Esther Solano: ‘Bolsonarism is structuring society’ – 03/04/2023 – Politics

Sociologist Esther Solano has been interviewing Bolsonarists since 2017. She seeks to decipher their values, feelings and tendencies. She tries to understand the reasons for their vote in the past and anticipate how they should behave in future elections.

She is convinced that Bolsonarism is not just support for former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL) nor is it limited to an anti-political and anti-PT vision: “It also represents a way of understanding the world”, she says.

“For me, the key is this: Bolsonarism is representative”, says Solano. “It is much deeper and much more structuring of Brazilian society. If we don’t understand that, we haven’t understood anything about Bolsonarism.”

According to her, although Bolsonaro lost to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), Bolsonarism was very victorious, because the defeat was very narrow despite “all the disaster that was the government”.

Now, however, with January 8 and after three months in which Bolsonaro remained in the US, Bolsonarism has demobilized. With that, and considering the possibility of the former president being declared ineligible by the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), discussions are opened about a possible successor – or successor.

In Solano’s polls, only two names appear with a lot of potential: former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro and Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans), governor of São Paulo.

How does Bolsonaro’s return impact the opposition camp? We did research on this. There is a feeling of a lot of confusion. Even among the radicals, they cannot weave a narrative about why Bolsonaro left Brazil, why he came back. So there is an expectation of understanding what is happening.

But apart from that, we see three consequences, basically. Bolsonaro can play a role in reorganizing and re-energizing the radical base, which is currently very demobilized.

On the other hand, moderate Bolsonarists have detached themselves from the more radical ones. We talk about an accordion effect between them: during the elections, there is a rapprochement, but afterwards, when Bolsonaro decided not to pass the presidential sash and left Brazil, there are moments of distancing.

So it is interesting to observe whether the return of Bolsonaro, coinciding with this complex period of the Lula government in terms of communication, will bring about a rapprochement between the moderate and radical bases.

Finally, people are waiting for the institutional Bolsonarist field to be reorganized. There is an expectation that, if Bolsonaro is not the leader of this field, that at least his return will define the new characters.

If he demonstrates that he does not have the capacity to energize the field, or if the problems in court lead him to political ostracism, this leaves the door open for other leaders, even outside the Bolsonarist field. If a possible fall of Bolsonaro does not contaminate the entire field, then other Bolsonarist figures may occupy that leadership.

Michelle and Tarcísio have been pointed out as possible successors in this field. What capacity do they have to mobilize Bolsonarism? Michelle has a great ability to mobilize culture wars, moral guidelines. She communicates very well with the conservative religious female audience.

This public mirrors Michelle a lot for what she represents: a woman of values, conservative, of the home, of the family, but also a woman who wins the public space. Also, a woman who has a violent, aggressive husband – and many Brazilian women have this model of marriage.

But, at the same time, it is seen as excessively radical, when Brazilians are in need of greater moderation, a more pacifying style. So, if she moderates this radicalized style, and if she can get away from the toxic potential of lawsuits, she gets a spot in the spotlight.

Mrs. Could you give examples of Michelle’s radicalization? Women see that she is naturally religious, but she also has a radicalism, because she puts this dichotomy of good against evil in a very simple way, in which Lula, the PT and the left are evil. All this rhetoric of the demonization of Brazil with the PT came out of her mouth a lot. And that was considered excessive.

And what about Tarcisio? It has enormous potential. It has several elements that are very interesting for the majority audience of Bolsonarism, which are the moderates. Tarcísio represents the founding values ​​of Bolsonarism: he is a military man, he represents the idea of ​​order, hierarchy, discipline; he also represents religious values, but without Michelle’s radicalism.

And he has something very important, which is the idea that he can move across different political spectrums. So it is an image of the conservative subject, but moderate, dialoguing, and who at the same time is a subject who does, who is efficient.

Would they be competitive even in the eventual absence of Bolsonaro? It will depend on how they understand their respective roles. If Michelle takes the place of the most radicalized Bolsonarism, she has all the cards to lose the bet, because we have seen lately that she has a tiredness, a burnout of radicalism.

But there is a scenario in which they understand that they can gain political expression by migrating to a center-right – taking into account that the center-right has imploded in Brazil. I can see Tarcísio symbolizing this next leader of the center-right, or more moderate right, and Michelle assuming another role, as a candidate for governor of Brasilia, for example, in which she also makes the symbolic dispute in networks, in churches.

In your research, does any other name come up with the potential of these two? Anything. What would other possible names be? There are Bolsonaro’s children, but they have enormous negative potential; not even the most radical Bolsonarism accepts Bolsonaro’s children. They are considered spoiled brats, children, playboys, etc.

Former Minister Damares [Alves] it is powerful in the symbolic field, but it has no expressive capacity beyond that field of religious fundamentalism.

