The Brazilian presidential election in late October 2018 saw a run-off between right-wing authoritarian candidate Jair Bolsonaro and former São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad. Bolsonaro’s campaign rhetoric targeted minorities, gay people and women, and exposed his nostalgia for a return to military rule. Bolsonaro had gained attention in a radio interview in 2016, in which he said that the Brazilian military dictatorship’s one mistake was torturing but not killing. In spite of this, Bolsonaro managed to win the second round handily, with 55.1 per cent of the votes (Bloomberg News, 2018; Phillips, 2018).
After his inauguration on 1 January 2019, Bolsonaro appointed members of the armed forces to key government posts, including vice president and the ministers of defence, science and technology, and mines and energy, as well as to the government secretariat, which handles relations with parliament. Seven out of twenty two ministers in his administration came from the armed forces (including reservists), more even than in some governments during the military dictatorship of 1964–1985.
The press referred to Bolsonaro as ‘Tropical Trump’, a moniker that alluded not only to Bolsonaro’s right-wing agenda but also to the two leaders’ shared disdain for democratic institutions and human rights. Both leaders also made false claims about the fairness of their countries’ elections just prior to their victories.
Just two years before Bolsonaro’s big win, the election of Trump brought to the fore the populist challenge facing Western democracy. But Trump’s win was preceded by other alarming developments for democracy. One of the earliest challenges came from Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
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