BOLSONARO: BRAZIL’S TROPICAL TRUMP

RIO DE JANEIRO: Impetuous, admiring of military men, pro- guns, social media- savvy, accused of misogyny and racism: Brazil’s far- right presidential frontrunner Jair Bolsonaro shares more than a few qualities with US leader Donald Trump. But is it a fair comparison? The 63- year- old candidate with the carefully coiffed hair trounced the first round of presidential elections last Sunday, winning 46 percent of the vote. Many Brazilians are taken with his calls to patriotism, his anti- crime rhetoric, and the image he projects as an outsider who wants to drain the swamp. In the second round run- off on October 28 he hopes to ride to victory the conservative wave surging under him to beat Fernando Haddad, the leftist standing in for former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, incarcerated for corruption. For Joao Feres Junior, professor in political science at the University of Rio de Janeiro, the Bolsonaro phenomenon has some points in common with the one that took Trump into the White House. Like Trump, “he’s an actor, a candidate who understands nothing about public politics, who talks poorly, but for whatever reason has a fairly inexplicable charisma that attracts a certain type of electorate— an electorate with fascist tendencies,” he said. But Junior noted a major difference in supporters. “A large part of Trump’s electorate is made up of poor whites. In Bolsonaro’s case, his electorate is more white people from the middle and upper middle class.”