Mourão says Lula's return 'difficult' but accepts popular sovereignty

Vice President Hamilton Mourão sat down with Folha in his office on a Wednesday in March 2021, just as Brazil was crossing a grim threshold: 270,000 dead from COVID-19, with two thousand people dying each day. The conversation ranged across the political landscape and the pandemic's wreckage, but one exchange stood out for its candor about the future. When asked whether he worried about a Lula candidacy in 2022, Mourão was direct. He found it unlikely the former president would win, he said. But if the people chose to bring Lula back? "Patience," he said. "I find it difficult, you understand. I find it difficult." There would be no institutional rupture, no military intervention, no constitutional crisis. The people were sovereign.

Lula had just recovered his political rights days earlier when Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin annulled the convictions that had barred him from running. Mourão's acceptance of that outcome—however grudging—marked a boundary. He believed the judiciary had grown too powerful, that the balance among Brazil's three branches had tilted dangerously. But he would not cross it. The military would not cross it. That line held.

On the pandemic itself, Mourão's diagnosis was clinical. The government had failed to mount an adequate public awareness campaign, he acknowledged. Neither the federal government nor the states had done enough to help people understand the disease's severity. But he resisted the notion that the administration bore primary responsibility for the catastrophe. The real problem, he suggested, was that the pandemic had become a political weapon. Bolsonaro's government had weaponized it. The opposition had weaponized it. The dispute between the president and São Paulo Governor João Doria—a fellow conservative but a rival—had poisoned the response. "This political use of the pandemic is terrible," Mourão said. He defended Health Minister Eduardo Pazuello, an active-duty general, saying he occasionally gave him a talking-to: "Do more and talk less."

On vaccines, Mourão offered a defense of the government's strategy that hinged on a bet that had not paid off. The administration had wagered heavily on the AstraZeneca vaccine, manufactured in Brazil by Fiocruz, believing it would arrive on schedule and in sufficient quantity. That assumption collapsed. The government had refused three offers from Pfizer, citing contractual terms incompatible with Brazilian law. Mourão acknowledged the decision looked wrong in hindsight but pushed back against the idea that it represented a planning failure. "It's like a sports commentator saying, 'If we'd put in player X, we would have won,' " he said. You had to judge decisions by the information available at the time. Still, he projected that by year's end, 120 to 130 million Brazilians would be vaccinated.

When the conversation turned to Bolsonaro's own resistance to masks and his encouragement of large gatherings, Mourão bristled. If the president had the power to convince 150 or 160 million Brazilians to stop wearing masks and washing their hands, he said, then he was already reelected and didn't need to worry about anything else. The suggestion that the president bore responsibility for the behavior of the entire nation was, in Mourão's view, a stretch. He had contracted COVID himself and recovered after taking hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, vitamin D, and zinc—drugs without proven efficacy, though they had worked for him, he insisted.

On his own relationship with Bolsonaro, Mourão was matter-of-fact. The president had excluded him from ministerial meetings, but that was constitutional. The vice president was not part of the executive chain of command. At sixty-seven, he said, he was not going to complain about being left out of the game. Rumors swirled that Bolsonaro wanted a different running mate for 2022, but Mourão said they had never discussed it. He was waiting to see what would happen before deciding whether to stay in politics. If he left, he would take care of his own life.

The interview captured a moment of strange equilibrium: a military officer in the second-highest office acknowledging the legitimacy of an outcome he disliked, defending a pandemic response he admitted was flawed, and insisting that the system would hold even if his boss lost. It was not a ringing endorsement of anything. It was something more fragile—a commitment to the rules, made while watching them bend.