The violence promised by Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right Rio de Janeiro congressman who is within a mortar’s range of the Brazilian presidency, was visited upon him during a campaign rally Thursday.
In the Minas Gerais state, Adélio Bispo de Oliveira, who later told police he was on “a mission from God,” allegedly plunged a knife into the candidate’s body. Bolsonaro was rushed to a hospital and into surgery to treat internal injuries and a large loss of blood, Brazilian news outlets reported.
“You bandidos that tried to ruin the life of a guy who is the father of a family and the hope of all Brazilians,” Flávio Bolsonaro ― the congressman’s son who is a Rio state representative ― said in a statement. “You just elected the president, and it will be in the first round.”
The stabbing threw into further mayhem a tense, chaotic and unpredictable presidential election. Bolsonaro, a former army officer who has in the past called for the return of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, has sat near the top of presidential polls since last summer. As of Friday, with just a month to go before the first round of voting on Oct. 7, he led all polls that did not include former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the popular leftist leader who was ruled ineligible last week thanks to his July 2017 conviction on corruption charges.
In normal times, Bolsonaro’s radical right-wing views would have kept him relegated to the fringes of Brazilian politics, with little influence beyond his ability to capture a headline or a charging document thanks to his racist, sexist and homophobic statements. Bolsonaro once told a fellow lawmaker that she was too ugly to rape. He has called immigrants “scum” and has proposed selling off lands settled by indigenous Brazilians and the descendants of enslaved Africans. He wants to give the country’s already deadly police forces, which killed more than 4,000 people last year, even more power to shoot and kill with impunity. And in 2016, he dedicated his vote to impeach the country’s then-President Dilma Rousseff to the army colonel who oversaw the dictatorship-era program that tortured her.
Bolsonaro has seized on the discontent, the despair and the anger, fomenting a backlash against a corrupt establishment with a noisy fake populism. If this sounds familiar, it should. Bolsonaro has become known as “Brazil’s Trump.”
But as his stabbing in the streets of Juiz de Fora on Thursday might suggest, these are not normal times. For the past four years, Brazil has been embroiled in a series of crises it cannot escape: a grueling economic recession that has cost three million jobs and returned millions of people to poverty; an expansive political corruption crisis that has ensnared hundreds of politicians, including da Silva and leading members of the country’s biggest centrist political parties; and a record outbreak of violent crime that has resulted in more than 60,000 homicides in each of the last two years. The crises and the establishment’s failure to address them have left Brazilians with little faith in their democracy or their country.
Bolsonaro has seized on the discontent, the despair and the anger, fomenting a backlash against a corrupt establishment with a noisy fake populism. If this sounds familiar, it should. Bolsonaro has become known as “Brazil’s Trump,” and he has benefited from many of the same conditions that produced President Donald Trump and gave rise to rise to xenophobic, anti-immigrant, quasi-authoritarian politics around the world.
The attack is expected to boost Bolsonaro’s candidacy: His membership in a small party granted him little television time under Brazilian election law, but the stabbing will put him front and center even as he takes a break from campaigning. Brazilian markets rallied Thursday afternoon on the expectation that the attack would help the right-winger who, beneath his rhetorical populist postures, has adopted more traditional market-based economic policies in an effort to appeal to financial elites. And experts said the assault could push the issue of violent crime further to the forefront of voters’ minds and increase support for Bolsonaro, who has cultivated a “law and order” image that, like all such appeals, is really a promise of lawlessness and disorder in service of the ruling classes.
“A very violent episode against a candidate that wants to change everything generates a narrative that benefits him strongly,” said Thiago de Aragão, the director of Latin American political risk at Arko Advice, a consulting firm based in Brazil. “It strengthens even more his narrative, because everything he was saying that people could suffer, he actually suffered himself.”
Bolsonaro’s fellow candidates widely condemned the attack as yet another assault on democracy in a country where political violence isn’t a novelty: In 2016, there were 28 killings of political candidates, including 15 that occurred during the official period of campaigning. The incident led to widespread calls from candidates and human rights groups to put an end to such violence.
While Bolsonaro no longer calls for the return of military dictatorship, he nonetheless has promised to stock his cabinet with military officers, further militarize Brazilian society and bring even more violence to Brazil. His rise poses one of the toughest tests Brazil’s democratic institutions has faced since the end of the dictatorship three decades ago.
“This is the most important election in Brazilian history,” James Green, the director of Brown University’s Brazil Initiative program, said before Thursday’s attack. “Brazil is really at a crossroads.”
The implications of the election ― which will unfold over two rounds of voting in October ― will stretch beyond the country’s borders. Brazil may be a young democracy, but it is also an influential one: It is the largest of Latin America’s democratic nations and the fourth-largest democracy in the world. What happens in October will offer a referendum of sorts on the state of global, multicultural democracy itself.
