Detox of Bolsonarism will not be easy – 06/24/2023 – Celso Rocha de Barros

Jair Bolsonaro should be declared ineligible for having gathered ambassadors from around the world and made it clear that he would attempt a coup if he lost the 2022 presidential election.

I find it sad that Jair is condemned for the only promise he kept, but life is hard.

With Bolsonaro out of the picture, the question arises of who will replace him at the helm of the Brazilian right.

The ideal, of course, would be to see it back under the control of its moderate members. I hope very much for this to happen, even though I already know that even moderate rightists will also be my opponents. After all, if all goes well, we’ll fight unarmed.

My suspicion is the following: the quality of the post-Bolsonarist right will be proportional to the length of sentences to which Jair and his direct accomplices are sentenced.

The difficulty of trying a “moderate Bolsonarism” is that Jair was the leader of the radical faction of the movement itself, and the coup was a central part of its program.

Extremism was part of its attraction: those who adhered to Bolsonarism were invited to experience the promise that the police and military would stand by you even if you committed the worst crimes.

Bolsonarism offered you protection from the authorities while you attacked female journalists, persecuted LGBTs, burned forests and stole land from indigenous people.

Politics will always have a sadistic side, because it’s the last stop before war. But everything remains under control as long as no one is armed, and the state’s weapons are under the control of the law. Bolsonarism armed you and promised you that the State’s weapons would join yours if you committed crimes.

Anyone who tries to find the root of Bolsonarist seduction only in traditional values ​​or economic interests will miss half the story. Bolsonarism offered a scholarship-sadism that provided enormous psychological satisfaction for its militants, at least while the movement had control of the State machine.

Politicians, businessmen, the military and opinion makers who supported Bolsonaro will survive moderation.

They will continue with their positions, with their spaces, with their money. The right is still the majority in Brazilian politics by a wide margin, as it always has been. The bar for being a right-wing commentator in the Brazilian media must remain very low.

But the rank and file of Bolsonarism may miss the scholarship-sadism.

It is entirely possible that this fascination will be diluted in the face of the punishment of the coup plotters and Bolsonaro himself.

The very fact that Jair had fled to Disney while his privates carried out orders on January 8th must have been a trauma in that imaginary. The coup dummy is there in Papuda, he looks around, he can’t find his leader, where is he? He is in a mansion paid for by Valdemar Costa Neto.

The fear is that punishment will not come, that doubts persist about the permanence of state weapons as one side of the political debate.

After all, there will be no shortage of people to lie that Jair wasn’t that bad: there is always a market for commentators who pose as “out of the box” and “politically incorrect” while arguing that the establishment does not abuse its privileges enough.

If the punishments do not come, the transition to the democratic right may be halfway through. And half Bolsonarism is still pretty bad.

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