On Thursday March 12, President Jair Bolsonaro
addressed the Brazilian nation. Just two days earlier, he had called
coronavirus a “fantasy,” but now he was wearing a mask. Using his
preferred method of communication, Facebook Live, he confirmed that
Communications Secretary Fabio Wajngarten had tested positive after they
had both had dinner with Donald Trump at the Mar-a-Lago resort in
Florida. Bolsonaro said that because of the pandemic, nationwide
demonstrations planned for Sunday, March 15, organized to support the
president and attack Congress and the Supreme Court for getting in the
way of his autocratic instincts, should be suspended. After all, he said
“a tremendous message has already been delivered” to the other branches
of government.
This was true. Without needing to fill the streets with his
supporters, the Bolsonarista movement had demonstrated its willingness
to intimidate Brazil’s existing democratic institutions. It is not
clear, however, what Jair Bolsonaro wants to do with them. His son
Eduardo, now probably the chief ideologue in the family, has made sure
that threats are not just subtext. “If someone dropped an H-bomb on
Congress, do you really think the people would cry?” he
tweeted last month.
During his father’s 2018 campaign, Eduardo Bolsonaro boasted that all
it would take is “one soldier and one corporal” to shut down the
Supreme Court. Jair Bolsonaro has always defended authoritarianism, but
as president he has not exactly put forward a coherent plan for Brazil
that those more moderate bodies have even needed to block. Does the
president really plan to shut down these institutions, or does he just
want to fight with them constantly? And if the conflict worsens, might
it be Bolsonaro who loses? These are the questions hanging over Latin
America’s largest country as it begins to be rocked by Covid-19.
“You now have a highly unpredictable situation, where it’s hard to
rule out anything. Either team could win,” said Oliver Stuenkel, a
professor of international relations at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas
University in São Paulo. In this schema, the teams are: Bolsonaro on one
side and Congress and the Supreme Court on the other. Winning for the
president would mean governing unimpeded by the other branches.
“Usually, one of the key elements of democracy is that even if you lose,
you don’t lose everything. But Bolsonaro may have produced a different
situation, one more akin to the final rounds of the World Cup—either you
survive, or you’re out.”
Bolsonarismo is an
explicitly violent movement
that holds democracy in contempt. It has made use of the niceties of
representative government, but it also believes they can be discarded in
service of the movement’s real goals: the affirmation of the
traditional family, the maintenance of Brazil’s existing social order,
and, most importantly, the eternal crusade to crush the left. Before an
anti-corruption investigation destroyed the political establishment and
allowed him to take center stage, the effective sum of Jair Bolsonaro’s
political life, over twenty-seven years as a congressman from Rio, had
been praise for the military dictatorship and support for the most
violent police in the country.
Since his election, he has been a tireless culture warrior, attacking
the press, or the opposition, or the system of checks and balances, in
an endless stream of attention-grabbing provocations. But if you shut
down your social media and walk the streets instead, it’s clear that
Bolsonaro has not remade Brazil in his own image. In the final week of
his campaign, he outlined what that would mean: the
deletion of all traces
of the left from the country. He could still try to accomplish this,
and subjugate Brazil’s institutions in the process; or he could suffer
the same fate as the last three presidents here—and face impeachment or
prison.
Bolsonaro has been in power for over a year, and the sky has not fallen; that is, not unless you live in one of the Rio
favelas where the state
governor and erstwhile Bolsonaro ally Wilson Witzel last year authorized police to
rain down gunfire and
flash bombs
from helicopters. For the country’s comfortable middle classes, life
has felt much the same as it did before, if not a bit more stable than
it had been under the previous,
world-historically unpopular president, Michel Temer.
There are two reasons for that. First, Bolsonaro adopted a
free-market platform during his 2018 campaign. It seems he doesn’t care
much about economic policy himself, but he installed a hard-neoliberal,
Pinochet-admiring
finance minister, and the business community has so far offered
conditional support for the president. There has been just enough
economic growth to keep things rolling for the people who really matter
here.
Second, Bolsonaro refuses to do what most Brazilian presidents since
the fall of the dictatorship have done: unlike them, he has neglected to
form a supportive coalition in Congress that would push through his
agenda. As a result, the legislative branch has been semi-independent,
governing as a relatively sane center-right body and issuing frequent
rebukes to the executive. A far-reaching pensions reform bill, whose
passage last year was crucial to keeping the markets on Bolsonaro’s
side, was actually softened and repackaged and delivered by Rodrigo
Maia, the leader of Congress, and ended up being much less regressive as
a result.
In the halls of Brazil’s otherworldly congressional complex in
Brasília, there is disagreement as to what Bolsonaro is up to. One
theory is that either he’s incompetent or just doesn’t care enough to
work with the legislature; another is that the conflict is intentional
and part of a larger scheme; and his supporters say he simply refuses to
engage in the corrupt machinations he said he would abolish.
“He is constantly testing the limits of his power, moving forward,
then retreating a little, to see how far he can go,” said Gleisi
Hoffman, the president of the left-leaning Workers’ Party (PT), which
ruled the country under Presidents Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva and Dilma
Rousseff from 2003 to 2016. “But what he really wants is a closed,
authoritarian system. That’s what he believes in.”
