The remote and sparsely populated Amazonian states of Acre, Rondônia, and Roraima — three of the poorest outside of the Northeast — are also the most pro-Bolsonaro states in the country, respectively giving him 63 percent, 64 percent, and 70 percent in last week’s vote. The states of the Central-West region, which occupy an intermediate socioeconomic position between the poorer Northeast and North regions and the wealthier Southeast and South, also gave Bolsonaro very large victories.

These states all lie on Brazil’s agricultural frontier, heavily dependent on livestock farming, soya production, and various extractive activities. While state capacity outside a few larger cities is generally precarious, local economies have actually benefited from its further erosion under Bolsonaro’s government. In particular, his dismantling of environmental and Indigenous protection agencies has removed major constraints to land- and resource-grabbing.

This may primarily benefit large landowners, but it also has knock-on benefits for the low-income populations of these areas. With few other economic opportunities available to them, many find paid employment or can operate as small-scale entrepreneurs in sectors with low barriers to entry.

Meanwhile, PT organization has largely failed to penetrate these areas, leaving most state resources that might actually reach the poor largely in the hands of clientelist parties. As a result, in the agro-frontier, the state is largely perceived as a threat to livelihoods, while any benefits the poor receive from the state tend not to be associated with progressive forces. Where the poor of the Northeast were absorbed into a social democratic project seeking to strengthen the democratic state as a redistributive and regulatory entity, the poor of the agro-frontier have been enlisted into a project that seeks to dismantle those very same institutions.

The Institutionalist and Revanchist Middle Classes

The middle classes also straddle Brazil’s political divide, and this division also strongly correlates to geography. The Southeast and South are Brazil’s wealthiest regions, but also contain diverse sub-territories, including rural agricultural zones, small towns and medium-sized cities with varying social conditions, and large metropolises that encompass wealthy districts, middle-class suburbs, and poor urban peripheries and favelas.

In 2018, voters across almost all of these diverse territories voted heavily for Bolsonaro, concealing important differences between them. However, in 2022, these differences have reemerged. The states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro — two of the country’s wealthiest and most populous — bear this out. In particular, a clear divergence has emerged between their respective urban and provincial middle classes.

To take two fairly representative examples, between 2018 and 2022, Bolsonaro’s vote in the provincial cities of Petrópolis (Rio de Janeiro) and São José dos Campos (São Paulo) fell from 62 percent to 55 percent and 60 percent to 55 percent, respectively. However, in both cases, he has retained a large lead of twenty-one points over Lula. In other words, while there may have been a downward adjustment from the peaks of 2018, Bolsonarismo has taken root in these places.

Compare that to the professional middle-class territories of metropolitan São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In the neighborhood of Pinheiros, in São Paulo’s inner West Zone, the PT vote increased by a huge thirty-six points, from 11 percent in 2018 to 47 percent today, while Bolsonaro’s has fallen from 42 percent to 33 percent. In Rio’s Botafogo, the PT vote grew by an even larger forty-one points — from 13 percent to 54 percent — while Bolsonaro’s has fallen from 44 percent to 33 percent. Such patterns were repeated across Rio’s South Zone and inner North Zone, and São Paulo’s inner North and Southwest Zones. In these areas, it seems, Bolsonarismo is really on the retreat.

Again, this divergence can be linked to these populations’ differing relationships to the democratic state-building process. In both cases, there is little interest in radical government or a strongly redistributive state, which most would associate with populism and corruption. The economic downturn and corruption scandals of the mid-2010s led both the urban and provincial middle classes into an anti-institutional turn — supporting a parliamentary coup against Dilma Rousseff and voting en masse for Bolsonaro in 2018 to “keep the PT out.”

However, the reality of Bolsonarismo has shown that part of the middle class continues to believe in the long-term project of democratic consolidation, including moderate social spending and the protection of minority rights. Many of them are the orphans of the much-weakened center-right Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), and, thanks to Lula’s moderate positioning, have been absorbed into the PT fold. More importantly, though, horrified by Bolsonaro’s pandemic denialism, dismantling of state institutions, and threats against democracy, they have become emphatically “anti-Bolsonarista.”

What has surprised many, including the polling companies, is how many voters have not accompanied the institutionalist middle class in recoiling from Bolsonarismo. Most prominent among them are those voters that I refer to as the revanchist middle class.

These voters are most commonly found in the small-town interior of the Southeast and South, but also in other regions and in some metropolitan areas. They support, if not outright authoritarianism, at least a radical reform of the state, rejecting the social settlement that emerged from Brazil’s re-democratization process and its progressive 1988 constitution.

For this constituency, investment in public services — most of which they do not use — is a waste of taxpayers’ money. Historically excluded racial groups and sexual minorities are seen to be pampered with state resources and privileges. Gun control and age limits for criminal liability are viewed as preventing police and ordinary citizens from legitimately defending themselves from ubiquitous criminals. In other words, the revanchist middle class seeks to take back a state that they believe was captured by their enemies, in order to neuter its capacity to continue work against their interests.

Seen in this light, what looks to others like Bolsonaro’s incapacity to govern, may look to many of these voters like a deliberate step in the right direction.

