More like a dash to the far-right
Brazil on Sunday became the latest country to drift toward the far right, electing a strident populist as president in the nation’s most radical political change since democracy was restored more than 30 years ago.
The new president, Jair Bolsonaro, has exalted the country’s military dictatorship, advocated torture and threatened to destroy, jail or drive into exile his political opponents.
The word “populist” is too cuddly for all that. Far-right authoritarian is a better fit.
Mr. Bolsonaro, who will take the helm of Latin America’s biggest nation, is farther to the right than any president in the region, where voters have recently embraced more conservative leaders in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Paraguay and Colombia. He joins a number of far-right politicians who have risen to power around world, including Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
And Trump, and Duterte, and Erdoğan.
Many Brazilians see authoritarian tendencies in Mr. Bolsonaro, who plans to appoint military leaders to top posts and said he would not accept the result if he were to lose. He has threatened to stack the Supreme Court by increasing the number of judges to 21 from 11 and to deal with political foes by giving them the choice of extermination or exile.
He’s also like Trump in being frankly an asshole.
He accomplished little in his long legislative career, but his roster of offensive remarks — he said that he’d rather his son die than be gay and that women don’t deserve the same pay as men — was interpreted by many as bracing honesty and evidence of his willingness to shatter the status quo.
Yes, it’s so refreshing to hear men say women don’t deserve equal pay.
A year ago, Mr. Bolsonaro’s bid was widely regarded by political veterans in Brasília as fanciful in a nation renowned for the cordiality and warmth of its people. Some of the candidate’s remarks were so offensive the country’s attorney general earlier this year charged him with inciting hatred toward black, gay and indigenous people. In a country where most of the population is not white, this alone might have seemed to disqualify him.
Is Trumpism catching? Globally?
After the first round of voting, in which Mr. Bolsonaro received just shy of the 50 percent required to win outright, some political analysts expected he would moderate his rhetoric in order to appeal to centrist or undecided voters.
They were wrong.
Last Sunday, he issued a threat to members of the Workers’ Party that critics called downright fascist.
“Those red good-for-nothings will be banished from the homeland,” he said during an address, delivered via a video link up, to thousands of supporters gathered in São Paulo. “It will be a cleanup the likes of which has never been seen in Brazilian history.”
Any bets on how long it will take Trump to match him?
I was mostly surprised to learn that women being paid the same as men, has been going on for so long, and is so ingrained in society, that suggesting otherwise is apparently “shattering the status quo”. You know, instead of being something that hasn’t actually happened yet, despite women having been vocally campaigning for it since the 1960s.
I saw last night that Brazil has public schools that are being run by the military, with military discipline. Bolsonaro wants to expand this, and also have the military determine the curriculum.
You mean less than men?
The word “populist” is too cuddly for all that. Far-right authoritarian is a better fit.
Upon reflection, it seems to me that “far right authoritarian” has (or at least previously had) the connotation of a strong man who used military force to overthrow a democratic government. The thing about “populist” is that it points out that the government was (at least in theory) democratically elected. So perhaps we should call them “Far-right authoritarian populist” (which yields the acronym “FRAP”, so everyone can insert their choice of “knock-on-the-side of the head metaphors – or maybe just knock-knock jokes)
@Ophelia #3 – assuming you were replying to me(?) – no, I meant to say “the same” – but with a lot of sarcasm.
The idea that saying “that women don’t deserve the same pay as men” is “to shatter the status quo” implies to me that 1) the status quo is that women do deserve the same pay as men, and 2) that suggesting otherwise is to “shatter” the status quo must mean that the current status quo is extremely heavily ingrained in society.
If the status quo is that women deserve the same pay as men, and this is heavily ingrained in society, the only way that could be true – as far as I can see – is that women must have actually been being paid the same as men for many decades now. This is what I was so very surprised to learn.
(Sorry, I know that sarcasm doesn’t read well in internet comments, and I try to be subtle about it which doesn’t help, and I keep forgetting to add “/s” tags on the ends of my posts which is a recipe for disasterous misunderstandings.)
Heh, no problem. At least 50% of what I write is sarcasm, and I never add close tags!
And now, an astonishing news alert from the normally progressive CBC outlining the potential benefits to Canadian business resulting from Brazil’s shift to the right: https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1056723341028085760
We can’t blame Trump for Bolsonaro, it’s not always about US influence. Brazil has a long history of brutal dictators long before Trump. Why? The country is ossified by its Portugese institutions, it’s been compared to an aircraft waiting to take off but never quite lifting off, for generations.
We’ll find out if Bolsonaro’s bite is as nasty as his bark.
Is anyone blaming Trump for Bolsonaro? I asked if Trumpism is catching, but that was a question, not an assertion.
Well, considering that Trump is not in the same league as Bolsonaro, Duterte or Erdogan, it’s not a question that I’d bother asking.
/s I associate with strikethrough, so eve that could confuse.