BRASILIA, Brazil — After two years without a political party, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro sealed an agreement with the centrist Liberal Party to back his 2022 reelection bid, according to a party statement released Wednesday.
The decision followed a meeting between Bolsonaro and Liberal Party leader Valdemar Costa Neto in the capital Brasilia, the statement said. The president’s formal enrollment to the party’s ranks will take place Nov. 22.
Bolsonaro intends for the alliance to aid him in battling his nemesis, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “Lula,” as da Silva is known universally, holds a handsome lead over Bolsonaro in early polls. Joining one of the parties that forms part of the so-called Centrao group also signals Bolsonaro shifting course from his 2018 campaign strategy, when he sharply criticized their old-school political practices.
“It is very symbolic how Bolsonaro has started to play the traditional game of Brazilian politics,” said Maurício Santoro, a political science professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. “The PL is helping Bolsonaro survive.”
The Liberal Party – known by its Portuguese initials PL – and other Centrao parties are notorious for their ideological malleability and swapping support for government appointments and earmarks. Bolsonaro was affiliated with such parties during most of his seven terms as a federal lawmaker, but cast himself as a political outsider during his 2018 presidential campaign. He vowed not to embrace the horse trading that benefited entrenched actors and enabled corruption.
Instead, he ran under the banner of the Social Liberal Party, which he left one year after his election victory amid disagreements with party leadership over funding and regional nominations. He set out to forge his own party, but failed to garner enough signatures and has been without a political home since.
Two of Bolsonaro’s ministers told The Associated Press the president’s decision to join the PL was influenced by his three politician sons, who believe the party will grant their father sufficient autonomy to pick allies as candidates for gubernatorial and congressional positions in next year’s election. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
The presidential press office didn’t respond to a request for comment from the AP confirming the PL’s statement, nor the president’s justification for the decision. Earlier Wednesday, Bolsonaro said in a radio interview there was a “99.9% chance” he would join the PL.
Reports that Bolsonaro was seeking a Centrao party to sponsor his reelection bid had already generated commentary from analysts that he was fully departing from his prior anti-establishment stance. As rumors of his agreement with the PL intensified this week, a series of comments criticizing party leader Costa Neto were deleted from the social media profiles of Bolsonaro family members.
Bolsonaro himself has said Costa Neto was corrupt and a convict, noted Carlos Melo, a political analyst and professor at Insper University in Sao Paulo. In 2012, Costa Neto, then a lawmaker, was convicted for corruption and money laundering in a vast vote-buying scandal that almost brought down da Silva’s administration. He served time in prison.
“Bolsonaro was always affiliated with a Centrao party, his whole congressional career,” Melo said. “He got elected criticizing the Centrao, the Workers’ Party, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party, saying he was an outsider. It was a strategy for that election.”
Bolsonaro joining the PL will mark the continuation of his cozying up to the Centrao over the past year. The far-right president has turned to the Centrao for political shelter from increasing pressure on his administration, including more than 100 impeachment requests, a Senate investigation into his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and plunging popularity. In August, he appointed a senator from the Centrao to be his chief-of-staff, sealing his rapprochement with the power brokers.
“If you take away the Centrao, there’s the left,” the president told a small conservative news outlet, Jornal da Cidade Online, on Tueday. “So where do I go?”
———— AP reporter Jeantet reported from Rio de Janeiro.
