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Brasil
Bolsonaro’s electoral victory was perceived as another sign of a neopopulist trend which has been growing all over the world and includes politicians such as Donald Trump, Rodrigo Duterte, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán. He campaigned presenting himself as a figure of the people against the old and corrupt elites, contesting representative democracy. Paradoxically, he catalyzed the “against everything that is out there” feeling that exploded in Brazilian society amid nationwide protests 2013 that demanded more participation and democracy. Nevertheless, Bolsonaro was not new in the Brazilian political scene as he had been a congressman for almost thirty years. Despite his public positions in favor of the military dictatorship, his rhetorical defense of torture and torturers in that dictatorship, his frequent misogynistic, homophobic and racist declarations, his candidacy was endorsed by liberals such as Paulo Guedes who was later to become the Economy Ministry.
Throughout the campaign, Bolsonaro successfully associated himself to the fight against corruption, which had led to a middle-class rejection of the PT.
This was a political reading of the national climate by a politician who had not previously carried out such political agenda and who seemed like a comparatively “clean” politician in part because he had been so far out of the political mainstream and disconnected from major congressional factions. On the other hand, the PT was one of many political parties implicated in corruption investigations, though the other parties were not significantly punished by voters. Bolsonaro’s association with the fight against corruption came into sharper relief when he appointed as Minister of Justice Sergio Moro, the former federal judge who was responsible for the Lava Jato operation and for Lula’s imprisonment.
Over the course of five years, the democratic protests of 2013 evolved into cost-of-living demands, later to protests against corruption and ended up in an unexpected authoritarian president who was openly nostalgic for Brazil’s past military dictatorship, a president whose election relied on an alliance of liberals and lavajatistas (anti-corruption activists) and dreams of reintroducing “the dictatorship’s political ethos, preserved and intact, into modern Brazil.
