Brazil May Elect Jair Bolsonaro. Here's Why A Major Democracy Is Flirting With Fascism.

Brazil, The World's Fourth-Largest Democracy, The World's Next Generation of Federations 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 into the polls in the last week before the election. Still, he holds a strong enough position to create São Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers' Party.

Bolsonaro, who was stabbed on the campaign in September, has a history of 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 US 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 is up to 30 years ago, Bolsonaro is an even greater threat to the democracy than any of the other right-wing parties and politicians his global peers. In Bolsonaro, a successful 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.

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 a largely ineffective legislator from a small party. He is known for his accomplishments as a lawmaker for his brash, violent and incendiary rhetoric. This year he joined the right wing Social Liberal Party and became nominee for president.

Bolsonaro once told a fellow congresswoman that she was too ugly to rape. He has said that he is more of a dead man than he is. These Afro-Brazilians are not suitable for procreation, so-called immigrants "scum," and promised to sixteen protected indigenous and Afro-Brazilian lands in order to turn over mining and agriculture interests. He has been under the influence of 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 this year.

To believe he is not a serious person Take him seriously, not literally.

As early as 1993, when Bolsonaro said that it 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 himself to impeach then-President Dilma Rousseff, to form anti-dictatorship guerrilla, to the Army Colonel who oversaw the program that tortured her while she was in prison.

Bolsonaro, who has even been denied that Brazil's military training, has also been expressed for Latin American strongmen. He praised form 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 did not kill enough. And in the 1990s, he said that Brazil should follow the path Alberto Fujimori, who shuttered Peru's congress, rewrote parts of its constitution, and imprisoned and tortured political opponents.

Bolsonaro's running mate, retired Army Gen. Antônio Hamilton Mourão, has failed to rule out the possible return of military rule and openly Bolsonaro's his 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 would have 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, director of Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins University. "He clearly has zero look for democratic institutions. He clearly means what he says. "

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 It is the only way to understand the size of the budget deficit, but its opponents have not been motivated by issues of truth and justice.

The Workers' Party – also known as the – scandals. Da Silva was convicted on money laundering charges in 2017 and imprisoned earlier this year.

Many of these complaints are valid: Rousseff failed to manage the economy through a downturn that became a full-blown crisis, and the party's links to corruption came out after it had long been promised that it would clean up Brazilian politics. The party also made it to the country's rampant problems with violent crime. Its shortcomings have been eroded among Brazilians in the PT's ability to govern.

Purpose Bolsonaro has helped to reduce the risk of homophobia and sexism. push to protect and promote LGBTQ and gender equality. Bolsonaro has promised to "take back" Brazil from the left and to the bottom of the "PC culture" that has "coddled" marginalized groups.

It's a nationalism of the brand that has won gains across the world, and Bolsonaro's movement is explicitly identitarian: On his website, he proclaims that his Brazil is "a country that is proud of our colors, and we do not want to import ideologies that destroy our identity. "Bolsonaro blasts the PT and Haddad as tools of" communism "who wants to turn Brazil into Venezuela. He and his supporters have used a variety of social media, and they have a variety of allegations about the party and its voters – for instance, claiming that it supports gay pedophilia.

Not entirely. The PT's base of support is smaller than it used to be, but it still won a larger share of seats in the National Congress than any other party during this election's first round of voting. The PT remains the most popular party in Brazil, and da Silva might have won the presidency, he had not been banned from the race thanks to his money laundering conviction.

Brazil's center-right parties, by contrast, were not-factors in the first round of voting, as Brazilians seem to have lost all faith in their ability to govern corruption. The Social Democratic Party (PSDB) and the Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) deserve plenty of blame for their role in creating discontent and despair plaguing Brazilian politics. Their impeachment of Rousseff was as much an effort to check the car wash probe – which she refused to shut down – and seize the power they had failed to win at the ballot box as it was an attempt to hold her accountable for the country's economic woes. And as part of Rousseff 's training governing coalition, they share responsibility for those economic problems.

President Michel Temer, a member of the PMDB who assumed power after Rousseff's impeachment, was instantly implicated in bribery scandals and bribery charges. It is also necessary to revive the economy as it continues to be implemented in the social and health care sectors. His "solution" to the rise in violent crime, meanwhile, was to the military in charge of Rio de Janeiro – a cynical move that has only worsened Rio's plight and done nothing to address violence in other parts of the country.

Leading figures from the PSDB, meanwhile, were also involved in the Car Wash probe. The combination of impropriety, the party's association with Temer's government and its choice of Brazilians to make it easy for Brazilians to turn elsewhere.

The failures of these two parts created on the Brazilian right, and Bolsonaro filled it.

Bolsonaro has won favor with the social and economic spectrum, as people are fed up with violence and corruption. He enjoys support from a majority of mixed-race Brazilians, even as he continues to make racist statements. He also enjoys widespread support from the country's growing conservative evangelical movement and from wealthier Brazilians who traditionally support the center-right parties – the financial and business elite, in particular.

The evangelical movement agrees with Bolsonaro's hardline anti-LGBTQ stances and, like him, opposites the nascent feminist movement that has pushed for women's equality, more access to contraception and limited legalized abortion. Brazil's most outspoken evangelical leaders also support Bolsonaro's militarized vision of public security.

