Bolsonaro is left without the support of the elites who brought him to power

“This boat is already gone,” says heavyweight businessman, dedicated to politics, on the president’s peer support Bolsonaro. A relevant part of industry, finance, services and even the retail elite find it unnecessary to wait for Bolsonaro’s behavioral changes concerning the fight against the pandemic and the economy. This posture sIt was revealed with the adhesion of these sectors, in particular the financial sector, to a political manifesto called “Letter from economists”. The public text was signed by more than 1,500 economists, bankers, businessmen and officials of previous governments, with harsh criticism of the president’s performance in managing the pandemic. “I never doubted Bolsonaro’s incompetence,” said Mailson da Nóbrega, Minister of Finance under the government of José Sarney and one of the signatories of the manifesto.

But we still do not know where it goes after this step, underlines columnist William Waack. Dissent is fueled by informal WhatsApp groups. At the moment, Who they would be willing to support is something unknown to businessmen themselves, members of an elite who enthusiastically embraced the fall of the PT and the election of Bolsonaro in 2018. and that today she considers herself deeply disappointed. This mood spreads and He’s already reached agribusiness sectors – remember Bolsonaro’s candidacy grew in the thriving grain and protein arc before becoming a phenomenon in major urban centers.

“We gave him 75% of the votes here in Santa Catarina”, says the head of the entity that represents the rural producers of this state. “Today we wonder why we did this.” The dismissal of the Bolsonaro government from affected segments of the economy comes a little after that of the academic elites and the liberal professions not identified with the left. same Before Bolsonaro’s victory, they warned of the corporate, populist, extremist and ideological component that _and the diagnosis was correct_ it would prevail over any liberal agenda in the economy.

There is a component en Bolsonaro’s populist “worldview” perfectly in line with comparable phenomena in Europe, Asia and the United States. It’s contempt for the elites at large, including scientists, specialists and experts. Bolsonaro sees himself as the possessor of a kind of “folk wisdom” which is nothing more than the celebration of ignorance., prejudices and apparently “simple and ingenious” proposals which only add to the problems, as witnessed the case of resistance to restrictive measures to combat the pandemic and the promotion of ineffective or even dangerous drugs.

A recent factor that has contributed to the divorce of relevant segments of the business community from the President is the conviction that Bolsonaro, in addition to being an incorrigible corporatist and interventionist and a lousy political operator. Employers’ analysis of government it reinforces the idea that the political vulnerability of the Director General increases with each misstep. And businessmen and the “Centrão” (the lineup of central lawmakers who back Bolsonaro in Congress) don’t like to line up with the losers.

The most recent evidence was the appeal, signed by the president himself, to get the Supreme Court to ban restrictive measures. adopted by the governors of the Federal District, Bahia and Rio Grande do Sul, qualified by the minister who presented the question to the STF to “big mistake”.

These same sectors of the economy They have become convinced, albeit belatedly, that there are no shiny coins in the drawer while waiting for the “window of opportunity” of which the Minister of the Economy Paulo Guedes speaks so much., on whom they have placed their hopes and are now listening with barely concealed disbelief (the most respected voice today is that of the President of the Central Bank, much to Bolsonaro’s chagrin). They prefer to deal directly with the presidents of the judiciary, the Senate and the House, as has just happened to address the fight against the pandemic and the recovery of the economy.

Two were the immediate results of that landing, a blow that Bolsonaro accused and described as a “movement” against his government. Run after the facts announced the creation of a commission with the judiciary, the legislature and some governors, which is a clear demonstration of their loss of coordination capacity and the dilution of their powers. Driven by the growing number of deaths from Covid, which surpassed the three thousand threshold on Wednesday, makes a rare statement focused only on the subject of vaccines, the great center of attention and hope.

Regarding the economic elites in a state of rebellion after a disaster, they helped create, apparently, they are not lacking in self-criticism. One of the authors of the “Letter of economists” summed it up as follows: “We have a tradition of supporting mad governments.”