{"id":6656,"date":"2018-10-28T22:32:01","date_gmt":"2018-10-29T02:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/?p=6656"},"modified":"2018-10-30T07:40:50","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T11:40:50","slug":"bolsonaro-wins-brazil-election-promises-to-purge-leftists-from-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/?p=6656","title":{"rendered":"Bolsonaro Wins Brazil Election, Promises to Purge Leftists from Country"},"content":{"rendered":"
Bolsonaro supporters celebrate outside his home in Rio de Janeiro after exit polls on Oct. 28 declared him the preliminary winner of Brazil\u2019s 2018 presidential election. AP Photo\/Leo Correa<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After the most polarized<\/a> and divisive campaign<\/a> in its modern history, Brazil has elected as its next president<\/a> a right-wing politician who openly disdains human rights and admires military dictators.<\/p>\n

Jair Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old congressman who had strong evangelical backing<\/a> for his law-and-order stance on policing, support for gun rights and opposition to abortion, won 55 percent of votes. Bolsonaro\u2019s leftist competitor, Fernando Haddad, a former education minister and ex-mayor of S\u00e3o Paulo, received 45 percent of the roughly 100 million ballots cast.<\/p>\n

Bolsonaro\u2019s angry, populist campaign rhetoric led many newspapers and public figures worldwide to declare his candidacy a threat to democracy<\/a>. But 57.8 million Brazilians on Sunday showed less concern about Bolsonaro\u2019s message.<\/p>\n

Haddad, his opponent, joined Brazil\u2019s presidential race<\/a> less than a month before the first round of voting<\/a>. The Workers Party, which has run Brazil since 2002, tapped Haddad to replace front-runner Inacio Lula de Silva, a wildly popular former president jailed on corruption charges in July<\/a>. Haddad was unable to retain Lula\u2019s lead.<\/p>\n

Brazil\u2019s politics of disillusionment<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bolsonaro\u2019s victory will likely worsen an already acute crisis in Brazil, the second-most populous nation in the Western Hemisphere.<\/p>\n

Once a rising star in the developing world<\/a>, Brazil has been mired in severe recession<\/a> and political turmoil since 2015. Hundreds of politicians, including former President Lula<\/a>, have been arrested and jailed in a judicial investigation that has exposed corruption at the highest levels of government.<\/p>\n

That corruption has consequences: A survey conducted in August by the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics<\/a> showed that only 25 percent of citizens trusted their federal government and 18 percent trusted Congress.<\/p>\n

In such circumstances, Bolsonaro\u2019s win as an anti-establishment candidate was predictable \u2013 and not just because Bolsonaro had maintained a clear lead in the polls ever since Lula withdrew in September.<\/p>\n

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Brazil\u2019s next president. AP Photo\/Silvia izquierdo<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/figure>\n

When voters don\u2019t believe in their politicians or government institutions, candidates who tap into voter disdain for the political system can find success. In my scholarly research on democratization, this is what I call<\/a> the \u201cpolitics of disillusionment.\u201d<\/p>\n

This phenomenon helped conservative outsiders to win in the United States<\/a>, Italy<\/a> and Hungary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, disillusionment in Brazil has handed victory to a right-wing populist who promises to purge the country of his leftist opponents<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cEither they go overseas, or they go to jail,\u201d he told a huge crowd in S\u00e3o Paulo in one of his last appearances before Sunday\u2019s vote.<\/p>\n

Inflammatory rhetoric and militarism<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bolsonaro has been in Congress for three decades. But to harness popular rage against the system, his campaign offered an outsider\u2019s scathing critique of Brazilian society.<\/p>\n

In response to rampant political corruption and extreme violence in Brazil, Bolsonaro defended military dictatorships<\/a> like the one that ran Brazil from 1964 to 1985. The only problem with Brazil\u2019s former authoritarian leaders, Bolsonaro said, was that they \u201ctortured rather than killed<\/a>\u201d dissenters.<\/p>\n

Critics say his adulation of the military<\/a> raises serious doubts about the future of Brazil\u2019s 33-year-old democracy.<\/p>\n

Bolsonaro, a former army captain, regularly uses homophobic, misogynistic and racist rhetoric<\/a> against large swaths of Brazil\u2019s population. He has said that he would \u201cnever allow\u201d his children to get romantically involved with a black person<\/a> and that he was \u201cincapable of loving a homosexual son.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bolsonaro also once told a fellow congressional representative that she \u201cdid not deserve to be raped\u201d by him because she was \u201cterrible and ugly.\u201d<\/p>\n

His candidacy was met by outrage and mass protest by women<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Hundreds of thousands of women across Brazil marched against Bolsonaro, who is known for his disparaging remarks about women, on Sept. 29. AP Photo\/Andre Penner<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/figure>\n

The president-elect\u2019s ambiguous policy agenda<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beyond his inflammatory rhetoric, Bolsonaro has offered few specifics<\/a> about how he would govern Brazil.<\/p>\n

He skipped presidential debates<\/a> and avoided tough questions<\/a> about whether he would make economic and political reforms to help get Brazil out of its three-year-long crisis.<\/p>\n

To tackle record-high crime, the president-elect has said he will ease gun laws and reduce the age of criminal responsibility from 18 to 16. He is a staunch proponent of restarting the death penalty<\/a> in Brazil, saying he would \u201cvolunteer to kill those on death row<\/a>\u201d himself.<\/p>\n

Brazil has the world\u2019s third-largest prison population. Sixty-four percent of those incarcerated are black<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bolsonaro also wants to end affirmative action at Brazilian public universities<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He considers abortion to be murder<\/a>. The procedure is banned in Brazil, but in recent years women\u2019s groups have been pushing to liberalize abortion laws. That is unlikely to happen under Bolsonaro.<\/p>\n

Some analysts have suggested<\/a> that Congress may rein in Bolsonaro\u2019s more radical tendencies. But evidence from the United States and elsewhere suggests that in the politics of disillusion, presidents who campaign as extremist govern as extremists.<\/p>\n

Bolsonaro takes office on Jan. 1. Brazil\u2019s political institutions, already weakened by corruption and public outrage, will face great pressure to show that they can withstand the new president\u2019s populist ambitions and militaristic instincts.<\/p>\n

It is a daunting challenge for Brazil\u2019s young and, I fear, faltering democracy.\"The<\/p>\n

Helder Ferreira do Vale<\/a>, Associate Professor, Graduate School of International and Area Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After the most polarized and divisive campaign in its modern history, Brazil has elected as its next president a right-wing politician who openly disdains human rights and admires military dictators. Jair Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old congressman who had strong evangelical backing for his law-and-order stance on policing, support for gun rights and opposition to abortion, won…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":124,"featured_media":7256,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/images.theconversation.com\/files\/242634\/original\/file-20181028-7056-1yv865l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=26%2C80%2C5964%2C2982&q=45&auto=format&w=1356&h=668&fit=crop","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[192],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-polity-governance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/124"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6656"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6658,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6656\/revisions\/6658"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinamericasecurityreport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}