Analysis. The question keeps coming back: how does he manage to hold on? Jair Bolsonaro is certainly a man used to storms. But while Brazil, ravaged by the P1 variant, outcast on the international scene, has more than 400,000 dead from Covid-19 and is sinking deeper into the humanitarian slaughter every day, everyone is wondering about the astonishing capacity of resilience of the far-right leader.
His responsibility in the ongoing drama is however edifying: Jair Bolsonaro has successively denied the epidemic, prevented any containment measure, refused to negotiate vaccines, slowed down immunization plans. In any other democracy, it is hard to imagine such a leader remaining at the top of the state. And yet, against all odds, here is the president still firmly anchored in power, with an intact popularity among 25% to 30% of the population and a solid majority in Parliament.
Dizzying collapse
For a year, no mass demonstration has come to question his magisterium. Unlike the Chileans, Algerians, Lebanese, Iraqis or Hong Kongers, angry Brazilians have not braved the Covid-19 to take to the streets and cry out their rage, contenting themselves with small car parades and pot concerts. Protests that appear to be very timid, if not insignificant, compared to the vertiginous collapse of the country.
The main reasons for this situation are known: unshakeable base of popularity among its militant base, economic crisis, fear of the return of the left to power, clever political agreement negotiated with parliamentarians from the center. But this does not explain everything. Because the Covid-19 crisis has updated a deeper and more essential data, allowing Jair Bolsonaro to remain in power: the report of Brazil to death.
In the imagination, Brazil is a party country associated with carnival, samba, football and caipirinha, the national cocktail. The country has always exported, with the desire and with success, its image of mixed democracy, “Land of the future”, joy of living and easy love. Brazil, this peaceful giant “Eternally stretched out in its sublime cradle”, as the national anthem even proclaims.
Nothing, however, is more false. Brazil is above all a violent country. A study, published in 2017 by the organization Small Arms Survey, estimated that more than 70,000 Brazilians die of violent deaths each year. More than one in ten on the planet takes place in the country, champion of all categories of deaths by gunshot, police violence, feminicides, attacks against sexual or indigenous minorities. In total number of victims, in 2017 Brazil exceeded India, six times more populated, and Syria, plunged into civil war.
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