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If there is no end to the worst of Bolsonaro, why does Brazil love him?

This article is published in issue 45 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until November 9, 2021

Jair Bolsonaro, president of Brazil, enjoys bad press. Prejudices? Partly. Justified? Sure. When he was elected, the worst was thought. Three years later it’s worse than we thought. Her pearl necklace exceeds the imaginable. Machism, racism, militarism, homophobia they are the most famous and heavy. He believes a little, a little he cultivates his electorate. But it gets worse. The most serious is Covid. Over 600,000 dead and him? Denier. “A little cold.” Never seen with a mask.

Until the turning point: partial, belated, hypocritical. It is true that many others have done wrong against the pandemic. But anger boils. It is understood that the Senate wants to indict him for injured humanity. The second pearl is the Amazon. “It’s ours,” he says. So? Not that it was protected before, devastation is an ancient and complex phenomenon. But he cut the funds to protect her. The message is: free everyone! And so it was. Then reverse again. But who believes it anymore? The necklace is long: cuts to university research, ill-concealed white supremacism, do-it-yourself justice. And international isolation, unbelievable but true.

As long as Donald Trump was in the White House, like him, he had someone to cling to; now not even that. Having risen to a global power for thirty years, Brazil is now a pariah. No important statesman wants to know about Bolsonaro. Destroyed the trust, you want to recover it! In fact, the rating agencies are cautious. Not that the Brazilian economy is any worse off than others. Quite the contrary, in Latin America, given the bad trend. But how to trust such a helmsman? Therefore they keep it in a bain-marie waiting for bright spells, for more reliable successors: in terms of “country risk”, Brazil is sailing in the middle of the table, neither meat nor fish. At first attracted by the mirage of a “liberal revolution”, the markets have long eaten the leaf: Bolsonaro has nothing of a liberal. Nor on the political level, where he gets away with attacking the autonomy of Parliament and the Supreme Court and playing with the fire of polarization; nor on the economic one, where apart from the pension reform, for which he apologized more than for Covid, his promises have gone deserted. Privatizations? Not received. Competition? Neither. Trade liberalization? Few things. Transparency? Better to be silent. Public administration? Untouchable. And to say that Brazil needs everything like oxygen after years of apnea, between recession and stagnation. In return, he proved to be the champion of ancient and popular national sports: cronyism and paternalism, transformism and nepotism. It has opened the purse strings so much that about 50 million Brazilians collect hard cash from the state! Holy hand, for some, hairy alms for others. One thing does not detract from the other.

Woe betide, however, to take Bolsonaro lightly, to give it up for dead, to laugh more than it should. The 57 million Brazilians who elected him must be taken seriously. Those who bet on early impeachment have lost their stakes. It is true that the polls give him in free fall but his hard core, around 25%, remains solid and enthusiastic. They are mostly white and educated Brazilians, of evangelical faith and low-middle income. He calls them “good citizens”, victims according to him of crime and immorality, corruption and political caste. Believers and devotees, they scream and thrash, troops by no means negligible. What unites them most is the common enemy: Lula da Silva, champion of the global left, and his Workers’ Party, which he ruled from 2002 to 2016. It was the hatred towards them that led him to the presidency. It will sound strange to Italian readers. But how? The workers’ president, Brazil power, the “zero hunger” plan? A myth! A romantic aura hangs over him. Prejudices? Sure. Justified? Partly. His legacy is full of light and shadow, but what matters is that Lula is back, that the Supreme Court has canceled the trials that
they had convicted him of corruption: they were irregular. And if on the one hand he remains the most popular politician, on the other hand he is also the most hated. Cheese on macaroni for Bolsonaro: the enemy he was looking for. Who knows if he will not succeed in compacting the Brazilians against him who are willing to do anything not to see him in power again. In short, a country with an eternal future behind it, Brazil is not doing well. It’s a pressure cooker. Democracy leaks and social peace staggers. There are many causes and many responsible, but Bolsonaro is at the top of the list. What to expect from a constitutional president who claims a military dictatorship? Does he scoff at human rights? Does he insult the judges and offend the parliamentarians? Do you despise the secular state and the separation of powers? Does it attack the independent press and in the meantime take possession of television channels? Under the circumstances, seeing the glass half full is visionary. Or drunk. Yet a glimmer of optimism is justified.

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