Demonized by the president and only recently having secured the
release of Lula from prison, the PT is on the defensive, though it is
still the largest party in the lower house of Congress. Hoffman thinks
Bolsonaro’s alliance with capital could fall apart, especially if his
government mishandles the economy, but readily admits that the president
has a committed base that believed him when he said he was an
“anti-system” candidate. So he needs conflict to survive. “The way that
he does politics, and this is a characteristic of fascism, is that he
always needs an enemy in order to fire up his supporters,” she added.
“First it is the PT, then Congress, then Lula, then all the
institutions, then Lula again. That’s how he operates.”
Carla Zambelli, an outspoken pro-Bolsonaro congresswoman from São
Paulo, has a different view. “President Jair Bolsonaro has never put
forward an authoritarian program,” she said, “and he defends the full
functioning of Brazil’s institutions.” What is distinct, she said, is
that he “doesn’t engage in the horse-trading those before him did.”
Zambelli was an outspoken supporter of the protests set for March 15,
before withdrawing her support because of the coronavirus outbreak.
It’s fairly easy to draw a map of Brazil’s power structures,
indicating where allegiances lie and how the chips might fall in a
moment of real crisis. Congress and the Supreme Court are in the hands
of Brazil’s messy political center, while the left opposition has
control of precisely zero institutions. Bolsonarismo, meanwhile, has the
presidency, the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, the military
and, to an even greater extent, the military police—plus a hard core of
fanatical supporters. Bolsonaro won the presidency with 55 percent of
the vote, meaning that he got the support of many people who had once
cast their ballots for Lula. But
studies published since then
have confirmed what was already clear on the streets: that there is a
smaller, especially zealous set of followers—above all, privileged young
men in the big cities—who are likely to stick with him even if other
voters end up regretting their decision.
This new movement formed alliances with existing power structures,
just as others were being crushed. Judge Sérgio Moro spearheaded the
sprawling, ambitious “Car Wash” anti-corruption investigation that put
Lula in jail in 2018, when he was the front-runner in the presidential
race. Immediately after his victory, Bolsonaro made Moro his “super
justice minister” and put him in charge of internal security in Brazil,
despite Moro’s earlier assurances he would never take a political post.
But after a set of stunning revelations published by the
Intercept last year, it became clear that Moro himself was breaking the law as judge and had
actively conspired to put Lula behind bars.
Although the global liberal press had lionized Moro for years as an anti-corruption crusader, he may in fact be the “
most important supporter of an authoritarian project” in government, according to well-connected
Folha de S.Paulo
journalist Mônica Bergamo. Lula has been relatively cautious since his
release, and it’s possible he is afraid he would be thrown back in if he
makes too much noise.
Then there is armed power. Since Bolsonaro’s presidency began, it has become clear that his family has
deep ties
to police “militias,” paramilitary forces of off-duty or former
officers that control large swathes of Rio de Janeiro state, including
the gang that in 2018 assassinated the progressive city councilor
Marielle Franco. Some have wondered if Bolsonaro’s bombastic outbursts
have been an attempt to distract attention from the
gruesome developments in this case, which would make sense—if he hadn’t always acted that way.
Ominously, though, a set of military police mutinies earlier this
year, ostensibly over a pay raise, demonstrated the willingness of the
officers to act outside of the chain of command. A senator was shot and
nearly two hundred and fifty people were killed during these strikes;
and Bolsonaro’s son Flávio said it was “legitimate self-defense” and
concerns for salaries that led to the wounding of the politician, a
rival of his political clan. São Paulo’s governor, João Doria, a former
Bolsonaro ally in charge of police in the largest state, accused the
president of stimulating the
miliciamento, or “militia-ization,” of the country’s police. Support for Bolsonarismo is
less solid
in the armed forces, despite the president’s lavish spending on the
troops and the fact that a third of his cabinet members are soldiers.
The military high command never had much regard for Bolsonaro before he
was president, and it is conceivable they could abandon him if things
really go south.
“Another military regime is unthinkable. That was a different era,”
Congressman Carlos Jordy, the vice-leader of the Bolsonaro government in
the House, told me. But he was quick to acknowledge his belief that the
1964–1985 period of military rule was “necessary,” because “there were
guerrillas that wanted to install a Communist regime in Brazil.” Armed
left-wing resistance did not actually start until after the US-backed
military coup, but I was more interested in finding out if anything
could justify canceling democracy once again, if perhaps in a different
way. Are there people in the country now who want to turn Brazil
Communist? I asked. “There are, there are,” but instead of being an
armed movement, it is “cultural Marxism that proliferates in every
corner of the country,” he said. “We now have people who think they
aren’t socialists, but think like socialists. It’s that Gramscismo.”
Along with Eduardo Bolsonaro, Jordy wants to make the defense of
communism a criminal offense in Brazil. Since there is a prominent
Communist Party here—which often
governs moderately,
and helped put on the World Cup—that would mean sending his
congressional colleagues to jail. But he said they wouldn’t need to be
arrested, because they could just stop being Communists.
