For years, it was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
At the turn of the century, Brazil was touted for its huge economic potential.
The South American country was named alongside Russia, India and China as the emerging markets
with the capacity to eclipse the world’s biggest economies.
They even had a popular acronym – BRIC.
Brazil briefly overtook the United Kingdom as the world’s sixth-largest economy in 2012.
But then, things began to slow down.
I’m Laura Carvalho, I am an associate professor in the Economics Department at the University of Sao Paolo.
Laura is the author of a best-selling book on the rise and fall of the Brazilian economy.
It’s called The Brazilian Waltz.
And it’s organized in chapters: the step forward, the step sideways
and the step backwards of that waltz, right?
So the idea there is to try to explain why Brazil went from an economic boom in the 2000s.
But then from 2011 up until 2014, you had a slowdown in the Brazilian economy.
This was due both to changes in the external sector, but also what I consider some mistakes
in the economic policy framework.
And then finally, you had the step backwards, and I think we’re still there today.
So, you had a very deep economic recession in 2015 and 2016, also a lot of political turmoil.
This political turmoil later fuelled the rise of an unlikely candidate in the 2018 Brazilian general election:
Jair Bolsonaro.
The president is one of the most dangerous social media influencers in Brazil.
When Bolsonaro arrived, it was as if a rock star had arrived.
People were just flocking towards him, elbowing each other to get a picture with him.
Just like the U.S.’s Donald Trump, right-wing firebrand Bolsonaro was, at the start, dismissed
by most media outlets.
Gustavo Ribeiro is a journalist based in São Paulo.
He is the founder of the Brazilian Report, which covers the country’s politics and
economics for a foreign audience in English.
At the Brazilian Report, we were one of the first to actually take Bolsonaro seriously.
In the Brazilian press, if you take what had been written about Bolsonaro leading up to
the 2018 elections, he was merely disregarded as this joke candidate, a sort of a rogue,
far-right person who would not get that far.
Here, parties do not pay for ad space.
They are granted space according to their congressional representation.
And the bigger your coalition is, the more space you have.
Leading up to 2018, Bolsonaro did not have a coalition and he had something like 18 seconds
of airspace per day, just ridiculously little.
But what many pundits fail to realize was that voter behavior was changing a lot and
the reliance of voters on social media to get their news and to get political content
was increasing very fast.
And Bolsonaro, he was on campaign mode for years.
Bolsonaro’s promises to tackle corruption and organized crime helped him clinch victory
in a country exhausted by political scandal and high murder rates.
Brazil is a country that sees around like 55 – 60,000 murders a year.
We have a big chunk of the population which has either suffered violence or know someone
who has suffered violence.
And then Bolsonaro comes offering quick, magical solutions.
That in his opinion, violence must be fought with even harsher violence.
But of course, it’s ludicrous. It doesn’t work.
But in people’s minds, he is offering a solution.
People don’t want to hear that okay, we have to start reforming how law enforcement
works and improving people’s quality of life and maybe in 10-15 years,
we’re going to reap the benefits.
People want, now, to be able to go to a bus stop and not worry if they’re going to get
mugged or stabbed or shot, which is a real concern in a lot of peripheral areas in Brazil.
During our deep economic recession that started at the end of 2014, but was actually worse
during 2015 and ‘16, you had at the same time a big corruption scandal that was linked
to what they called the ‘Car Wash Operation’.
So the ‘Carwash Operation’ was looking into corruption inside the Brazilian oil company
Petrobras.
The investigation was called “Operation Car Wash” because it was first discovered
at, you guessed it, a car wash.
What started out as a money-laundering investigation soon grew to implicate business figures, politicians
and even two former Brazilian presidents, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.
It’s not that the corruption itself caused the economic crisis.
There are many other explanations for that crisis, including the big fall in oil prices.
While Bolsonaro was hard on crime, running the economy wasn’t his forte.
Instead, he left the running of the show to businessman and free-market advocate Paulo
Guedes to lead reforms such as tax-cuts and deregulation.
Paulo Guedes is someone who was promoting from the beginning, the privatization of all
the public enterprises in Brazil, all the public companies, the reduction of the size
of the state in all areas, including health and education.
These reforms painted Bolsonaro as pro-market, winning him the support of Brazil’s business elite.
We will work to lower the tax burden, streamline rules and make life easier for those who wish
to produce and do business as entrepreneurs, invest and create jobs.
But the big economic turnaround they were hoping for never happened.
When the pandemic hit, very quickly, there was a recognition in society that it would
be impossible to have people stay home and comply to any type of restrictions and sanitary
contingency measures if they didn’t have any source of income.
His handling of it was catastrophic, he waited a long time to buy the vaccines.
Everyone wanted the vaccines, the anti-vax movement in Brazil is very small.
In October 2021, Bolsonaro released a video to his millions of social media followers,
claiming there was a link between Covid-19 vaccines and AIDS.
Facebook and YouTube all jumped into action to remove the post.
He has been a vector of disinformation.
He often touts unproven treatments against Covid.
He went against scientific consensus on almost every issue regarding the pandemic.
