In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro shocked the world by rising from relative obscurity to become president of Brazil. In these pages, I described a paradox thrown up by his unexpected success. Bolsonaro’s core support clearly lay in Brazil’s predominantly white middle and upper classes. But this is not sufficient to win a majoritarian election in a country where 70 percent earn less than two minimum wages (around US$450 per month) and more than half identify as black or mixed race. If we were to understand Bolsonaro’s victory, I argued, we also needed to understand his appeal to many low-income, black and brown Brazilians.

This seemed particularly paradoxical in the wake of thirteen years of government by the center-left Workers’ Party (PT) (2003–2016), during which it oversaw impressive levels of poverty reduction. While lower-income voters had tended to support the PT during this period, the middle classes fiercely opposed them. Bolsonaro’s victory seemed to defy such established logic. I therefore posed the following questions: “How has Bolsonaro been able to bring together elites wishing to block the social mobility of the popular classes, and a significant proportion of those they seek to block, within the same electoral coalition? And how long can this last?”

After four years of the Bolsonaro government, and in the heat of another presidential election, it is an apt moment to revisit these questions. Certainly, we now have a clear answer to the second: Bolsonaro’s mass appeal is far more durable than many assumed. In last Sunday’s vote, despite having overseen the world’s worst pandemic response, a huge increase in deforestation rates, and launched constant attacks against democratic institutions, Bolsonaro has fallen only slightly short of his previous first-round vote (43 percent compared to 46 percent in 2018). He will now face a tense runoff against the PT candidate, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who gained 48 percent of first-round votes.