We spoke at night in his office, on the last day before Congress was
shut to visitors due to the novel coronavirus. Congress had just
overruled one of Bolsonaro’s vetoes in a testy back-and-forth over the
budget. Jordy said that Bolsonaro had rejected the old logic of
governance, refusing to hand out jobs and favors in order to buy votes,
and that it may take some time for the rest of the government to adjust
to the new logic. On the wall outside his offices, I noticed a large
photo of him standing above “
Deus Vult,” the words supposedly
used to launch the First Crusade. He said he identifies with them, since
he believes we must go to battle with “those that want to destroy
Western Civilization.” Who are they, I asked. “Communists and
globalists.”
As it turned out, the real Bolsonaristas hadn’t wanted to call off
the protests. They believed their dear leader the first time, when he
said coronavirus was nothing to worry about, and not his half-hearted
appeal to slow the arrival of the pandemic. The hashtag
#desculpejairmaseuvou, or “Sorry, Jair, but I’m going,” took off on
social media. One video in particular captured the spirit of this
digital movement: Congessman Éder Mauro
posted a video
in which he declared: “A soldier that goes to war, but is afraid of
death, is a coward.” Then dozens of people stood up behind him, saluted
the camera, and pledged to take to the streets.
As things got going last Sunday, it became clear that—despite earlier
assurances to the contrary from officialdom—these marches were not just
about supporting the president. Calls for a military coup, or to shut
down Congress and the Supreme Court, or to usher in a
new age of brutal repression,
were everywhere. In downtown São Paulo, one giant banner read:
“Military Intervention—Now!” One participant, a forty-five-year-old man
named Alexandre Lima, told me, “It was a good idea to postpone the
demonstrations. But I went anyways.” For now, he prefers just telling
the rest of the government they’d better do what Bolsonaro wants. He
doesn’t favor a coup, he said, because it would look bad.
“The world already thinks this is too much of a military government,”
he explained. “That would do unnecessary damage to our reputation.”
Another protester, a twenty-nine-year-old teacher called Abimael
Pereira, was a lot less diplomatic. “We could try two things to resolve
this conflict. One is that we put pressure on Congress and the Supreme
Court, out on the streets, democratically,” he said. “The other is that
those two buildings become our Twin Towers.” No further explanation was
necessary, but he offered it anyway. “You know, we blow them up and kill
everyone inside.”
Jair Bolsonaro himself was supposed to be in isolation due to
concerns that he had recently come into contact with Covid-19. Or did he
actually have it? His family did little to clear that up. Apparently,
Eduardo Bolsonaro told Fox News
that his father had tested positive, then attacked the “fake news”
media for reporting exactly that, going back on Fox News to tell a
visibly perplexed anchor that the president had in fact tested negative.
As for Bolsonaro himself, who was supposed to be against the idea of
the populace forming large crowds in the streets, he began tweeting out
videos of the demonstrations around the nation, obviously encouraging
more of the true believers to hit the streets.
Then he decided to go out himself. Defying his own health minister,
he greeted supporters at close quarters and posed for selfies. No mask
this time. According to one count, he touched nearly three hundred
people. According to current epidemiological statistics, if he is
infected, that would make it likely that he would be ultimately
responsible for several deaths from infection with Covid-19.
Obviously nettled in an interview the next day, he said he shook those people’s hands “because it was
the will of the people.”
All of this seemed to confirm, finally, that Bolsonaro is incapable of
moderating his behavior: he will always make war on perceived enemies,
and he will always prefer maintaining the support of 15 to 25 percent of
Brazilians, the true radicals, to recognizing that there should be any
restraint on his actions.
For some Brazilians, this was the last straw. Leaks to the Brazilian press
indicated
that previously tolerant figures in Congress and the Supreme Court may
now unite against him. Congressman Alexandre Frota, a former adult film
star and one-time Bolsonarista, said he would bring impeachment charges
against the president. The president
lost the support
of an influential conservative woman, Janaina Paschoal, who’d helped
lead the charge to remove Dilma Rousseff. Parts of big cities erupted in
“
panelaço,” the
ritual banging of pots and pans, on Tuesday night. The
panelaço
was bigger and louder still on Wednesday, the day that Eduardo
Bolsonaro chose once more to blame communism, this time in China, for
the country’s problems,
causing a rift with the country’s largest trading partner.
The panelaços have continued, taking place in some form every day, as a majority of Brazilians sampled
told pollsters
they support taking extraordinary measures against the novel
coronavirus. Over the weekend of March 22–23, the new enemy-of-the-hour
for radical Bolsonaristas became governors like Witzel and Dória, former
allies who stepped up implement far-reaching measures to slow the
spread of Covid-19 in Brazil’s most populous states. In another
unhinged interview
Sunday night, President Bolsonaro said Brazilians don’t believe in
polls, and that this was all part of a plot, backed by the media, to
remove him from power.
This was the same outcome as the previous Sunday’s. The Bolsonaros
always seem to choose to escalate conflict. It is what they must think
will best serve their interests.
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