Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

From Military Prestige to Fragmented Prestige: Jair Bolsonaro and Authoritarian Populism in Brazil

2024; Volume: 63; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cj.2024.a919200

2578-4919

Joseph Straubhaar,

Political Conflict and Governance

From Military Prestige to Fragmented Prestige:Jair Bolsonaro and Authoritarian Populism in Brazil Joseph Straubhaar (bio) Since at least the 1930s with the Getúlio Vargas regime (1930–1945, 1951–1954) there has been a type of celebrity associated with strongman or authoritarian populist leaders in Brazil. Jair Bolsonaro originally started his political career with a degree of celebrity or notoriety as a former army captain who celebrated the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985) by vocally approving of military accomplishments under their rule and even its practice of torturing and killing dissidents. He gained further national prestige by celebrating the ruthlessness of that military regime, going on a variety of television programs in the years before he rose to greater prominence with his 2018 presidential candidacy to praise the regime's actions against the Left in Brazil and in its determination to exploit the Amazon rainforest for Brazilian economic development.1 Bolsonaro's reliance on military prestige and [End Page 176] authority was particularly dramatized after his election loss to Labor Party leader Lula da Silva in 2022, when many of the former president's supporters camped out in front of military bases in the hopes that military personnel would intervene to give the presidency back to Bolsonaro. However, to build a broader movement to get elected in 2018, Bolsonaro had to move beyond this initial base of strong military supporters to cultivate prestige and a larger following in several parts of an increasingly segmented Brazilian political culture. This essay explores the idea of a segmented celebrity that is created by both mass and social media among very specific parts of the political audience, such as evangelical Christians, nationalists, the far right of the political spectrum, big agriculture, gun supporters, and those averse to control measures against COVID-19—rather than aiming at larger parts of the population. As a strategy, it is associated with authoritarian populism, which has always selected certain parts of the population, such as the working class under Vargas, to mobilize in support of its regimes. Ernesto Laclau notes that one of the main ways that populism works is through a leader who segments off parts of a society in order to mobilize those parts as a support base for their movement or regime.2 Bolsonaro expanded his national populist movement through very direct outreach to a new right-wing coalition of three major rising forces in Brazil, what are often referred to in the press as the politics of bulls (big agriculture), bibles (evangelical Christians), and bullets (a gun ownership movement).3 First, the term bulls represents large-scale agricultural interests that form much of the food production and export sector of Brazil, particularly in western and northern Brazil. Farmers who represent those interests spread their operations into the Brazilian Amazon during the military dictatorship. The dictatorship built roads in the Amazon to further encourage development of farming there. Those farmers, from small farmers to major landowners and their national associations, resented efforts under President Lula to restrict clearing new land for farms in the Amazon. They already formed part of the opposition to the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT; Workers' Party) and moved to support Bolsonaro as he emerged.4 Second, the term bibles in the popular media phrase represents Brazil's rapidly growing evangelical Christian population, which were already a rising force in Brazilian politics.5 This outreach was often centered in poor and working-class neighborhoods. However, it targeted evangelical church [End Page 177] members unlike earlier populist movements that aimed at the working class as an economic class.6 Drawing initially on the connections of his evangelical wife, Bolsonaro's populist strategy has worked to ally with fundamentalist evangelical Christians and religious movements. The largest evangelical church, the Universal Church of the Reign of God, also has a major television network that has promoted a religious populist approach to governance that fit with an alliance with Bolsonaro. The third major group supporting Bolsonaro was the bullets—the conservative nationalist political movement that received support from the US National Rifle Association (NRA) to organize more widely in Brazil around gun rights.7 This movement also supported Bolsonaro as he emerged, and he reciprocated...