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Far-right candidate Jair
Bolsonaro has won a sweeping victory in Brazil's presidential
election.
With almost all of the
votes counted, Mr Bolsonaro has 55% of the votes against 45% for
Fernando Haddad from the left-wing Workers Party.
Mr Bolsonaro campaigned
on a promise to eradicate corruption and to drive down Brazil's high
crime levels.
The election campaign has
been deeply divisive. Each camp argued that victory for the other
could destroy Brazil.
Pointing to the number of
former members of the military he surrounds himself with and the
nostalgia he has expressed for the era that Brazil was under military
rule, his opponents argue that Mr Bolsonaro poses a risk to Brazil's
democracy.
But in his victory speech
the president-elect said that he would defend "the constitution,
democracy and freedom".
"This is not the
promise of a party, nor the word of a man. It is an oath before God,"
he said.
JAIR
BOLSONARO IS ELECTED PRESIDENT OF BRAZIL. READ HIS EXTREMIST,
FAR-RIGHT POSITIONS IN HIS OWN WORDS.
26
November, 2014
JAIR
BOLSONARO WAS elected president of Brazil on
Sunday evening. Ballots continue to be tallied, but multiple news
outlets have declared the race, as the far-right candidate has
received 55.34 percent of valid votes with 98.38 percent of
polling stations reporting. His opponent, Fernando Haddad of the
Workers’ Party, has received only 44.66 percent of votes.
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, senator 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 failed to win
reelection 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 which has exposed the judiciary to relentless
criticism for perceived partisanship.
Bolsonaro
supporters parade a fake coffin representing the Worker’s Party
(PT), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, during the second round of the
presidential elections, on October 28, 2018.
Photo:
Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images
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 hardline 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
having given 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 Partyinto
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 LGBTQs, Afro-Brazilians, women, indigenous
peoples, 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.”
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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I
will not fight nor discriminate, but if I see two men kissing in the
street, I’ll hit them.”
“I’m
a rapist now. I would never rape you, because you do not deserve it…
slut!”
Bolsonaro
gives his signature gun finger salute to supporters during a rally in
Curitiba, Brazil on March 28, 2018.
Photo:
Hueler Andrey/AFP/Getty Images
“I
would be incapable of loving a homosexual child. I’m not going to
act like a hypocrite here: I’d rather have my son die in an
accident than show up with some mustachioed guy. For me, he would
have died.
…
“If your son starts acting a little gay, hit him with some leather, and he’ll change his behavior.”
…
“If your son starts acting a little gay, hit him with some leather, and he’ll change his behavior.”
Preta
Gil, actress and singer: If your son fell in love with a black woman,
what would you do?
“Oh,
Preta, I’m not going to discuss promiscuity with whoever it is. I
do not run this risk and my children were very well raised and did
not live in the type of environment that, unfortunately, you do.”
“If
a homosexual couple comes to live next to me it will devalue my home!
If they walk around holding hands and kissing, that devalues it.”
Interviewer:
Are you proud of the story of Hitler’s life?
“No,
pride, I don’t have, right?”
Interviewer:
Do you like him?
“No.
What you have to understand is the following: war is war. He was a
great strategist.”
Interviewer:
Have you ever hit a woman before?
“Yes.
I was a boy in Eldorado, a girl was getting in my face…”
Interviewer:
Put her against the wall, a few taps? Pah!
“No,
well, no… [laughs] I’m married. My wife isn’t going to like
this response.”
“[Homosexuals]
will not find peace. And I have [congressional] immunity to say that
I’m homophobic, yes, and very proud of it if it is to defend
children in schools.”
Bolsonaro
takes pictures with soldiers during a military event in Sao Paulo,
Brazil on May 3, 2018.
Photo:
Nelson Almeida/AFP/Getty Images
“I
would not employ [a woman] with the same salary [of a man]. But there
are many women who are competent.”
“Beyond
Brazil above all, since we are a Christian country, God above
everyone! It is not this story, this little story of secular state.
It is a Christian state, and if a minority is against it, then move!
Let’s make a Brazil for the majorities. Minorities have to bow to
the majorities! The Law must exist to defend the majorities.
Minorities must fit in or simply disappear!”
“Violence
is combated with violence.”
“I
went with my three sons. Oh the other one went too, there were four.
I have a fifth also. I had four men and on the fifth I had a moment
of weakness and a woman came out.”
“If
I [become president], there won’t be any money for NGOs. These
worthless [people] will have to work. If I get there, as far as I’m
concerned, every citizen will have a firearm in their home. You will
not have a centimeter demarcated for indigenous reserves
or quilombolas [settlements
of the descendants of escaped and freed slaves that have protected
status.]”
“Has
anyone ever seen a Japanese begging for charity? Because it’s a
race that has shame. It’s not like this race that’s down there,
or like a minority ruminating here on the side.”
“The
big problem in Brazil is that the government is at the jugular of
businessmen. […] The worker will have to decide: less rights and
employment or all the rights and unemployment.”
“I’ll
give carte blanche for the police to kill.”
“Since
I was single at the time, I used the money from my [congressional]
housing stipend to get laid.”
“This
group, if they want to stay here, will have to put itself under the
law of all of us. Leave or go to jail. These red marginals will be
banished from our homeland.”
“You
will not have any more NGOs to quench your leftist hunger. It will be
a cleansing never before seen in the history of Brazil.”
“You
will see a proud Armed Forces which will be collaborating with the
future of Brazil. You, petralhada [a
derogatory term for Workers’ Party supporters] will see a
civilian and military police with a judicial rearguard to enforce the
law on your backs.”
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