Brazil’s slimeball leader President Jair Bolsonaro has had crowds out on the streets recently to back him in his battle with the supreme court. With elections looming next year, he has been trying to deflect charges that he is responsible for thousands of deaths, in that he allegedly spread false information about Covid-19. He has likened the disease to the flu, but it has already claimed at least 600,000 lives there, second only to the US where you-know-who was in charge.
There was a time when Brazil was a model for how a developing country could combine democracy and economic growth, giving lie to the perception that only a sharp stomp of the jackboot in government could attract investment and inspire confidence. Bolsonaro, though elected, is openly hostile to Brazil’s liberal constitution, and regrets assenting to a law that stripped him of the power to fire the central bank governor. His erratic style and attacks on the country’s institutions have eroded confidence in the Brazilian project. Inflation is getting into its stride.
Closer to home, Bolsonaro’s scorched-earth tactics echo the strategy of one Jacob Zuma, who to avoid justice has so far trashed, and not in any order, the presidency, the law-enforcement establishment, parliament, the ANC, Eskom, Derek Hanekom, SAA, the Constitutional Court and the free republic he swore to serve, but which now serves him at great expense and inconvenience. That’s the long-run cost of trusting a man who couldn’t pay for his own car wash.
Brazil’s woes will resonate at this time in SA, where the cure-all of populism and anticonstitutionalism is seen by some as a solution in a country where inequality and the alleged failure of democracy to deliver after more than 27 years have sown the seeds of social upheaval. Thus far, however, SA’s constitution has repaid our faith in it, withstanding the predations of the Zuma years and allowing President Cyril Ramaphosa space to regenerate institutions laid low by state capture and corruption. In politics, however, it’s always early days, and time will tell whether the Zuma tendency will regain the upper hand in the ANC, and take SA on the low road of self-defeating populism.
Looking abroad, it seems a long time since an idealistic zeitgeist was afoot, when SA was flattered to be included as the two big emerging economies, Brazil and India, threw in their lot with China, a superpower contender, and Russia, which in the early days of Vladimir Putin was not yet a fully-fledged gangster state. And as the tail of this new comet, meant to herald a new hegemony, they tacked on little, yet potent, democratic SA to form Brics, an alliance of emerging nations that would become a rallying point for a new world order. With the passage of time and events, however, the appetite among our Brics friends for a democratic and constitutional order has dissipated.
Bolsonaro is known as the 'Trump of the Tropics', which is amusing in that it presupposes that Trump himself is not deeply 'tropical'. Which makes Bolsonaro subtropical?
In a strange twist, Brazil’s constitution has ensured the demise of the only two presidents who had their hearts in it, and who governed in the name of the oppressed and marginalised, which is a great many people in a country that has long offered itself as a model of nonracialism and easygoing tolerance for all. In truth, it is a hotbed of racism and oppression, and even the country’s huge LGBT community is under attack from Bolsonaro, who is on his third wife but preaches family values, a sure sign of an antidemocratic bigot.
He is now trying to broaden his political base beyond race-conscious and often openly racist white Brazilians, the evangelicals who favour torture as a cure for the massive drugs problem and ranchers who want limits to Amazon settlement abolished.
If only for his devastating encouragement of the destruction of the Amazon and its indigenous peoples, Bolsonaro should be fed to the river’s famous piranhas and then put on trial at the International Criminal Court. More is the pity he’ll be devoured in a single course.
Recently, in the spirit of being a martyr and a man of faux destiny, he listed three possible outcomes for himself – arrest, death or victory, and indicated only victory would be acceptable. Lagging in the polls, Bolsonaro has started blaming the electronic voting system, borrowing heavily from the playbook of his big admirer, former US president Donald Trump.
Bolsonaro is known as the “Trump of the Tropics’’, which is amusing in that it presupposes that Trump himself is not deeply “tropical”. Which makes Bolsonaro subtropical?
In the way he threatens the 200-million plus people of Brazil with a return to military rule, which many in the middle classes and oligarch family-controlled mainstream media quite like, Bolsonaro is playing a typical tropical card. With the US having abandoned the democracy project in the Middle East, Russia openly glowering over free Ukraine, and Afghanistan handed over to the Taliban, democracy is on the backfoot. Will anyone raise a peep if Brazil succumbs to the authoritarian trend?
As for the other Brics states, in China, the conventional wisdom was that the legacy of the communist dictator Mao Zedong would fade as the country liberalised, suggesting that although it was not a democracy as such, an enlightened spirit nevertheless filled the smog-laden air of Beijing. This optimistic projection reckoned without a Cultural Revolution poet named Xi Jinping, who has introduced “Xi Jinping thought” in schools, and seems set for life rule as he builds the personality cult one was told would never be allowed to take root again. Persecution of minorities and dissidents has been ramped up, and the move on a free Hong Kong is well documented.
India, which styles itself as the world’s biggest democracy, has capitulated to Hindu nationalism, saddled with a government that pays lip service to rights.
In Russia, Putin is also an unashamed populist, poisoning rivals, invading neighbours (often with soldiers in unmarked uniforms) and ruling like a tsar resurrected. And these are our friends, who we look up to as partners on our journey to prosperity?
Within the Brics family, only SA, a midget by comparison, stands among this rubble with any credit. These role-models have become cautionary tales to help us to continue to avoid the tropical malaise that afflicts them, and which threatens us too. They are the friends we dare not emulate.
Sunday Times Daily
