Brazil, the world’s fourth-largest democracy, could become the latest country to pledge the growing fraternity of nations flirting with fascist rule on Sunday, when voters are likely to choose a far-right authoritarian as the country’s next president.
Jair Bolsonaro, a congressman who has openly praised Brazil’s erstwhile military dictatorship and exhibits all the hallmarks of a modern authoritarian, has slipped slightly in the polls in the last week before the election. Still, he holds a strong enough lead to suggest that he will defeat former São Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers’ Party.
Bolsonaro, who was stabbed on the campaign trail in September, has a history of aiming violent rhetoric at his political opponents and Brazil’s most vulnerable populations. Now, he’s on the cusp of bringing the right-wing movements that have triumphed in Europe and the United States ― through Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the rise of anti-immigrant, xenophobic parties in Germany and elsewhere, and U.S. President Donald Trump ― to South America. Victory for the candidate known as “Brazil’s Trump” could have wide-ranging implications in Latin America and around the world.
Bolsonaro’s rise shares similarities with those of other right-wing parties and politicians, but given the youth of Brazil’s current republic, which was only re-established 30 years ago, Bolsonaro is an even greater threat to the democracy he may soon oversee than any of his global peers. A Bolsonaro win could produce the clearest lesson yet in how a ready mix of elite failure, racial and social backlash, and underlying societal tolerance for authoritarianism can pave the way for modern democratic collapse.
Here’s a guide to everything you need to know about the man who, barring an Election Day upset, is about to become Brazil’s next president.
Who is this guy?
A former army captain, Bolsonaro left the force not long after Brazil’s military dictatorship ended in 1985. In 1990, he won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Brazil’s National Congress. He has served seven terms since as a largely ineffective legislator from a small party with little influence over Brazilian politics. He is known less for his accomplishments as a lawmaker than for his brash, violent and incendiary rhetoric. This year he joined the right-wing Social Liberal Party and became its nominee for president.
What sort of “violent rhetoric”?
Bolsonaro once told a fellow congresswoman that she was too ugly to rape. He has said that he’d rather have a dead son than a gay one and that he’d fight two men on the street if he saw them kissing. He has said Afro-Brazilians are not suitable for procreation, called immigrants “scum,” and promised to seize protected indigenous and Afro-Brazilian lands in order to turn them over to mining and agriculture interests. He was charged under Brazil’s judicial system with inciting hatred thanks to his racist, sexist and homophobic statements.
Bolsonaro has also routinely called for violence against his political opponents. In 1999, he said then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso should be shot. He called for gunning down members and supporters of the Workers’ Party during a campaign stop earlier this year.
Is he really pro-dictatorship?
To believe he isn’t requires a serious faith in a favorite maxim of Trump apologists: Take him seriously, not literally.
As early as 1993, when Brazil was attempting to cement its new democracy into place, Bolsonaro said he was “in favor of dictatorship.” He’s hardly walked that back since. As recently as 2015, he called the era of Brazilian dictatorship “a glorious period.” In 2016, he dedicated his vote to impeach then-President Dilma Rousseff, a former anti-dictatorship guerrilla, to the Army colonel who oversaw the program that tortured her while she was in prison.
Bolsonaro, who has even denied that Brazil’s former military junta qualified as a dictatorship, has also expressed fondness for other Latin American strongmen. He praised former Chilean Gen. Augusto Pinochet, whose regime was accused of killing at least 3,000 people and torturing 40,000 more. Bolsonaro said that Pinochet’s only mistake was that he didn’t kill enough. And in the 1990s, he said that Brazil should follow the path plotted by then-Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, who shuttered Peru’s congress, rewrote parts of its constitution, and imprisoned and tortured political opponents.
He’s not kind of a dictator. He is a dictator.
Monica de Bolle of Johns Hopkins University
Bolsonaro’s running mate, retired Army Gen. Antônio Hamilton Mourão, has refused to rule out the possible return of military rule and openly talked about a military coup in the past. Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, has talked about using the military to shut down the Supreme Court.
The weekend before the election, Bolsonaro pledged a “cleansing never before seen in Brazil” and said that “red thieves” ― by which he meant his leftist opponents ― would be “banned from the country.”
“They can either get out or go to jail,” he said in a video shown to supporters at a rally in São Paulo.
“He’s not kind of a dictator. He is a dictator,” said Monica de Bolle, the director of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University. “He clearly has zero regard for democratic institutions. He clearly means what he says.”
So how did we get here? What explains his popularity?
The short answer is a familiar one: backlash against an inept, self-dealing establishment that has deepened Brazil’s various interlocking crises. A historic recession that left millions unemployed, a sharp spike in violent crime rates leading to 60,000 homicides in each of the last two years, and a political corruption scandal (called Operation Car Wash) that has implicated hundreds of politicians have all evaporated faith in the Brazilian political system. Bolsonaro has seized on the discontent.
He and his supporters primarily blame the leftist Workers’ Party, which oversaw Brazil’s economic boom under ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and its bust under Rousseff, da Silva’s successor, who served from 2011 to 2016. Rousseff was impeached on charges that she illegally manipulated federal accounts to obscure the size of the budget deficit, though her opponents weren’t solely motivated by issues of truth and justice.
The Workers’ Party ― also known as the PT ― has spent the past four years in the middle of corruption scandals. Da Silva was convicted on money laundering charges in 2017 and imprisoned earlier this year.
