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The results of the first round of the Brazilian presidential election were a surprise. Not only did the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro get 47% of the vote and he is expected to win the next round of voting and become president (polls suggest a win with 54% of the vote). Appointed President Dilma Rouseff, appointed to the Senate in her home town of Minas Gerais, was also not elected.
Opinion polls suggested that she would easily win over her anonymous opponents. But to everyone's surprise, she came in only in fourth place. This should be compared to the 54 million voters who chose her as president in 2014!
The army and politician Bolsonaro has been an outsider of Brazilian politics for many years. His statements on the coup of 1964 even led the right-wing politicians to ignore him. He argued that the military dictatorship was not doing enough; torturing left-handers but not killing enough – unlike Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the Argentine junta in Argentina.
He said that black citizens are not worth reproducing and that American urinals should be expelled from their fields to make room for peasants. It is just these peasants who make up Bolsonaro's backbone and main support groups.
Bolsonaro promises that all the laws that guarantee land workers and the uninitiated right to aid and state protection cease to reign over Brazil that is still stuck between the big landowners who exploit their farms in feudal conditions and Brazil's most modern Brazil.
Recently, Bolsonaro threatened all dissidents with imprisonment or exile. "Whoever does not like it here when I am president may choose to leave the country or end up in prison."
He does not hide where his loyalty lies. The Amazon will be even more duped to give way to soybean cultivation, the school will be militarized and a severe discipline will guarantee safety and order. The favelas, the poor neighborhoods, will be cleaned up and the police and military officers will have their hands free to summarize the alleged criminals and their allies.
Homosexuals and women watch with fear how their rights – the results of a long battle – will be limited. His constituents often come from right-wing evangelists, the same churches that supported President Bush in the United States. Brazil is the largest Catholic country in the world, but evangelical sects have gained ground over the last 30 years and pastors and church leaders have mobilized millions of people. They are against abortion and against gay marriage, they defend the nuclear family and have conservative values.
Ten days before the first round of elections, tens of millions of women demonstrated alongside opponents of Bolsonaro. Brazil has rarely seen such manifestations. Many thought that it was at that time that Bolsonaro's high numbers would decrease and that unsafe voters would turn to somebody else. But it just became the opposite.
The churches mobilized and presented Haddad – the Labor Party candidate – as the devil's candidate. With the message coming home, evangelical pastors used radio and television to showcase Bolsonaro as the sole guarantor of family and Christianity.
But are there really 70 million Brazilians who believe in Bolsonaro? Analysts Folha de Sao Paulo, one of the best newspapers in Brazil and Latin America, do not believe it. They say the hard core of voters in Bolsonaro is 20 million, the other 50 million voted for him to punish the PT party – former presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rouseff. Tired of corruption and skeptical of everyone, they chose to vote for an underdog.
Many draw parallels to the way American voters voted for Trump, also a stranger with no experience of a traditional party. But the similarities are not great. Brazilian democracy is young and in thirty years no politician has managed to make citizens feel involved and engaged in the struggle for democracy. It also depends on the great illiteracy that characterizes the country.
The contradictions between young and urban Brazil with music, art and sexual freedom and conservative Brazil in rural areas that support the army and churches are great.
Brazil is a deeply racist society, and the white upper class has been concerned about how blacks and uninhabited people have gained increased political and legal rights. Bolsonaro promises white security, his constituents do not know that the security of Bolsonaro's speech will be a high price. He promises to abolish arms control so that whoever wishes can buy a weapon to defend himself.
He also stated that he did not want any particular cooperation with neighboring countries. Brazil, the fifth largest country in the world, will manage itself and will not need any ally.
Despite a major scandal, revealed by the famous and credible Folha newspaper in Sao Paulo – which has published evidence that Bolsonaro was alleged to have received bribes and spread false news about his rival Fernando Haddad via WhatsApp – the figures show that he is becoming the next president of Brazil on Sunday.
But the struggle between nationalist and protectionist Bolsonaro and industrial Brazil, entirely dependent on international cooperation, will characterize Bolsonaro's time in power.
Ana Valdes
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