Despite the fact that Bolsonaro oversaw one of the world's most disastrous COVID responses,
congress approved what went on to become Brazil's biggest welfare program in history, which
paid around $110 a month to about 60 million vulnerable workers.
It doesn't seem a lot but that actually is more money than many
people in Brazil have ever seen in just a month.
That reduced extreme poverty levels in Brazil to the lowest on record, and then that propelled
Bolsonaro to the biggest approval ratings of his administration.
In 2020, I would say that the Brazilian economy actually behaved relatively better if you
compare it to the rest of the world, and this is only due to the cash relief big program.
But of course, this was not the initiative of Bolsonaro’s government.
It was actually a lot of pressure from civil society and social movements and so on.
At the same time, because of that emergency program that was so strong, he started to
get more support of low-income voters that he did not in the election.
Almost 6% of GDP of actually giving money to people, helped attenuate that recession quite a lot.
But then in ‘21, the scenario changed completely.
When the government ran out of money to roll out these payments, the payments were suspended
between January and April of 2021.
Brazil’s economic recovery from the pandemic shock was short-lived, slipping back into
recession in the third quarter of 2021.
That brought poverty rates up.
Food insecurity reaches over half of Brazilian households.
And more than ideology, and more than anything,
Brazilian voter behaviour is driven by people's economic conditions.
You give a man a fish and he eats for a day.
You teach a man how to fish?
Yes, but in many areas in Brazil, there is no pond for this sad man to fish.
Despite its political and economic woes, Brazil is blessed with an abundance of natural resources,
making it one of the largest producers of tin, iron ore and phosphate.
Its extensive river systems wield enormous hydroelectric potential, while huge swathes
of the Amazon rainforest lie in Brazil.
The Amazon is an opportunity to actually have a transition for a green economy in Brazil.
And in fact, you have a lot of job potential that are linked to bioeconomy and various
sustainable activities that depend and rely on the Amazon being standing
including our exports potential, right?
However, there is a problem.
Bolsonaro has always been against environmental regulations.
He has enacted dozens of pieces of legislation that reduces the government’s power to curb
deforestation, and he has always taken the side of loggers.
Countries are implementing sanctions and barriers to trade due to the environmental consequences
of this strategy.
Bolsonaro’s government is much worse than whatever we had in the past
in terms of our potential and possibilities.
Six months into Bolsonaro’s time in office, deforestation in the Amazon had accelerated
over 60% over the same period in the previous year.
In 2021, deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest reached a 15-year high.
In the same year, during the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, however,
Brazil committed to end deforestation by 2030.
In my opinion, it’s definitely just paying lip service when he makes those pledges during COP26.
But and this is important, it does not mean that corporations in Brazil are not growing
more aware of the need for more sustainability because ESG has become a trend in financial markets.
And a lot of companies who seek funding from investment funds will have to play by those rules.
However, it would not be fair to say that Brazil’s environmental problems begins with
Bolsonaro because the country has lost, between 2000 – 2018, around 500,000 square kilometres
of native forest, not only in the Amazon, but throughout the whole country, which is
an area equivalent to the size of Spain.
While Bolsonaro inherited many problems from previous administrations, including the Amazon,
he has also fallen short on many of his promises.
As Brazil enters an election year and his presidency in jeopardy, Bolsonaro has tried
to exert a tighter grip on the economy, leading to a rumored fallout with big business and
Guedes, his economic advisor.
Even the people who were supporting him for that reason are very disappointed because
he did not carry out the structural reforms and the type of economic policies that have
been promised in his campaign.
There's also a very big devaluation of our currency that happened throughout the pandemic.
And this in Brazil actually ends up feeding even more into higher prices.
Brazil also deteriorated in the past few years, its position in the Mercosur.
Mercosur - or the Southern Common Market - is a trade bloc in South America that was established in 1991.
Brazil had a lot of influence in the negotiations in the region.
It actually gave up on that role by engaging in conflicts and different types of trade
barriers with the partners of Mercosur.
They have tried to push away and actually increased trade barriers to the trade partners
of South America.
So, it has a very bad relationship with Argentina, which is one of our major trade partners.
Our industry is losing ground and is struggling more and more.
Brazil remains isolated from most production chains, and we are becoming a country with
an economy that has less and less variety in terms of what it produces, and then becomes
dangerously reliant on a few basic products like soybeans, meat, oil and iron ore.
Ultimately, the Brazilian president’s legacy lies with the Brazilian people.
As Bolsonaro seeks re-election in 2022, he is likely to come head-to-head with a formidable
political adversary in former President Luiz Lula da Silva, who can now run for office
following the annulment of his corruption convictions.
He was Brazil‘s most popular president, leaving office with an 87 percent approval rating.
Whoever wins the election will be tasked with finding the Latin American economy’s footing yet again.
This shouldn’t prevent us from getting back on track, if the right policies are implemented,
if we have a government that is actually committed to having a sustainable, inclusive growth agenda.
As we say in Brazil, it’s easier to be the rock than the window, so it’s easy to throw
rocks at a window but once you become the government, you become the window.
And then you have to show results, just criticising and saying things will not work, just won’t cut it.