Two years late, Bolsonaro finally managed to make the manifesto trip he wanted. Bolsonaro planned to visit the authoritarian leaders of Hungary and Poland in 2020, around the same time he started calling for coup acts, but was prevented by the pandemic.
Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, was one of the few heads of state who attended Jair’s inauguration. Shortly after the election, Eduardo Bolsonaro went to Budapest and came back saying that he had learned how to deal with the press. Last week, the manifesto trip finally happened.
Before Budapest, Jair met with Vladimir Putin, the matrix of all new authoritarians. No one doubts that Putin is the dictator of Russia. But when was the coup d’état? Never. Putin progressively persecuted the press, rigged institutions, and at some point, the Russians woke up with no real chance of alternating power.
Putin’s prestige in Russia is, to some extent, understandable: the post-communist transition in Russia was more disastrous than anything we here in Brazil have seen in modern times: GDP fell by 30%, the state collapsed , life expectancy plummeted, the stock market crashed in 1999. Putin failed to put Russia back on the development path, but at least he gave the impression of halting the decline.
Orbán has none of those excuses. Hungary had an incomparably smoother post-communist transition, grew back in a few years, established a reasonably solid democracy, joined the European Union and is now considered a success story by all international agencies. It was this democracy, much more robust than the Russian one, that Orbán destroyed.
How could Jair not like that?
Orbán ruled by the rules throughout his first term, as did Chávez. In this, both were much more moderate than Bolsonaro. From then on, Orbán gradually dismantled Hungarian democracy. The retirement age of Supreme Court judges was lowered, as Bolsonarista Bia Kicis has been trying to do in Brazil, allowing Orbán to fill the courtroom with Hungarian Augustos Aras.
Without the threat of constitutional control by the Supreme Court, Orbán modified electoral rules to favor his party. He destroyed independent Hungarian media by suspending official propaganda in critical outlets (as Bolsonaro threatened to do with sheet and Globo) and the acquisition, by its allies, of the communication companies by Hungarian “Jovem Pans”. He used corruption extensively to threaten businessmen who did not support him and to favor his Havan Old Men.
There are also strong suspicions that Bolsonaro did not visit Putin on the eve of a war, destabilizing Brazil’s relationship with Washington, to buy matriosque dolls. The importance of Russian cyberattacks in Brexit or Trump’s victories should not be overstated; but they helped to mess up difficult electoral processes.
Again: how could Jair not like that?
In short, Bolsonaro’s manifesto trip through Russia and Hungary was a spoiler of Bolsonaro’s next moves: to smear the election and start an authoritarian transition in his second term.
