The crisis of Brazilian democracy under Bolsonaro: from the pandemic to the post-pandemic times

André de Macedo Duarte (Federal University of Paraná)

The text aims at interrogating the political connections between Bolsonaro’s misgoverning of Brazil during the Covid-19 pandemic and the aggravation of the crisis of Brazilian democracy. I claim that his failures in properly addressing the pandemic emergency were closely related to his political goal of transforming Brazilian democracy it into a ‘façade democracy’, a rather ambiguous political regime in which the differences between a full-fledged democracy and an authoritarian regime are blurred. To substantiate such claim, I discuss major aspects of Bolsonaro’s main political decisions, speeches and political propaganda from the beginnings of the pandemic in March 2020 up to the October 2022 Presidential campaign and to the explicit political attacks against Brazilian democracy that followed his defeat in those elections. Bolsonaro consistently tried to undermine Brazilian democratic institutions by recurring to harsh biopolitical, neoliberal and necropolitical governmentality practices and discourses, coupling them with neoconservative issues and reactionary political-theological tenets. Perplexing as that might be, such an attack against democracy was performed under the premises of defending Brazilian democracy against the threats of an alleged communist danger. I consider that it is fundamental to understand what kind of democracy is in the minds of contemporary far-right wing political leaders, since this is the path that leads to the weakening and dismantling of our existing democracies from the inside.