Brazil’s new leader looks to the past
The new leader of Latin America’s biggest democracy and economy doesn’t care about your feelings. That is, unless you share his rage at leftists, apparent scorn for women, homosexuals and vulnerable minorities, and zeal for blowing up his country’s sclerotic status quo.
On Sunday, 63-year-old Jair Bolsonaro won the second round in Brazil’s presidential election at a canter, coming comfortably ahead of his leftist challenger, Fernando Haddad. His victory capped a bewildering ascent: For more than two decades, the former army captain existed on the political fringes as a congressman in Brasilia, a figure of buffoonery and contrived controversy, the butt of jokes.
Now, buoyed by a decisive electoral mandate and significant parliamentary support, he may be poised to radically reshape Brazil and its democratic institutions.
From afar, Bolsonaro’s success can be seen as the latest and perhaps most emphatic victory of right-wing populism in the West. He and his allies consciously linked their campaign to President Donald Trump and maintained regular contact with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. They harped on the supposed threat posed by the “cultural Marxism” of their opponents, vowed a ruthless war on crime, promised to drain the swamp of a corrupt establishment, and wrapped themselves in the flag of the nation.
Trump tweeted, “Had a very good conversation with the newly elected President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who won his race by a substantial margin. We agreed that Brazil and the United States will work closely together on Trade, Military and everything else! Excellent call, wished him congrats!”
Voters opted for Bolsonaro’s hard-line pitch in reaction to the country’s faltering economy, soaring crime rates and mounting frustration with a political class exposed by a mammoth corruption scandal.
Bolsonaro’s rise is a reflection of a polarized, febrile moment in Brazilian society. Former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso observed in an essay for the Washington Post that the populist firebrand had “surfed a tsunami of popular anger and despair that swept away the entire Brazilian political system.”
Looking beyond the past three decades of democratic consolidation, Bolsonaro harks back to the dark period of Brazil’s military dictatorship — which held sway between 1964 and 1985, a not-too-distant episode in the country’s history — and sees inspiration. When he cast a vote in 2016 to impeach the leftist President Dilma Rousseff, he did so in the name of the military commander who had presided over her torture in 1970. He and his allies have cheered the junta’s grisly program that saw countless leftist activists disappeared, brutalized, raped and murdered.
“Bolsonaro is not the straight talking man of the people his supporters claim he is,” wrote Benjamin Fogel, a Brazil-based academic. “Instead, he is the embodiment of the most hardline faction of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for 21 years.”
Bolsonaro struck a more conciliatory tone after winning the election. But Bolsonaro is set to let loose a stridently ideological agenda — one that could have a major impact on Brazil, the region and the world. He is bent on reversing or canceling protections that Brazil’s democracy had afforded to indigenous peoples and other disadvantaged minorities.
Pandering to evangelical voters, he could reshape the school curriculum in favor of “traditional values,” while curbing teachers’ ability to express political views. The man predicted to be his education minister is a retired general who has defended the military’s right to intervene in politics.
Backed by powerful agribusiness interests, he wants to roll back environmental laws that thwart logging and the expansion of farms in the Amazon basin. He also seeks to vanquish influential leftist workers’ movements that support landless farmers and the homeless in big cities.
More broadly, there’s still confidence that Brazil’s institutions and civil society can withstand Bolsonaro’s demagogic influence, and that the military, a neutral entity removed from politics, will remain so. When the newly elected governor of Rio de Janeiro, who campaigned with Bolsonaro’s son, was asked what he would do with all the suspected criminals from the favelas arrested on his watch, he quipped Monday that he would “dig more graves.”
“I think Brazilians have forgotten what it means to be ruled at gunpoint,” wrote Brazilian columnist Marcelo Paiva, whose mother and teenage sister were detained by the military dictatorship and whose father, a socialist politician, was disappeared and killed. Bolsonaro could make them remember.
Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for the Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine.