Beef, Bible and bullets: Brazil in the age of Bolsonaro

The promise of liberal economic reform and more transparent and responsible politics that had featured in the campaign of 2018 had proven to be empty. Pension reform had been achieved despite, not because of, Bolsonaro. Lava Jato and the anti-corruption campaigns that had excited public opinion from the mid-2010s had run their course. At worst Braz

One of the fundamental underlying problems was that Brazil’s public finances were weak. The scale of emergency grant payments in 2020 had left the administration with a gigantic fiscal hole, increasing the size of the nominal deficit from 5.8 per cent of GDP at the end of 2019 to 13.7 per cent by the end of 2020. The decision to renew the grant in

Brazil, wrote journalists in Veja, was the only country in the world where the arrival of vaccines was a piece of bad news for a president.39 Bolsonaro seemed set against them. In December 2020 he told an interviewer on TV Band that “I’m not going to take the vaccine and that is all there is to it. My life is at risk? That is my problem.” When it b

Impeachment was by no means inevitable. Bolsonaro continued to enjoy the support of the ideological and socially conservative groups who make up his social base. Thousands of evangelical Christians, rank-and-file military policemen, small farmers and miners all remained loyal to him. Even following the decline in his popularity, nearly three in ten

For the parties of the Centrão there was little to be gained from supporting a government that was increasingly unpopular and regarded as inept by the most powerful and wealthy interests in the country. Two decisions by the Supreme Court in the second half of March had a big impact on the political landscape ahead of the 2022 presidential election.

By the end of March 2021 there were signs that the combination of economic issues and the fear and uncertainty stemming from the pandemic were influencing political calculations and potentially bringing Brazil to the edge of a new crisis. Opinion polls reflected this. Even in December 2020 Bolsonaro’s presidency was still relatively well regarded,

The polls showed that although the president had lost the backing of some middle-class supporters, he was becoming much more popular among low-income groups who had benefited from the emergency grant. It was particularly striking how popular Bolsonaro was becoming in the north-east, the only region that in 2018 had remained loyal to the Workers’ Pa

Past experience had shown the Centrão parties to be much more interested in pushing spending projects that could…

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during his first eighteen months in office Bolsonaro had made little progress in winning approval for new legislation. His one big achievement was the approval in 2019 of an extensive reform of pensions that had been piloted through Congress by Maia, in spite of the president’s lack of interest and the open opposition of many of his hardline suppor