Brazil rut: Lula v Bolsonaro, again

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1:03The Economist.

1:09Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Bloor.

1:19Today on the show, how honour culture holds women back and the rise of phone-free concerts

1:33But first

1:43Look at Brazil and it seems to have so much on its side No threat of invasion An economy resilient to Donald Trump's tariffs Friendly relations with both superpowers And resources in abundance But as Brazil gears up for a presidential election on October 4th The country seems to be stuck in a repeating rut. The stakes could not be higher in this election. Ana Lankes is our Brazil correspondent. On the domestic front, the next president will be able to choose four of 11 justices on Brazil's Supreme Court, shaping the country for a generation. The government is also living far beyond its means and creditors are becoming restive.

2:30Some people fear a recession in the next administration. And there's a big foreign policy dimension in this election. Donald Trump has treated Latin America as his personal playground since coming back to power in January 2025. He has abducted Venezuela as president. He has propped up like-minded right-wing populists in the region. He has blown up boats in the Caribbean. And if Brazil, the region's biggest country and rival center of gravity, comes into close alignment with the U.S., he will feel far more emboldened.

3:02who's in the running then as president so the problem is no one i've spoken to in brazil is very enthusiastic about this election because the choices are on the one hand the incumbent luis inacio lula da silva who's known as lula he's about to turn 81 so that's the same age that biden was when he dropped his re-election bid in 2024 and a lot of brazilians fear that he may run the economy into the ground. His government is on course to end the term with the largest public debt interest bill in a quarter of a century. But on the other side, you have Flavio Bolsonaro, who's 45 years old. He's the eldest son of Jair Bolsonaro, a former populist right-wing president, serving a 27-year sentence in jail for plotting a coup after losing his bid for re-election in 2022.

3:48Flavio's main policy is to pardon his father. He denies humans are causing climate change. He has been investigated for alleged but very credible ties to violent criminals, which he denies. So for our listeners outside, maybe it's helpful to think about this race as Bernie Saunders versus Donald Trump Jr., except if the younger Trump had links to sicarios. Anna, talk me through the challenges that either of these might face. Let's start with the economy. So it's possibly surprising that Brazil's economy isn't in a better state, given that Brazil is home to vast reserves of oil, renewable energy, critical minerals, and it's also about to overtake the US as the world's biggest agricultural exporter.

4:33Brazil has a lot going for it, which made it the biggest recipient of foreign direct investment among developing countries last year outside of China. But Brazil faces a predicament similar to many other countries, which is that the debt is rising very, very fast. And there's basically no interest in Congress to reduce that. Brazil is borrowing very heavily and it's spending above its means. But the difference between Brazil and, say, the U.S. or Europe or Japan, which all have very high government debt, is that the cost of servicing the debt in Brazil is far, far higher. Brazil pays more to service its debt than any big country except Egypt and Pakistan.

5:15And that's because it has a long history of hyperinflation and recessions. And so investors basically demand a premium. So what's happening right now is that the debt is on track to reach 100 % of GDP in the next few years. And there is no fiscal credibility from the government. So investors are really getting very restive. Over three terms as president, Lula has spent very lavishly on handouts and subsidized credit. His growth model has been focused on spurring consumption. But that has just heated up inflation. Whereas Bolsonaro is also not very credible. Jair Bolsonaro, the father, broke spending limits, tripled the big welfare program to win re-election.

5:58So the point is that because it has followed this consumption-driven growth model and not productivity-driven growth model, Brazil is falling behind. What about something we've spoken before about on the show, corruption? So corruption is a huge problem in Brazil. It feels like every 10 years, a gigantic corruption investigation engulfs the entire political class from left to right. And in this election, we're seeing the same problem. This big corruption scandal involving a playboy banker who orchestrated the biggest bank fraud in Brazil's history is hovering over the entire election. Basically, this banker didn't really run a lender.

6:37He ran an influence-peddling institution. He would throw these lavish parties where he'd fly in sex workers from Russia, Venezuela and other countries and invite all the country's top politicians and judges. Turns out that he had links to five of the Supreme Court's 11 judges, as well as most of the country's top politicians. And that has really fed cynicism and disenchantment in Brazil, which makes it easier for Brazilians to overlook Jair Bolsonaro's conviction for coup plotting and back his son. Generally, the sentiment that everything is rotten and needs to be burned down, that the system doesn't work, does not favor incumbents.

7:13Even though, in this case, Lula does not have direct links with this banker, whereas Flavio does. Flavio Bolsonaro claimed never to have met the banker behind the fraud, who's called Daniel Vorcaro. But in May, an audio tape was leaked that showed him asking for$25 million from this banker. and in the audio he calls the banker my brother I'm always going to be with you. He asked for a huge sum of money to finance a film about his father and then the money that was transferred for the film ended up in a bank account linked to Flavio's brother. Anna it sometimes seems like there are only two politicians in Brazil or two politicians and a son.

