Jair Bolsonaro Explained: How Did Brazil’s Current Far-Right President Ascend to Power?
Source: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/bolsonaro-president-without-party-strategy-depoliticize-brazil/
By: Alice Iscar
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the KCL Latin American Society or El Cortao.
It’s been over two years since Jair Bolsonaro –the current president of Brazil– was elected, and the balance sheet of his first two years of ruling Latin America’s largest country is rather grim. The range of examples to illustrate his wrongdoings since his election is large –the peak of Amazonian deforestation, an extremely poor handled sanitary crisis, and the sharp drop of his popularity among Brazilians just a few months after he took office in January 2019. The big question this article will attempt to answer is how such a radical conservative, misogynistic, homophobic and racist Brazilian political figure was able to ascend to the country’s management. Four main aspects which explain this phenomenon will be presented: antipetismo; the social, economic and political crises Brazil has been undergoing for the past decade; Bolsonaro’s personality-led campaign; and ‘fake news’.
Antipetismo
The most evident explanation to Bolsonaro’s rise to power comes from this term: antipetismo. ‘PT’ is the common Brazilian way to call the ‘Partido dos Trabalhadores’, the leftist political party which ruled the country for over a decade from 2003 to 2016. Antipetismo describes the sentiment of being against ‘PT’ –against Brazil’s Workers’ Party. This sentiment exists ever since people started to notice the undergoing economic corruption under the presidency of Luiz Inácio da Silva – or Lula, a former leftist president of Brazil who ruled the country from 2003 to 2011. However, itheightened in 2014, when the corruption scandal officially broke out to the world under the presidency of Dilma Roussefwith the initiation of the Operação Lava Jato (the Car Wash operation). The Car Wash investigation found that the source of the corruption came from the state-owned oil company Petrobras, from which politicians, and more particularly the members of the Workers’ Party, accumulated millions of dollars. After more than thirty people were arrested for corruption –businessmen and politicians included– the scandal reached its peak with Lula’s trial for corruption and Dilma Roussef’s consequent impeachment in 2016 (after she tried to name him her chief of staff in order to shield him from justice). Therefore, during the 2018 elections, not few were the Brazilians who harboured a genuine hate for Brazil’s Workers’ Party and the political class in general. In that context, Jair Bolsonaro, a retired military official, stood as an outsider, and ended up embodying that hatred against PT. A study led by Mark Setzler in the Brazilian Political Science Review found that support for Bolsonaro in the 2018 elections is widely and largely explained by partisanship and antiparty hostility towards PT.
A country in crisis
Closely – but not exclusively – related to the previous point, Bolsonaro also found his support in the social, political and economic crises which have been shaking the country for the past two decades. Brazil’s two main problems in the population’s mind are the economic crisis and the worsening of violence in the past decade. After years of steady growth, Brazil experienced a heavy economic crisis in 2014, under Dilma Roussef. Brazil’s real GDP fell by 7,2% from 2014 to 2016, amid the political turmoil occurring at the same time.The economic and political crises combined caused mass popular dissatisfaction in the wake of the 2018 elections, which proved to be a fertile ground for Bolsonaro’s rise to power. Additionally, Brazil has also been suffering from an increasing social crisis with the steady rise of violence in the past years. In 2018, fourteen of the world’s fifty most violent cities were situated in Brazil, the dangerousness being assessed by the number of homicides per 100,000 residents. In 2018, the violence in Rio de Janeiro was so uncontrollable, that Michel Temer, Brazil’s president at the time, signed an emergency security decree which gave the armed forces authorization to replace the police and take over its duties.Once again, in that context and thanks to his singularity, many Brazilians came to see Bolsonaro as the exit gate from those political, economic and social crises.
A personality-led campaign
Similarly to Donald Trump in 2016 and other populist figures who managed to rise to power, Jair Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign was heavily centred on his personality, which surprisingly, in a way, seduced many Brazilians. The list of controversial and offensive remarks delivered by Bolsonaro is long. He often appears as a racist, homophobic and misogynistic man –as he told a colleague that he would not rape her because she did not deserve it’ or as he claims he would rather his son die than be homosexual; or as he stated, when talking about Afro-Brazilian communities, that they ‘don’t do anything’ and that they ‘are not even good for breeding anymore’. If some Brazilians were horrified by those statements coming from a presidential candidate, the more conservative part of the population, who felt put aside by the post-dictatorship cultural and political establishment, identified with Bolsonaro. His rhetoric also gave the impression that he spoke his mind and was not afraid to do so, which significantly contrasted with the sense of deceitfulness and dishonesty coming from the ruling political elite and especially the members of the Workers’ Party.
Fake News
Once more calling for a parallel with Trump, Bolsonaro declared a war against media’s ‘fake news’ going as far as to accuse a journalist from The Guardian, Bianca Santana, of spreading fake news on him. However, it seems Bolsonaro and his supporters were the ones who heavily shared fake news on Bolsonaro’s rivals during the presidential campaign. In an interview on Vox by Jen Kirby of Benjamin Junge, he explains how important Facebook and especially WhatsApp are in Brazil. Benjamin Junge is an associate professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at New Paltz and a Fulbright fellow at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil, whose studies focus on Brazilian working-class and middle-class families. In the interview he mentions how the majority of families have a WhatsApp group and how these group chats are created on every occasion whether it is between students in a class or among friends and families. In that way, information is diffused very easily among the population. Junge claims that digital spaces such as Facebook and WhatsApp is where the fake news are.An example of a fake news story spread by Bolsonaro during his campaign is that Fernando Haddad, his leftist rival, was planning on creating a ‘gay kit’ to deliver to children in primary schools in order to encourage them to become gay. Many other absurd stories on his rivals were shared in order to undermine their legitimacy and promote his campaign.
Bolsonaro managed to find his support by exacerbating feelings of dissatisfaction, hatred, fear and insecurity whichBrazilians were feeling in the wake of his election. Thesestemmed from the political crisis of the corruption scandal which touched the Workers’ Party, but also the economic and social crises which have witnessed a rise in inequality and violence in Brazil’s largest cities. He also focused on leading a personality-centred campaign, which shocked but also seduced many Brazilians. Finally, he made heavy and coarse use of fake news in order to spread negative misinformation on his rivals, profiting from a general feeling of antipetismo among the Brazilian population.
Alice is a third-year History and International Relations student at King’s College London seeking to raise awareness about the current politico-environmental situation in Brazil. She is a regular contributor of El Cortao’.
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