Analysis: Bolsonaro tries to repair damage to London with speech at the UN

After the fiasco of his visit to the funeral of Elizabeth II in London, Jair Bolsonaro (PL) tried to soften the damage to his image with a speech that was quite anodyne by his standards at the opening of the UN General Assembly.

Of course, everything in life is comparison. The president ended his speech in front of a Portuguese secretary general with a slogan from the fascist Portuguese dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, spoke about repudiation of gender ideology and mixed criticism of the Nicaraguan dictatorship with his defense for religious freedom.

Close to his first speech at the UN, in 2019, it was almost a reading of the “Soft Path” so much to the taste of Bolsonarism. There, there was a lot of criticism of the organization and the influence of the so-called ideological wing was visible, today just a pastiche used in social network posts.

Left behind the exacerbated Trumpism in the 2020 edition and even the denialist Bolsonaro who complained about the mandatory vaccines in 2021. domestic supply of immunizations against Covid-19.

The election, as predicted, was at the center of his speech. But of the “thief Lula” who spoke to crazed supporters in London, the president only made a reference to corruption at Petrobras – which has nothing to do with the busy pulpit, but a fact in itself. The PT was left with a cowardly criticism, without naming him.

But the core was what the center wanted: to turn the UN into a platform and show a list of alleged achievements of the government, tempered with a rehashed lie from last year’s speech about the gigantism of the 7/7 demonstrations.

Regarding Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), leader of the polls, ironically what was seen was an agreement that was already known: the criticism of the sanctions regime against Russia in the Ukrainian War, the request for a ceasefire and the defense of the reform of the UN Security Council as a way of embracing the greatest political diversity in the world today.

All this has already been defended by the PT, both in his presidency years (2003-10) and recently, in the case of comments about the war.

So far, unlike the British sausage, this New York leg of the trip has not seen the vexation of 2021, when the president was forced to eat pizza on the street for not being vaccinated against the plague and saw his Minister of Health show the middle finger. for protesters.

It seems little, and it is. But for the international stature of diplomatic dwarf projected by Bolsonaro, expressed in the miserable bilateral meetings of his empty agenda at the UN, if it does not cancel out the embarrassment carried out in London or win any centrist vote, the speech did not make the situation even worse.