7:59Why is the country left with two such polarizing figures and no one else? I don't think this is just a problem in Brazil. We're seeing this in a lot of elections. Voters feel that they don't have good options on the table. There are other candidates running in this election in Brazil. And unlike in other countries, Brazil has two rounds of the election. If nobody wins more than half the vote in the first round, which is this Sunday, there's a runoff at the end of the month. Those other candidates might get some votes in the first round. But the problem is both Bolsonaro and Lula have very high vote floors, which makes it very hard for any third candidate.

8:36Where does all of this leave Brazil then? I'm not hugely optimistic about the next four years in Brazil. Neither man has the strength nor will win a thumping enough mandate to face the interest groups that keep spending very high in the country. Brazil's Congress has also become incredibly powerful in recent years, far more than in most other presidential systems. It has taken a huge amount of control over the budget. And Brazil's Congress is very corrupt. So it's basically very hard for any president that comes to power to deal with the forces that are causing the institutional rot and fiscal crunch that Brazil is experiencing.

9:17So I think it's going to be very hard. But I want to end on a positive note. Several of Brazil's institutions are really robust. The media, it's fierce, it's free, it's relatively well-funded. The civil society groups, which have been pressuring the government to protect the Amazon and Brazil's other biomes. The federal police has investigated politicians from across the political spectrum. And then you also have a Supreme Court that, despite individual corruption cases, was able to send a coup monger to jail last year. These are positive signs. I think even though the next four years might be hard, I don't want to lose hope in Brazil.

9:56And I hope its voters don't either. Ana, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Rosie.

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12:38History suggests there are many ways to oppress women. Hence the campaigns of decades past and present, the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to equal pay. Yet in some countries, the struggle isn't for fair treatment or safety in the workplace. It's about being allowed to go out to work at all. thanks to so-called honour culture. Honour culture can mean a lot of things, but the most basic summary of it is the idea that male honour depends on female seclusion, that men have to protect the women in their families by essentially not letting them step outside without a male guardian.

13:23Robert Guest is the deputy editor of The Economist. And it has really profound implications for how individual women live their lives in countries where it's strong. And how prevalent is it really? Give me some examples of what this means on the ground, Robert. If you think about women in the workplace from the perspective of a rich country, then you're thinking about issues like is there adequate childcare provision? Are the rules in the workplace fair? All that kind of thing. There's a lot of parts of the world where it's much more basic than that. It's, is the woman allowed to leave her home to go out to work in the first place?

14:03Or is her husband saying, no, you may not? And you can see this in the female labour force participation rate numbers. And they are shockingly different in the parts of the world where honour culture is strong. And which countries is honour culture strong in? The kind of stuff we're looking at, it's big in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. It's a pretty large part of the world. So roughly speaking, in the Middle East and North Africa, only about a fifth of women are in the labour force. In South Asia, it's about 30%. And this is just far below what you would expect in other parts of the world.

14:40And this is not because they're not educated, although that may also be a problem. It's because the men in their lives are stopping them from stepping out of the front door. It's what I call the glass front door problem. And how much of this is about religion? Some of it is about religion. I mean, a lot of the countries we're talking about here are Muslim, but a lot of them are not. India is the biggest one and it's mostly Hindu. It's mostly about tradition and male kinship groups. So honor culture comes as a way of binding men who are related to each other together into self-defense units and that's a very basic unit of a lot of societies over history.

15:19But it's really not terribly well suited to the modern world. How does honour culture really work then? Who's imposing it? Well, men in the family are imposing it and because they tend to be bigger and stronger and have the weight of tradition behind them, very often they win. But what's interesting is where you get to places where that starts to change. So I was in Saudi Arabia a few months ago and for a long time the principles of honour culture were actually enshrined in law in Saudi Arabia. So the law said that women weren't allowed to go out and work. And then when that changed, suddenly every family had to deal with the question, okay, so now it's legal, so what do we do?

15:57So I talked to a lady called Hamda in Riyadh, and when the law changed, she was like, great, I want to go out to work because I'll be able to earn money, and money's good, we can pay our bills. And her husband said, no, over my dead body, you do not go out to work because only immoral women go out to work. You might meet a man. That would bring shame on the family. You know, essentially he was saying only prostitutes go out of the house to work. And they argued about it for about a year. And every day Hamda was saying, look, I want to go out and work. And her husband was saying no. And then after about a year, she won the argument.