The financial elites flooded into his corner thanks to their own opposition to the Workers' Party and its economic policies. It must have been an inexplicable move, given Bolsonaro's past support for statist, military-driven economics, but it's a lot of hiring at the University of Chicago-educated economist who promised to implement their market-friendly policies. He has also long been the preferred candidate of young, libertarian-minded movements – some of them linked to conservative organizations in the U.S. – that are also socially conservative rabidly.

In the days before the first round of voting on Oct. 7, he was endorsed by the Bible, Bullets and Beef Legislative Caucus, which counts conservative evangelicals, public security hardliners and elite agribusiness interests among its members. A coalition of these groups and other business elites pushed Bolsonaro to a near-majority in that first round. He dominated the wealthier southeast regions, and his support with each step up the income ladder.

Bolsonaro has already gone to the market for its support of the market-friendly policies that it has won over the financial elites, so its prescription for Brazil's ailing economy is just as unpredictable as it has always been. What is predictable is that it will likely be made to roll back gains made by the most marginalized communities, including the aforementioned affirmative action policies.

"The goal of Bolsonaro is to overturn every single victory in the last 80 years," James Green, director of the Brown University's Brazil Initiative program, said recently. "There's a real threat that a proto-fascist will be in power in Brazil."

He will also push hardline policies on public security that will only lead to more violence. They are more than 4,200 people last year, and the number is rising. Bolsonaro's approach to the outbreak of violent crime is to be further militarized Brazil's law enforcement agencies and even more leeway – "carte blanche," he calls it – to shoot and kill criminals on sight. He has proposed that the neighborhoods, the informal, largely black, poor and working-class communities often controlled by drug gangs. He has also proposed loosening Brazil's restrictive gun laws.

Another predictable effect of a Bolsonaro presidency will be on the global fight against climate change, in which Brazil and its rainforests figure prominently. Bolsonaro has proposed closing the country's environmental agencies, eliminating fines for illegal logging, removing the Amazon rainforests for destruction. These forests are one of the globe's chief defenses against climate change and they are already "tipping point," according to scientists. Bolsonaro may well be a threat to Brazil's progress in reducing emissions and deforestation to the planet's efforts to limit the effects of climate change.

He could have more immediately disastrous effects. Brazil has never fully dealt with the horrors of its last dictatorship, and while polls show its citizenry still broadly wants democracy, the country also exhibits higher levels of support for the concept of authoritarianism, most of its peers in Latin America. It's a country where nearly 60 percent of the population supports a policy approacha good criminal is dead criminal" and where nearly half of citizens are OK with police torture. Bolsonaro has promised more of. Large swaths of Brazilian voters just do not see his stances on social issues or policing as extreme.

"The risk of political authoritarianism in Brazil is increased because of some sympathy for authoritarian solutions hibernating in the society," said Claudio Couto, a political scientist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, a Rio-based think tank. "It can be awakened when you have a candidate like Bolsonaro who says, 'Now you have a way to implement this kind of agenda. And it's me. '"

Bolsonaro has been likened to Trump, his stances on violent crime, Brazil's ongoing drug war and the will of the Philippines. at least 20,000 extrajudicial killings. In Brazil, a rampant-up drug and a person who has been killed by a person who is guilty of a criminal offense. of those killed by police.

Brazil's rates of femicide and LGBTQ are more likely to be higher in the last two years. Bolsonaro's opposition to protections for the communities suggests more danger is ahead.

Yes. Brazil's democracy is a young, and a figure like Bolsonaro will test the ability of its institutions to weather such an anti-democratic storm. It is possible that they will – that they will survive in the first place – but there are reasons to worry, especially if the institutions supported by the military dictatorship, including business and the media, fall in line behind another authoritarian.

Bolsonaro's small, right-wing party won 51 seats in the Chamber of Deputies in the first round of voting, so his supporters will be a sizable chunk of his governing coalition. His allies also won early victories at lower levels. Bolsonaro fans are in line to win as many as 14 of the 27 state governorships.

Some observers fear that the military could return to power, especially with a military officer and a general military commander.

There are similarities to Brazil's prior lapses from democracy. The failure of eliciting an effective system of counter-seizures in the face of a crisis in the face of a crisis And as in times past, many of these same elites have been all too willing to ignore their initial concerns and get in bed with the authoritarian themselves.

Military goals of the fate that overthrew Brazil's last republic in 1964 are rare in the modern world. Brazil is instead following the playbook of 21st-century democratic decay, in which those failures allow authoritarians to win the ballot box rather than at the point of a gun, and then proceed to erode norms and institutions until the remnants of a democracy remain. Democracies today are undermined using the tools of democracy itself. Brazil may be no different.

"It's much more likely," "Harvard Political Scientist Steven Levitsky, the author of How Democracies Die, said this summer.

That would have global ramifications. For all its struggles, Brazil is a massive and influential country – it is the world's ninth largest economy, its fifth most populous nation and the largest democracy in Latin America. It is the world's biggest non-nuclear superpower. It plays a vital, if often overlooked, role in hemispheric and global affairs. The rise of right-wing authoritarians in Europe has set off alarm bells around the world, but Bolsonaro's victory could signal a full-on global democratic backslide.

"I tend to buy into this idea that we have entered into a global democratic recession," Levitsky, said. "But if [Brazil] suffers a democratic erosion, I would change my tune a lot. "