Opinion – Vinicius Torres Freire: Bolsonaro corrupted September 7, but who takes so many people to the street?

The eye is precarious, but the Avenida Paulista of the 7 de Setembro Bolsonarista movement of 2022 seemed to have at least as many people as the coup rally of 2021. the head of Dilma Rousseff in 2016.

Jair Bolsonaro corrupted public affairs in order to appropriate the national date, take crowds to the streets, almost alone occupy journalistic coverage time and make campaign videos. It was successful.

Bolsonaro could, therefore, be the object of several electoral crime processes, if there were a General Attorney’s Office. They would probably come to nothing, as has been the case for the past four years, from the impeachment requests that rot in Congress to the inquiries that scoff at the Supreme Court. Bolsonaro’s delinquency is part of the political landscape. A success.

The PL candidate, the national monthly party, started the day by saying that 1964 could be repeated. He campaigned through state TV, the one he had promised to shut down in 2018.

In yet another act of misappropriation, he hijacked the 7 de Setembro parade in Brasília to hold a rally about an electric trio (who paid for it?), fulfilling the mere formality of not using the official platform next door.

In the Brasilia parade and in the air-naval pirouettes of Rio, the military were colluding with institutional corruption. In the Brasilia parade, there were also parades of military schools and even a “homeschooling” wing.

As the state of social and political depravity became natural, the speaking classes and official politicians said that the speeches were moderate. They were the usual illiterate and crooked chat room, with coup threats between the lines.

In the history of the country’s political speeches, there will be talk of a mental castrate boasting of being “imbrochable” and asking voters to compare the “first ladies” (that silly and anti-republican idea), giving preference to a “princess ” “God’s”.

As in a medieval allegory, personifications of the politics of darkness accompanied Bolsonaro at the rallies: the ultra-right businessman, the leader of the Pentecostal Brucutu party, the military man with a hideous look, the agro ogre in a hat.

That said, Bolsonaro now has 32% of the votes in the first round and 42% of the valid votes in a second round against Lula da Silva (PT). It is the only politician and the only program that takes the crowd to the streets.

Part of the movement is financed by entrepreneurs and business associations. Some are from “civil society” committees, as seen and heard on Avenida Paulista. Many families, many children, with the suffering face of the poor or less than well-off majority of the country, strolled there as in a pleasant Sunday in the park. Fanatics swarmed around the coup trucks, but they were in the minority.

It is a new Brazil or one with new power, made up of people left for decades on the periphery, who invented a new religion, a Christianity without a New Testament, who fear drugs; of men with fear and/or anger at human diversity. Made from the world of agriculture, from so many entrepreneurs from the countryside or from small businesses and religious politicians dissatisfied with the State and the sliver of power they had until now. In part, made up of people tired of not seeing, in practice, much difference between parties or governments.

It was a Brazil that was formed while the cultural elites of São Paulo and Rio fantasized their country according to the alienated intellectual fashion of the moment, if not pure ideological bullshit. Bolsonaro was the horse and catalyst of this reaction. He passed in the saddle, the people mounted and went in droves to the street.