Over the past couple of years the world has seen extreme examples of populist political movements come to fruition and take power in various countries. France’s most recent election saw populism come against populism with the Far Right La Pen eventually losing out to Macron’s Centrist party. Many political leaders are seen as being populist with the likes of Trump, Farage and even to a certain extent Corbyn rising up the political ranks from left (or right) field.
As populism grows it is reaching the further reaches of international politics with the South American powerhouse of Brazil being the latest to fall into line with their electing of Jair Bolsonaro. Infamous in his homeland, a nobody on the global scale; and now as of the first of this month “His Excellency”, a title that would make even the most narcissistic of leaders jealous.
Having spent his formative years in a country under the fist of the Brazilian dictatorship in the mid to late 1960s he saw the power that such militarism and fear created. Eldorado, a small city due south of São Paulo, is where his journey from dentist’s son to leader of the sixth most populous country in the world starts. He was in the city when deserter army captain turned left-wing guerrilla Carlos Lamarca was being hunted by the military dictatorship who had gained control of the country six years prior. Bolsonaro recounted in an interview back in 2017 that Lamarca “took [a soldier] as a hostage, and then killed him with strikes of a rifle butt” following it with a sly comment calling the hunted former army man “cowardly”.
At the age of 22 Bolsonaro finished his army cadet training at Agulhas Negras academy for army officers. He quickly made a name for himself with his outspoken nature, something that the Brazilian leadership post coup d’état was not used to. Jair Bolsonaro spoke out against the minimal wages that captains and other ranking officers in the army were getting. He did this through the media of a magazine that, just a year later, turned on him ruining his militant career with allegation of a bomb plot on various military bases across Brazil. To this day he still denies all allegations as the Supreme military court of Brazil acquitted him.
In 1985 Brazil’s parliament and its leadership came from out of the grasp of the military dictatorship and created the “Citizen’s Constitution” in 1985. The same year that former army captain Jair Bolsonaro became elected to the city council of Rio de Janeiro. This election was thanks to support from the military community due to his outspokenness on the wages of officers two years prior.
An outspoken advocate of the dictatorship styles of militant presidents between 1962 and 1985 such as Branco, Silva, Medici, Geisel and Figueiredo he is quoted as saying “Let’s do the coup, already. Let’s go straight to the dictatorship” back in 1999. With promises of shutting down congress on his first day of office and dismissing the Brazilian democratic parliament as “useless” he created a nostalgic feel for those longing for the days of militaristic control of the South American country. Only a week into his newly elected position and so far, he has not closed down the Brazilian Congress. He has already started moving towards a more militaristic feel to his cabinet with his Vice President and seven of his cabinet ministers coming from military backgrounds with a former Army General as his head of the Presidential Office for National Security.
“I would never rape you because you don’t deserve it”. That is what the current Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro shouted in the face of fellow politician Maria do Rosário. This stemmed from the rookie deputy do Rosário becoming a leader of a commission that was trying to tackle the issue of sexual abuse towards children and minors. During the argument he claimed that congresswoman do Rosário called him a rapist and then proceeded to call her a “vagubund”, Portuguese for whore. This is not the only time that he has stood by and proudly exclaimed his misogyny along with other bigoted attitudes. Bolsonaro has always stated that he would never pay a woman the same salary as a man due to the fact that they can get pregnant. In his militaristic and slimmed down cabinet of 22 member as opposed to the traditional 29 (with his hopes to cut it to just 15) his Minister for Women, Family and Human Rights – Damares Alves – is an anti-abortion evangelical pastor. Ms. Alves’ views include the belief that women were born to be mothers; she also believes that “it is time for the church to govern” inciting a clerical dictatorship to be run hand in hand with Bolsonaro’s military filled cabinet.
Jair Bolsonaro proudly promoted his homophobia with a belief that he would rather see his own son die in an accident than come home with another man or ‘moustached partner’ as Mr Bolsonaro quaintly put it. During his campaigning over the past year the current Mr President himself claimed that the minorities in the country must “bow to the majority or disappear”. This threat was made to 700, 000 aboriginal Brazilians, 14 million afro-brazilians whom he called too fat “even to breed” and claims that they are an expense that the Brazilian government should not have to dish out for.
Many have called Mr Bolsonaro the ‘Trump of the Tropics’ due to his societal attitude and lack of care for anyone different to himself notwithstanding his archaic views on women, race and sexuality. His bedside partnership with the Bible, Bull and Bullet – an evangelical pro-gun lobby looks an awful amount like the partnership that Trump has with the NRA who coughed up $30 million towards his campaign. With promises of gun control to be eased on a country that had 63,000 homicides by gun in the year of 2017, the comparisons towards his northern, more orange contemporary are becoming uncanny which is not a good direction for one of the world’s leading economies to head in.
The action or, maybe more accurately, inaction towards his offensive style of political campaigning strikes a chord with many around the world with leftist appeasement rife within the election year. Mr. Bolsonaro’s words were never challenged and most political commentators within Brazil shrugged him off as a “big man with a boy’s heart” or just “exaggerat[ing]” his political views. This sounds an awful lot like the way that the media treated Trump in his election campaign along with the lack of opposition that the remain campaign posted in Britain’s EU referendum which lead to political malpractice with lies and falsities being spread around the issue.
In September 2018 Bolsonaro was stabbed whilst holding a rally losing two litres of blood from his abdomen. This action by Adeilo Bispo de Olveira turned the election on its head with Flavio Bolsonaro, the George W. Bush to his father’s H.W. Bush, proudly claimed that Olveira “had just elected the president”. Which proved to be true as after that his campaign played off the fact that he survived the assassination attempt and that leftists were trying to shut down his freedom of speech and trying to shut down the voice of his nation. He won the election 55% to 45% showing that even though violence begets violence, trying to silence someone’s voice only makes them louder and pushes more people to listen to them.
This political development has just added to the chaos of the political structure of the world since the turn of the decade and will make the coming years of world politics very interesting with Bolsonaro already striking up allies with the likes of Trump, Netanyahu and Putin. The populist right wing movements across the world are truly coming up Trumps.
Rhys Ash Powell 