International

Jair Bolsonaro Is Elected President of Brazil. Read His Extremist, Far-Right Positions in His Own Words

04/11/2018

By Andrew Fishman
October 29 2018

Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil on Sunday evening. The far-right candidate received more than 55 percent of valid votes. His opponent, Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party, received less than 45 percent. In a country with compulsory voting, almost 29 percent of adults preferred to annul or not cast their ballot.

Across Brazil, city streets echoed with fireworks, shouts, and car horns as preliminary election results came in. Thousands of supporters, many dressed in green and yellow, assembled outside the president-elect’s beach-front residence in Rio de Janeiro. On São Paulo’s main street, Avenida Paulista, police used tear gas to separate Haddad and Bolsonaro voters.

Bolsonaro, who has taken aim at the media throughout his campaign, chose to make his first statement after the election via Facebook Live, rather than a press conference. “We could not continue to flirt with socialism, communism, populism, and the extremism of the left,” he said. The broadcast was picked up by major TV networks, but repeatedly froze due to connection issues. “All of the promises made to political groups and the people will be kept,” he added.

Soon after, he stepped outside, made a brief statement to the media, and asked a key supporter, Sen. Magno Malta, to lead the group in prayer. He then read a prepared statement and took questions from a representative of the press.

The Workers’ Party originally ran former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as their candidate, and he was the clear favorite in the polls. However, they were forced to swap him out at the last minute for Haddad, a former mayor of São Paulo who had failed to win re-election in 2016, after Lula was sent to prison on a questionable corruption conviction, and it became clear that higher courts would not overturn the sentence. Hindered by a late start and the lack of a national profile, Haddad struggled to gain name recognition and failed to distance himself from public perceptions that linked his party to corruption and the status quo. Nonetheless, with the strong base of the Workers’ Party and the message, “Haddad is Lula,” the 55-year-old academic was able to scrape his way through the first round of elections on October 7, taking 29 percent of the vote in a 13-way contest.

This year’s elections were particularly fraught, marked by dramatic polarization, political violence, and massive disinformation campaigns on social media, in a country that has been roiled by years of social, economic, and political crises. Since 2013, millions of people of all political stripes have repeatedly taken to the streets in protest; Brazil has struggled to climb out of the worst recession in history; massive corruption scandals have destabilized political institutions and major economic players; former President Dilma Rousseff (also from the Workers’ Party) was impeached on dubious grounds; her successor, President Michel Temer (the most despised leader in Brazil’s democratic history), has pushed through a series of unpopular austerity measures; and Lula was jailed, a process that has exposed the judiciary to relentless criticism for perceived partisanship.

In short, every major political institution has been increasingly discredited as Brazil has spiraled deeper and deeper into a dark void. And from the abyss emerged a former army captain and six-term congressman from Rio de Janeiro, Jair Bolsonaro, with the slogan “Brazil above everything, God above everyone,” and promises to fix everything with hard-line tactics.

Seven years ago, Bolsonaro was a punchline for the political humor program CQC, where he’d make outrageous statements. A former presenter, Monica Iozzi, said they interviewed him multiple times “so people could see the very low level of the representatives we were electing.” Now, it’s Bolsonaro who is laughing, and Iozzi says she regrets giving him airtime. Riding the wave of public discontent, Bolsonaro campaigned against the Workers’ Party, corruption, politicians, crime, “cultural Marxism,” communists, leftists, secularism, and “privileges” for historically marginalized groups. Instead, he favored “traditional family values,” “patriotism,” nationalism, the military, a Christian nation, guns, increased police violence, and neoliberal economics that he promises will revitalize the economy. Despite his actual political platform being short on specific proposals, the energy around his candidacy was enough to win the presidency and turn his previously insignificant Social Liberal Party into the second-largest bloc in Congress.

But what has frightened his opponents, many international observers, and even some fervent Workers’ Party critics, are Bolsonaro’s repeated declarations in favor of Brazil’s military dictatorship, torture, extrajudicial police killings, and violence against LGBTQ people, Afro-Brazilians, women, indigenous people, minorities, and political opponents, as well as his opposition to democratic norms and values.

Here is Brazil’s next president in his own words over the years. In the coming months, Brazil and the world will discover if Bolsonaro will make good on these drastic promises when he takes office on January 1, 2019:

“I am in favor of a dictatorship, a regime of exception.” – Open session of the Câmara dos Deputados, 1993

Interviewer: If you were the president of the Republic today, would you close the National Congress?

“There’s no doubt about it. I’d do a coup on the same day! It [the Congress] doesn’t work! And I’m sure at least 90 percent of the population would throw a party, would applaud, because it does not work. Congress today is good for nothing, brother, it just votes for what the president wants. If he is the person who decides, who rules, who trumps the Congress, then let’s have a coup quickly, go straight to a dictatorship.” – Câmara Aberta TV program, May 23, 1999

“The pau-de-arara [a torture technique] works. I’m in favor of torture, you know that. And the people are in favor as well.” – Câmara Aberta TV program, May 23, 1999

“Through the vote, you will not change anything in this country, nothing, absolutely nothing! It will only change, unfortunately, when, one day, we start a civil war here and do the work that the military regime did not do. Killing some 30,000, starting with FHC [then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso], not kicking them out, killing! If some innocent people are going to die, fine, in any war, innocents die.” – Câmara Aberta TV program, May 23, 1999