Bolsonaro’s Son Promises to Re-Democratise Brazil Before the Runoff
Flávio Bolsonaro, who beat Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Sunday’s first round and goes into the 25 October runoff as favourite, has pledged to use a greatly enlarged far-right congressional bloc to change the constitution and “re-democratise this country”. Brazil was re-democratised in 1988, after the twenty-one-year dictatorship his father praised.
“The only thing standing in the way of Brazil becoming a barbarity is called Flávio Bolsonaro as president,” he told a rally in Goiânia. Asked on Wednesday whether he was finishing his father’s work he rejected the framing: “Let’s stop lying. Let’s touch down in the real world... Brazil needs to go back to normal, that’s all.” Jair Bolsonaro was jailed for twenty-seven years last year for attempting a coup, and he and his co-conspirators are expected to be freed if his son wins, with the former president tipped for a ministry able to choose the armed forces’ chiefs. His Liberal party took twenty-eight of the Senate’s eighty-one seats, its largest caucus yet. The congresswoman Talíria Petrone calls it “the announcement of a coup”; the political scientist Miguel Lago puts it more exactly — “it’s almost like a coup d’état with the support of the majority of the population”. The writer Celso Rocha de Barros describes a generation of authoritarians who hollow institutions out from the inside: “then you don’t need to break any laws to achieve authoritarianism... because you are the law.” For scale, the V-Dem institute currently ranks Brazil twenty-eighth in the world on liberal democracy, two places above the United Kingdom. This account rests on a single outlet’s reporting from Brazil; no other approved source carried it today.