Disappointment vs. Indifference in the Urban Peripheries

If the rift between the institutionalist and revanchist middle classes is most clearly visible in comparisons between metropolis and hinterland, a divergence between low-income urban voters is clearest if we compare the county’s two largest cities: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

During the 2000s, the poor urban peripheries of both cities had been electoral strongholds of the PT in presidential elections, much like the Northeastern region. However, they gradually abandoned the party during the 2010s and most voted strongly for Bolsonaro in 2018. This looked like a secular trend, perhaps attributable to a range of social processes common to these territories — for example, labor precaritization, a decline of trade unions and grassroots movements, and a large growth of Evangelical churches.

However, an historic divergence in last week’s election suggests we must look elsewhere for explanations. Again, a crucial factor is the different way the democratic state has been experienced in each of these cities.

In a reversal of recent electoral trends, the peripheries of São Paulo have swung back heavily toward the PT. Take, for example, the eastern periphery of Itaquera, where the PT vote increased from 20 percent in 2018 to 49 percent in 2022, or the southern periphery of Campo Limpo, where it grew from 25 percent to 54 percent. In both zones, Bolsonaro’s vote also fell markedly, leaving Lula with very large first-round majorities. This pattern is repeated across most of São Paulo’s municipal periphery and many of its working-class satellite cities.

The picture in the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro could hardly be more different. Across the distant West Zone neighborhoods of Santa Cruz, Campo Grande, and Bangu, Bolsonaro retained margins of twenty or more points over Lula, and he won convincingly across every part of the Baixada Fluminense. Bolsonarismo seems to be entrenched in Rio’s predominantly low-income metropolitan peripheries just as it has in the small-town hinterland.

There are important differences between the peripheries of the two cities that help to explain this divergence. First, the PT has historically achieved a far greater institutional presence in São Paulo’s peripheries. More broadly, though, institutional conditions in the city have, over time, fostered greater expectations of the state.

Eduardo Marques has identified what he calls a dynamic of “incremental progressivism” in São Paulo, observing that many progressive public policies have gradually been institutionalized, even under center-right municipal administrations. This is partly the product of electoral competition under conditions of minimal consensus, which means that effective policies often survive changes of government.

Just as importantly though, organized civil society has been able to achieve a significant influence over policy-making processes. Such processes are hardly smooth and the public sphere remains highly precarious across much of the periphery. But this dynamic provides evidence that contestation through the democratic state can be worthwhile. It fosters a belief in the possibility of an effective and redistributive state, even if the reality falls far short. Indeed, even disappointment in the state’s current ineffectiveness and unfairness can betray a belief that it could be otherwise.

Conditions in Rio’s peripheries are quite different. The PT never laid down deep roots as a political force and was always forced to form alliances with clientelist parties that maintained a strong hold over local political culture. This meant the PT era was experienced as less of a rupture in the peripheries of Rio than elsewhere.

There has also not been anything like the same institutionalization of progressive policies. In low-income communities, the state is typically articulated via local political-economic power networks, often intertwined with violent militias. Notwithstanding the important presence of social movements in Rio de Janeiro, such conditions heavily constrain their ability to operate freely in the peripheries. The net effect is to reinforce among residents of these areas a certain indifference to the state, at least as a possible vehicle of incrementally institutionalized and improving services.

Rather than being a disappointment, the state becomes an irrelevance, and many of the basic needs of everyday life are sought via other means. It is not difficult to see how Bolsonarista discourse, emphasizing the failures of the democratic state and the need to seek security and opportunity outside of it, might resonate in such a context.

A Clash of Heterogeneous Coalitions

Returning to our original question, the first round of Brazil’s crucial 2022 election reveals that a socially and geographically heterogeneous electoral coalition has durably cohered around Bolsonaro. This includes diverse social groups along Brazil’s agro-frontier, who experience the state largely through environmental regulations that they perceive as a threat to their livelihoods. It includes some of the middle classes of Brazil’s wealthier regions, mainly in its small-town hinterlands, who have abandoned Brazil’s project of democratic consolidation in favor of a revanchist retaking — and reshaping — of the state. And it includes residents of Rio’s (and perhaps other) urban peripheries for whom the state has come to be seen largely as an irrelevance.

In other words, these are groups who, under very different circumstances and for different reasons, have converged on a consensus that Bolsonaro’s “anti-governance” is certainly not a deal breaker and may even be a positive step.

Ranged against them are poor voters, especially the Northeast, who wish to see a resumption of the PT’s project of social inclusion; an institutionalist middle class that, after flirting with Bolsonarismo, has rediscovered its democratic bearings; and a skeptical urban working class, particularly in São Paulo’s urban peripheries, that retains a residual hope in the eventual consolidation of a functioning, redistributive state.

It is these two heterogeneous, internally fraught but now largely consolidated blocs that will clash on October 30, in the next round of voting. Given their similar size, it may be a relatively small number of swing voters and undecideds who determine the outcome, which will have enormous implications for Brazilian democracy in the years to come. But even if Lula wins, Bolsonarismo will endure in opposition, offering a destructive alternative to those who have lost, or perhaps never had, faith in Brazil’s democratic state.