“I tend not to buy into this idea that we’ve entered into a global democratic recession,” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, who as recently as 2015 called the idea “a myth,” said in an interview this summer. “Those claims have been overstated so far. But if [Brazil] suffers a democratic erosion, I would change my tune a lot.”
“If Brazil falls, if Brazil goes authoritarian, I would worry a lot about the rest of the region,” Levitsky said. “People in Latin America ― militaries in Latin America, demagogues and democrats in Latin America ― will be paying close attention to Brazil. It would have devastating regional consequences.”
Bolsonaro has spent his entire political career advocating violence against his political opponents and people he deems unworthy of the country he claims to love. In 1999, he said that the dictatorship “should have shot some 30,000 corrupt people, starting with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.” He has repeatedly suggested that former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose regime was accused of murdering 3,000 people and torturing 40,000 others, should have killed even more. He has denied that Brazil’s dictatorship tortured people.
Bolsonaro’s most ardent and direct calls for violence, though, are aimed at the leftist Workers’ Party, which under da Silva and his hand-picked successor, former President Rousseff, ruled Brazil from 2003 to 2016. During a campaign stop last week, he called for gunning down members of the PT, as the Workers’ Party is known.
Bolsonaro’s presidential candidacy is fueled by his opposition to da Silva, Rousseff and the PT: He first began campaigning for president in 2016, shortly after Rousseff’s impeachment and da Silva’s initial implication in Operation Car Wash, the corruption probe that has embroiled Brazilian politics for more than four years.
By then, Trump was nearly two years into the campaign that would make him the president, and right-wing leaders had begun to emerge across Europe. Bolsonaro launched his campaign against that backdrop, pitching himself as a savior ― his middle name is Messias, as if life itself were a hack writer ― who alone could rescue Brazil.
His playbook was similar to Trump’s: Bolsonaro cultivated a base of devoted followers on social media, allowing him to go around traditional media; those outlets, Bolsonaro and his supporters routinely suggest, traffic in misinformation and “fake news.”
Where Trump demagogued on the issue of immigration, Bolsonaro has focused his attention on Brazil’s struggling economy and its rampant corruption. That Workers’ Party presidents oversaw the economic downturn and were implicated in Operation Car Wash gave him everything he needed to paint the left and its supporters as the cause of Brazil’s woes.
At its core, however, Bolsonaro’s campaign, like those in other countries, was an explicitly nationalist reaction to the left and the policies it had spent a decade implementing. The conservative “Bullets, Bible and Beef” legislative caucus to which Bolsonaro belongs gave that away during Rousseff’s impeachment, when it ignored the stated reason for the ouster ― that she had illegally manipulated the federal budget deficit. Instead, it unanimously voted for her removal on grounds that she represented an all-out attack on “God, family and the Brazilian people.” On his campaign website, Bolsonaro alludes to leftists as foreign, saying that “we are a country that is proud of our colors, and we do not want to import ideologies that destroy our identity.”
His campaign has made it clear which Brazilians do not belong to that “we”: Bolsonaro opposes the affirmative-action quotas previous governments implemented to increase university and employment access for black Brazilians and women; he has compared same-sex marriage, fully legalized in 2013, to pedophilia; Brazil’s dictatorship, Bolsonaro has claimed, was justified because it defended Brazil from “communists.” His candidacy and his opposition to Brazil’s current leftist movements exist, he claims, for the same reason.
Bolsonaro has not reserved his violent rhetoric for his political opponents; it is his preferred solution for dealing with Brazil’s most marginalized groups, too. In the past, he has said that he’d punch gay men if he saw them kissing in the street. During his campaign, he has proposed using helicopters to dump pamphlets into Brazil’s largest favela neighborhood ― where the overwhelming majority of residents are poor and black ― to warn drug dealers that they had six hours to turn themselves in before the military would come in guns blazing. He has suggested turning more of Brazil’s public security operations over to the military and giving the country’s police ― already among the world’s most deadly law enforcement forces ― more leeway to shoot and kill anyone they suspect of a crime. (The overwhelming majority of victims of police violence in Brazil, of course, are black Brazilians.)
Bolsonaro excused the death of Marielle Franco, the black, queer Rio de Janeiro city councilwoman who was assassinated in March, as “just another death in Rio de Janeiro.” He has remarked that Brazil’s feminists are good only for the oral sex they might provide; his calls to seize indigenous lands are their own form of violence against populations that already suffer disproportionately.
“His plan is to rollback every single social advance that has been achieved since the mobilizations against the dictatorship in the late ’70s,” Green said. “For the LGBT movement, for the women’s movement, for the important movement for rights for people of color.”