16:31And how did she do that? Firstly, what she said about money was true. You know, an extra wage really does help pay the bills. And even the most reactionary men do kind of understand that. But secondly, all of her husband's sisters got jobs. So it was much harder for the husband to argue that basically only immoral women go out to work. So this kind of process of social change, it's not often driven by people rethinking their philosophy from first principles. It's just observing what the people around them are doing. So what you've seen in Saudi Arabia in the past decade is pretty astonishing in terms of the speed of social change.

17:10So the share of women there in the labour force has doubled since 2010. So this is something that's deep-seated, but it can change. Robert, you've pointed to the economic impact for individual families there. What about for societies at large? How much of a difference does it make when social attitudes change and women go out to work? Well, in the countries where that's a huge problem, the possible impact is huge. So the best guess is if you removed the barriers to women working in the countries where it's currently hardest, that would be a sort of pretty immediate boost to GDP of about 20 % in those countries.

17:50And that, for context, is a bigger deal than avoiding a typical civil war. And how do you remove those barriers? That's a big ask. Well, it's very complicated. The simplest thing to think about is laws. and according to the World Bank, about half a billion women in the world live in countries where equality before the law for women is not merely imperfect but distant. So you get rid of those and that's helpful, but it's only a starting point. You've then got what can you do to change people's attitudes, and that's both women's attitudes and men's attitudes, and we did a lot of reporting on this story, and we were talking to people in India and Saudi Arabia and immigrant communities in Sweden, And there seem to be three things that really help.

18:39One is technology, that if you can see on the screen in the palm of your hand the way people live in other countries, that gives you ideas about what's possible. Another thing is social contagion. When one group of people start doing something, others notice. And so the role of pioneers is very important. If you're the first woman in a village who goes to find a job in the town next door and you deal with the gossip that inevitably happens in the village, then you can inspire others to do it. And finally, there's money. Okay, so we're back to money again. Is it really that big a lever? The love of money gets a very bad rap in scriptures, but actually it is often the clinching argument for why it's a good idea for women to go out to work.

19:28It's an incontrovertible argument that if you bring in another wage, there is more money in the household. And that then opens the door to all the other good things that happen. There's a really striking link between women going out to work and greater equality within the family. So we looked at numbers from about 27 countries. And even if you correct for the overall level of institutional sexism in the country and income of the household, women working end up having more decision-making power at home, more say over what the family budget goes on, and more say over things like whether they're allowed to go out without asking their husband's permission to visit their friends or go and have fun.

20:14So paid work makes families more equal. In praise of social change. Robert, thank you very much. Thank you.

20:44In Lost Boys, her new song, Phoebe Bridges doesn't say which machine she hates, but given that her song is about self-destruction and stunted maturity, she may well be referring to a smartphone.

21:01Elsewhere, Bridges has been loud and clear about her feelings towards the gadgets. She has banned phones during her world tour, which kicked off early this month, and she's banned phones during her previous concerts too. To gain entry to this one, ticket holders will have to seal their devices inside Yonder pouches, which are then magnetically locked for the duration of the gig. That means no filming or taking photos, as fans normally do at other performances. If you've been to a gig recently, you'll doubtless have seen an endless sea of phones recording the artist's every move. Nightclubs are also full of people who would prefer to digest their big night out through their phone screen.

21:40According to Samsung, each concertgoer in Britain records an average 12 and a half minutes of video per show. That's a lot of data, and it's not necessarily clear whether we're watching it back afterwards.

21:53Though Phoebe Bridges is probably one of the highest profile artists to be banning phones, she's definitely not alone. Alicia Keys, Childish Gambino and Jack White have all banned smartphones at their gigs. Even Sir Paul McCartney has. At two gigs, he played at the Fonda Theatre in March early this year. He banned phones and spoke about how freeing he found it. Bob Dylan's upcoming tour will also be phone-free when it hits the UK later this year.

22:25For some musicians, nostalgia definitely plays a part in their decision. When Sir Paul talked about his concerts, he said it was like an old gig, like how everyone used to play. But the anti-tech trend is not just a yearning for simpler times. Rather, the hope is that fans will get more out of the live music experience. and the idea is that it is all the more special for being ephemeral, something that can't be reposted on social media afterwards. Getting your hands on the ticket without having your phone on hand to record every moment means you get to enjoy the company of your favourite musician and fellow enthusiasts without a screen in the way.

23:01This creates intimacy and it's good for the artists too. They think that concerts should be appreciated in the moment and not videoed for later use. even people like Harry Styles are getting in on us at his recent gig in Manchester guests were encouraged to put their phones away and were given disposable cameras with a note saying thank you for really being here with me dance with all your friends artists have said that they hate looking out at a sea of iPhones rather than smiling faces Swedish metal group Ghost banned phones on its tour in 2025 their frontman cited the ever-growing distance felt between the crowd and the band as the reason for that but honestly Canadian DJ Kay Trinada put it even more bluntly he said it looks mad awkward from where I stand and I have to agree with him