‘Brazilian Trump’ wins,
A 63-year-old populist renegade rode a wave of voter rage to Brazil’s presidency, marking South America’s most dramatic shift to the right since the end of the Cold War-era military dictatorships.
Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain, bested leftist Fernando Haddad in yesterday’s runoff, with just over 55 per cent of the vote, compared with just under 45 per cent for his rival.. His win adds Latin America’s largest nation to a growing list of countries — from the US to Hungary to the Philippines — where staunch right-wing nationalists have scored victories at the ballot box.
Bolsonaro ran a Donald Trump-style campaign that made heavy use of social media, and promised to renegotiate the terms of trade deals, put economics before environmental preservation and bring an iron fist to fighting crime. He demonised opponents and polarised the nation with his history of denigrating women, gays and minorities.
“What I most want is to follow the will of God, and the Brazilian constitution,” Bolsonaro said via Facebook after winning. “
We have everything to be a great nation, and if this is the will of God, we will be a great nation.”
Bolsonaro won a first round of the election this month but failed to avoid a runoff. His challenger, Haddad — a one-term Mayor of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city — had depicted the election as as a fight to preserve democracy. Bolsonaro has been an outspoken defender of Brazil’s former military dictatorship, lamenting that it did not kill enough dissidents.
The election occurred as faith has collapsed in Brazil’s corruption-stained political class, the economy has floundered and gang killings have surged, leaving the nation feeling rudderless and besieged.
Haddad ran largely as a stand-in for Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the popular former President, whose re-election bid was upended when he landed in jail this year on corruption charges.
“I voted for Bolsonaro because things can’t continue as they are,” said Alexandre Maciel, 44, an asset manager at a financial firm in Sao Paulo. “He’s the only one with the courage to do something different.”
Once dismissed as an unelectable rabble-rouser, he launched his campaign with no real allies, a small party machine and a paltry budget. He overcame those challenges with the power of social media, bypassing the country’s powerful television networks. He spoke directly to voters through angry all-caps tweets and Facebook Live videos. His simplistic get-tough solutions to Brazil’s deeprooted problems of crime and corruption played well online, and he developed a movement that some analysts compared to the US President’s in 2016.
Millions of devoted backers cheered the plain-talking Bolsonaro for articulating their rage. His left-wing opponents, he shouted, should be locked up. He also said police should use lethal force against criminals.
Even as Bolsonaro was sidelined from the campaign in September — when he was stabbed in the abdomen at a rally — his popularity grew.
Bolsonaro cuts a rare figure in Brazilian politics, which was dominated for most of the past decade and a half by the leftist Workers’ Party.
He has proclaimed himself a political outsider, despite serving seven terms in congress. For decades, he survived on the fringe. He once said a female politician was too ugly to rape and suggested that having a dead son was better than a gay son. Last year, he suggested that some descendants of African slaves were fat and lazy.
Oliver Stuenkel, professor of international relations in Sao Paulo, said: “It was obvious in this election that someone who could build a credible narrative of being different was going to do well. Bolsonaro understood that. He was politically incorrect, a bit weird. But that’s one way he has been able to set himself apart from the rest.”