It now looks increasingly like Brazil will elect a fascist president in November. I saw this coming in 2016, but it is actually finally happening because the old ruling party, the PT, does not want to leave power.
To my mind, the PT should’ve spent this election cycle consolidating and working to create a wide coalition to defeat Jair Bolsonaro and/or Geraldo Alckmin.
Instead, they are trying to use imprisoned ex-president Lula’s good name with voters to elect Haddad, the ex-mayor of São Paulo. Haddad has little recognition among the PT’s base in the north and is actively hated in the south, where he lost his re-election bid.
Meanwhile, what SHOULD be the main conservative opposition party, the PSDB, has nominated as their candidate Geraldo Alckmin, Governor of São Paulo, a man of negative charisma and many corruption scandals, who is being undermined by Bozo in his own electoral base.
With the left and the relatively “sane” right eating each other, all Bozo has to do is cruise to the run off election in November with his solid minority base.
Haddad will get just enough votes because of Lula’s prestige to be the other run-off candidate. At that point, the entire “center right” will swing behind Bozo because the one thing they cannot possibly do is let the PT back in power.
The Brazilian “deplorables” are generally young, white, middle class men who live in the southern part of the country. Women hate Bozo. They are also generally new middle class – the kinds of guys whose family patrimony began to be built over the last 20 years. Ironically, many of them are actually fruit of the social investments of the past decades.
And after that… Well, Bozo is a man cut from the same cloth as the presidents of the Philippines and Turkey. He once led an attempted coup to stop democracy from returning to Brazil. His VP candidate was drummed out of the armed forces for favoring a return to military rule.
His social stances are beyond retrograde. He believes boys become gay because they are not beaten enough and that the native peoples of Brazil need to disappear from the face of the Earth.
If he gets in, what Americans FEARED would come true with Trump will almost certainly happen in Brazil. Our democracy is only a bit more than thirty years old and has been desperately weakened by the recent impeachment crisis. It cannot resist a fascist presidency.
Brazil is being dismantled, piece by piece and sold to the highest bidder. Bozo will oversee this process, as would Alckmin, but Bozo will whip up hate among our deplorables, much like Trump or Hitler, in order to give the masses a first rate distraction while he does it.
We will be forced into survival mode as a nation and it is not likely we will come out until a decade or more has passed.
The Brazil I saw born with so much hope in 1985 looks like it will die in the next two months. The fire that destroyed our beloved National Museum presages our destiny as a nation, I think.
Whatever is left here in 2022, it will not be anything like the Brazil we once knew. It may, in fact, end up something like a Neopentecostal Turkey. But most likely, the state and nation will simply be dismantled.
PS: Well, Bozo just got stabbed at a rally. Now watch his popularity soar as they try to shoe horn him in on the first ballot via a sympathy vote.
Thaddeus Blanchette is an immigrant to Brazil who has been living in and studying the country most of his adult life. He blogs at http://omangueblog.blogspot.com and can be reached at poboxthad@yahoo.com.br