Brazil, home to the world’s sixth-largest population and eighth-largest economy, looks set to ride the right-wing nationalist wave that has swept through Europe and the United States.

Jair Bolsonaro, a controversial, populist political outsider from a military background, took 46% of the votes in the first round of presidential elections in this vast South American country on October 7. The margin was historic — but not quite wide enough for him to avoid a second-round runoff against Workers’ Party candidate Fernando Haddad, who won 29%.

Bolsonaro has a history of making statements considered outrageous or extreme, a characteristic that has led to comparisons with US president Donald Trump. He has won broad support in the Orthodox Jewish community for stands like promising to move Brazil’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but he faces stiff opposition among liberal Jews.

His opponent, Fernando Haddad, has tried to rally support from across the political spectrum under the charge that Bolsonaro represents “a danger to democracy,” but Haddad’s campaign faces two formidable hurdles: No candidate in Brazilian history has overtaken a first-round winner; and Haddad’s party, the left-wing Workers’ Party (known by its Portuguese initials PT), is currently in wide disrepute. The party gave Brazil its two previous presidents, Luis In?cio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, but “Lula” was convicted of accepting bribes and Rousseff was impeached for malfeasance.

“Bolsonaro is our only option,” says Rabbi Alberto Cohen, a senior rabbi in Sao Paulo’s Beit Yaacov kehillah. “We don’t agree with everything he says, but the other candidates are enmeshed in a corrupt system.”

Rabbi Cohen says Bolsonaro will be good for the Jewish community: “He is in touch with the congregation, and a member of our kehillah is even part of his economic team.”

Brazilian Reform and Conservative Jews are of another opinion. Some organizations consulted for this article (who preferred to remain anonymous) said they don’t want to take a side because many of their members reject Bolsonaro. The candidate was invited to give a speech in Hebraica Sao Paulo (the local equivalent to the JCC), but the event had to be canceled due to protests.

The tourist image of Brazil as a land of beaches, music, and joy might be hard to reconcile with the idea of this country being ruled by a former military man who has described the brutal dictatorship that ruled from 1964 to 1985 as “beautiful.” But no one here was surprised by the nearly 50 million votes Bolsonaro received.

“Bolsonaro managed to be the magnet for popular discontent with the political class and its failure to deliver decent public services without so much corruption,” explains Igor Gielow, editor at large of Folha de Sao Paulo, one of the most influential newspapers in Brazil.

Of German and Italian descent, Jair Messias Bolsonaro was born in 1955 and received a military education. He served in the Brazilian army, reaching the rank of captain, until 1988, when he jumped into the political arena and was elected to the Rio de Janeiro city council. In 1991 he moved up to the National Congress, serving an uninterrupted 27 years, winning the most votes of any Rio congressman in 2014 under Brazil’s system of proportional representation.

Throughout his entire political career Bolsonaro has maintained a reputation as an outsider; he only managed to pass two laws in his nearly three decades in Congress, but he has been the chief beneficiary of the “anyone-but-PT” syndrome that has lately taken hold. That leftist party ruled the country from 2003 to 2016, and while initially PT policies lifted over 30 million people out of poverty, their grip on power was weakened by bribery and political scandals. Former president Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva is in jail and was barred from participating in this election, while former president Dilma Roussef was impeached for failing to root out corruption. The economy shrinking more than 3 percent and a rampant crime rate have fed popular disenchantment with the political system, which has made voters more tolerant of Bolsonaro’s extreme pronouncements against minorities.

Many campaign observers have drawn similarities between Bolsonaro and Donald Trump. Like the bombastic US president, Bolsonaro has mastered social media and found alternatives to classic avenues of communication. He has by far the most followers on social networks among Brazilian politicians, and he doesn’t engage his competitors in debates. What’s more, he was even forced to curb his campaign the last month before the first-round vote: A would-be assassin who claimed to be following “G-d’s will” gashed a five-inch wound in Bolsonaro’s abdomen at a speech, and the candidate lost prodigious amounts of blood. His popularity continued to grow during his monthlong hospitalization. As he said after his first-round victory, “For someone with no TV time, a small party, no political funds, and who has been in the hospital for 30 days, this is a great victory.”

Also like Trump, Bolsonaro

has made numerous strong pro-Israel statements, and has expressed a willingness to move Brazil’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

“Bolsonaro many times has expressed his intention of having a stronger relationship with the Trump administration, and Trump himself has criticized present Brazilian business environment,” explains Folha de Sao Paulo’s Gielow.

Despite this momentum, Jair Bolsonaro can’t afford to start measuring the presidential office for drapes. Almost a third of the population didn’t vote or cast blank ballots, and many Brazilians want “anyone but Bolsonaro.” Workers’ Party candidate Fernando Haddad is trying to reach out to those disaffected voters, and has also secured the support of the candidate who came in third, Ciro Gomes, with 12.5%. Bolsonaro is likewise shifting his rhetoric to appeal to centrist voters. The latest poll by Datafolha shows Bolsonaro leading Haddad 58% to 42%.

Can Bolsonaro be expected to keep all his campaign promises if he wins? That is hard to predict, but suffice to say his promises are already causing him internal problems. A few days after his first-round success, the promised embassy move to Jerusalem raised fears of a world Muslim boycott of Brazilian meat products among local meatpacking companies (whose annual poultry exports amount to $5 billion, half of which goes to Arab nations). The outcome of this political plot will be clarified in the second round on October 28.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 731)