And a globally important ecosystem driven ever more rapidly towards a point of no return. That is the prospect for the Amazon rainforest for at least the next four years if Flávio Bolsonaro holds on to the lead he established this week in the first round of Brazil’s presidential election. This appears to be of far more concern to the outside world than to voters in Latin America’s biggest, richest and most biodiverse nation.
The far-right son of the former president and jailed coup-monger Jair Bolsonaro won 47% of the vote, putting him in pole position before the 25 October runoff with the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was backed by 44.2%. The result is an unnerving jolt to climate and nature campaigners. Taken out of context, this appears to be a vote against the forest.
The current administration of Lula (as the veteran Brazilian president is best known) has reduced deforestation in the Amazon by almost 50%. But that success secured little noticeable electoral traction for either Lula or pro-forest candidates in other polls held the same day. The former environment minister Marina Silva lost a bid for the Senate and Joenia Wapichana, a former head of Brazil’s Indigenous affairs agency, Funai, failed to win a seat in Congress.
Out of 57 Indigenous candidates, only two won. Flávio Bolsonaro is the heir to the political legacy of his father, Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain whose four years in power resulted in a 59.5% increase in Amazon deforestation, roughly equivalent to destroying 2bn trees. If he wins, Bolsonaro has promised to free his father, who was imprisoned for plotting a military coup and attempting to annihilate democracy in Brazil.
He has said that his father could have any position he wants in his administration. Flávio Bolsonaro has shown that he will be just as willing as his father to dismantle protections for climate and nature and allow illegal miners, loggers and land grabbers to invade Indigenous territories. As a lawmaker, he backed a 2019 bill to eliminate requirements for landowners in the Amazon to conserve a proportion of native vegetation.
In his manifesto, he completely ignored the climate crisis. And he has courted support from some of the most predatory landowners in the rainforest. He is also part of a movement – Bolsonarism – that is geared towards maximising profits for extractive industries regardless of the environmental cost.
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