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On 28 October 2018, Brazilian voters delivered a sweeping victory to presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, putting the far-right populist at the helm of the world's fourth-largest democracy. After a raucous campaign in which the former army captain demonized his political opponents and promised to save the country from total ruin, Bolsonaro handed a stinging defeat to the left-leaning Workers' Party (PT), which had governed Brazil from 2003 to 2016. Social media, along with networks of Pentecostal churches, helped to disseminate Bolsonaro's incendiary messages and organize his broad multiclass following.
After nearly clinching the presidency in the October 7 first round with over 46 percent of valid votes, Bolsonaro received 55.13 percent of the vote in the runoff (see Table on p. 70). The remaining 44.87 percent went to PT candidate Fernando Haddad—a last-minute substitute during the first round for popular former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had been imprisoned since April 2018 on corruption charges linked to Brazil's mammoth Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) scandal. In keeping with the polarizing tone of the campaign, the share of voters who cast ballots for each candidate closely approximated the share who expressed a strong antipathy toward the opposing candidate. Concurrent elections for the 513-member Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of the bicameral National Congress, saw a surge by Bolsonaro's hitherto minuscule Social Liberal Party (PSL): This party went from winning only a single seat in 2014 to claiming 52 seats and the highest share of popular votes in 2018. Bolsonaro had joined the PSL—previously one of the nondescript "parties for rent" that help to populate Brazil's fluid system—in 2018 merely to qualify for a place on the presidential ballot.
The dramatic ascent of this far-right fringe figure and longtime legislative backbencher caught many by surprise. Brazilian presidential elections since 1994 had been marked by a virtual duopoly, with the left-leaning PT and the center-right Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB) as the predictable finalists. Taken together, these two parties consistently won between 70 and 90 percent of the vote. The three presidents elected in this period—Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2003) of the PSDB, followed by Lula (2003–11) and his chosen successor Dilma Rousseff (2011–16) from the PT—had all won second terms in office, lending...