There’s another character that I keep a close eye on, which is Nikolas Ferreira, [deputado federal pelo PL-MG]. He is very expressive in the field of online popular representation, for example, but he is still very restricted to this more radical Bolsonarism. I think he will play a role in promoting moral guidelines.

Many analyzes of Bolsonaro’s victory in 2018 considered Lula’s arrest and stabbing as decisive factors for the election result. In the book “The Bolsonaro Paradox”, Mrs., Camila Rocha [colunista da Folha] and Jonas Medeiros dismiss this interpretation. Why? Because it is overly simplistic. Lula’s stabbing and imprisonment were accelerators. But Bolsonarism is much deeper and much more structuring of Brazilian society. If we don’t understand this, we don’t understand what Bolsonarism is.

For me, the key is this: Bolsonarism is representative. For a long time, the left field understood Bolsonarism as the synthesis of denial: anti-system, anti-politics, anti-left, anti-PT. Of course it’s all of that, and denial is already profoundly representative.

But it also represents a way of understanding the world. Without understanding the value of order, of religious fundamentalism, of rejecting the identity agenda, the value of a whole logic of white male class patriarchy, without understanding all of this, we will not understand this deep root of Bolsonarism.

And another important point: the element of hate. If we don’t understand how Brazil is also built on hatred as a founding element of politics, we won’t understand the potential of Bolsonarism.

In the 2022 election, without stab wounds and with Lula out of prison, Bolsonaro lost. Doesn’t that play against your argument? No. No stab, with Lula and after all the disaster that was the Bolsonaro government… The moderate Bolsonarist base itself recognized that Bolsonaro was profoundly inhumane in managing the pandemic, that Paulo Guedes’ economic policy was a disaster and that Lava Jato was dehydrated. Even so, he only lost by 2 million votes.

This means that he actually represents profound values ​​that are deeply rooted not only in the upper classes, but in a large part of the Brazilian popular base, the new middle classes. And he was very important in personifying the politics of hate and denial. So he lost the election, but Bolsonarism was very victorious.

Is it possible to know the size of Bolsonarism now in the opposition? I don’t know if we can quantify it exactly. Bolsonarism is nourished by elements that are visible in the public sphere, such as frustration with politics, anti-systemic logic. But there are other elements that were latent until Bolsonarism empowered them.

This whole fascist component, this whole logic of hatred is the foundation of Brazilian sociability. But we didn’t have a political expression that could capitalize on hatred in electoral terms like Bolsonaro did. And it is very complicated to measure these latent elements in a quantitative research.

But we have a specific methodology to capture trends. Our methodology is the mini ethnographic focus group. Basically, they are in-depth interviews, lasting up to three hours, with small groups. We manage to capture what we call “deep stories”, the affective-symbolic structuring base of individuals.

And what can happen in a while? This structure, which was empowered by Bolsonarism, may once again return to a state of latency, or may once again be mobilized by Bolsonarism figures.

Regardless of what happens to Bolsonaro from now on, can you say what his place is in the history of the right in Brazil? He has a place in the history of the world’s extreme right. In Brazil, he occupies a very important place for the reorganization of the political panorama. There is an axis shift from the classic PT-PSDB polarization to a PT-extreme right, PT-Bolsonarism polarization. That in itself is fundamental.

But he will also go down in history as the protagonist of very potent phenomena, such as the digitization of politics. All this online fascism policy, this online extreme right, this is a qualitative leap in Brazilian and world politics.

And the masterful point of Bolsonarism – I don’t speak Bolsonaro, because it is Bolsonaro and many people behind him – was being able to X-ray, to read the latent structures of Brazilian society and understand how to vote all of this. It’s not trivial. So much so that that structure was there, but other characters weren’t able to capitalize on it before.

In the book, among the factors that contributed to the rise of Bolsonarism, you mention progressive advances. That is, in this reading, progressive advances correspond to a conservative reaction of the size of Bolsonarism. How to escape this trap? This is perhaps the most difficult calibration that Brazilian politics has in its hands. Me and Camilla [Rocha] we have tried for a long time to make our research useful for the path of dialogue.

If we want to advance in public policies in favor of Brazilians –and we talk about policies for women, for the poorest, black, LGBT, etc. population–, we have to try to do this with a minimum of population consensus.

Entering into consensus means giving up some issues, priorities, agendas, vocabularies in favor of trying to make these advances more solid, more comprehensive. The biggest challenge facing the next progressive government, in an area that is basically human rights, is to start from consensus and not from dissent.

Mobilizers of the cultural wars of Bolsonarism, such as Michelle and Nikolas, are in charge of trying to dynamit any consensus initiative. So the progressive camp, the democratic camp, has to be much smarter.

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Esther Solano, 39
Sociologist, with a master’s and doctorate from the Complutense University of Madrid, she is a professor at Unifesp (Federal University of São Paulo). She is the author, among other books, of “The Bolsonaro Paradox – The Public Sphere and Right-Wing Counterpublicity in Contemporary Brazil” (2021, Springer).