Election in Brazil: The duel of the alpha males

Every election is a fateful election, at least it should be if it is done properly democratically.

And yet the situation rarely seems as acute as in the presidential election in Brazil, which is now leading to a runoff.

The record of right-wing incumbent Jair Bolsonaro is devastating: hunger is back in the resource-rich country;

The denial attitude towards the corona pandemic cost almost 700,000 lives according to official counts;

the head of state is deliberately torpedoing trust in the country's most important institutions, and in the Amazon, humanity is losing more valuable jungle than ever before.

That Bolsonaro even has a chance

The fact that such a president even has a chance of being re-elected shows that something is amiss.

The ideologically divided country also has a problem with machismo.

Both candidates, the anti-democracy Bolsonaro and his challenger, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who came from a humble background and ruled the country quite successfully from 2003 to 2010, are men in their seventies who are bragging about their masculinity.

Lula claims to have "the libido of a twenty-year-old";

Bolsonaro had "Imbrochável" chants ("permanently erect") intoned.

Numerous documentaries, including the first exciting contribution to the Arte themed evening on the Brazilian elections (“Lula or Bolsonaro, the duel”), focus on the duel between the alpha males.

You always see the determined supporters of the opponents: the Lula leftists demonstrating in large numbers and the martial Bolsonaro fans, including the military, drooling evangelicals and armed right-wing radicals, but also ordinary citizens and celebrities like Neymar.

Rarely is there a legitimate warning that violent clashes could ensue if Lula, as predicted, wins the election.

A little goes under that the most important phase of the duel is in the past.

To understand why the rifts seem unbridgeable,

It is worth examining in detail the scandalous crackdown on widespread corruption in Brazil (“Lava Jato”, 2014 to 2021), which landed Lula in prison for 580 days.

Decisive days: Although he was a favorite, he was not allowed to compete in the 2018 presidential election.

Brazilian director Maria Augusta Ramos meticulously reconstructs the uncovering of a Bolsonaro camp-led campaign against Lula: a media scoop based on leaks and chat logs that is almost Watergate-sized.

The reporting led to Brazil's Supreme Court, in March 2021, biasing former Judge Sérgio Moro, who convicted Lula in 2017 and was Bolsonaro's Minister of Justice.

It has been proven that Moro colluded with the public prosecutor's office, in particular with the head of the special investigative team at the federal court in Curitiba, Deltan Dallagnol, to sentence Lula.

All judgments against Lula da Silva have been overturned and nothing has stood in the way of his comeback since then.

The Bolsonaro faction's hatred of the judiciary,

Ramos has decided not to use a narration voice, there are only a few superimposed inscriptions.

All processes are explained by three journalists involved in the uncovering, their interview partners and archive recordings.

It requires some concentration to follow in all turns.

The protagonists are Leandro Demori, editor-in-chief of the news platform “The Intercept – Brazil” and acting here mildly activist, as well as Carla Jimenez and Regiane Oliveira from “El País Brazil”.

However, many of the scenes in which the journalists talk about the events in their offices and write articles, the development of which can be followed live on the screen, appear to be re-enacted.

The film didn't need this questionable form of staging.

Despite the lack of a narrator, it quickly becomes clear that the documentation is not impartial.

All interviewees take the line that corruption is endemic in Brazil ("structures of embezzlement" do not only exist at the petroleum company Petrobras, says defense lawyer Fernando Fernandes), but that the Labor Party PT is not particularly to blame and certainly not responsible for it by Lula da Silva.

Of course, more interesting than the question of guilt is that one is witnessing a much larger duel here: that between the state institutions undermined under Bolsonaro and the fourth estate, the independent media, which despite all the attacks still exist, as well as an independent judiciary at the highest level .

The law professor Pedro Serrano speaks of “liquid authoritarianism”, a “hollowing out” of the existing structures, and he draws a parallel to the rise of National Socialism in Germany.

Critical media and a brave judiciary also existed for a while in the Weimar Republic.

In her Brazilian-German-Dutch co-production, Ramos succeeds in showing the complexity of the perversion of the law in today's Brazil and at the same time in strengthening trust in the Brazilian public.

Brazil and the Lula da Silva case.

Anatomy of a political scandal

runs at 10:35 p.m. on Arte.

At 9.45 p.m. Arte shows