Bolsonaro as a symptom

A year after the

Events in Brasilia

, Jair Bolsonaro returns to the eye of the hurricane: the Brazilian Justice is observing him and he mobilizes his forces.

In 2022 he lost the election by a narrow margin and, although everything indicates that since the day of the assault on the institutions carried out by his followers, the former president has lost political power, but he still retains networks and powers.

His anti-establishment allegations continue to have a hearing: like those of Javier Milei in Argentina or those of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.

The projects of the populist extreme right are viable in contemporary Latin America because there are social groups that give credibility to their stories, once minority and politically incorrect.

In parallel, Bolsonaro, like Milei or Bukele, won elections because they forged pragmatic alliances and fished on battered electorates.

There is an inconsistent reading of their victories that overvalues ​​the prominence of these characters, taking advantage of the loopholes in the system and the opportunities provided by social networks.

However, when the loopholes of the system are analyzed, although problems appear - rigid institutional frameworks, insufficient online regulations or imperfect electoral systems - that relativize charisma as an explanatory key, a set of small degradations are also glimpsed that, after the pandemic, are have exacerbated.

We are talking about economic growth that does not drain, precarious public services, artificial political tensions, dysfunctional communication models and corruption that does not stop.

All these elements show that the quality of democracy is fading in the region while these characters grow.

In fact, the extreme right in Latin America does not emerge in a vacuum: it appears within the framework of rampant crises of legitimacy.

Charismatic leaderships limit themselves to politicizing, in a negative way, the prevailing frustration and nihilism.

They supposedly resolve collective anxieties.

Situations like this should not be confronted solely through regulations and complaints: the unrest has a basis and is latent in many countries.

Latin America is one of the regions with the greatest inequality on the planet (eight of its countries are among those with the worst Gini Coefficient) and the discouragement that inequality fuels is in the matrix of the rumor.

The great political triggers of the electoral overturns are related, however, to two expressions of insecurity that, at a popular level, make inequality tangible: the public one (two thirds of the most dangerous cities in the world are in Latin America) and the financial (inflation in Venezuela and Argentina was around 200% in 2023).

Both scourges are suffered by citizens who experience, with genuine anguish, violent events such as those that took place in Ecuador last January.

The same could be said of the daily nightmare that inflation represents in indebted countries that, in addition, suffer from bloody monetary dualities, with very clear winners and losers.

The suffering, despair and resentment that this creates ends up connecting with the Manichean and conspiratorial laments that characterize far-right arguments.

It is striking, however, that when the majority of these figures come into power they tend to unilaterally impose the same agendas of containing public spending, eliminating subsidies and selling healthy state assets that, for decades, led to economic stagnation. to structural fiscal deficits, suffocating debts, runaway increases in the cost of living, deficient public services and, to top it all off, a turmoil in public life that, far from calming down, tends to deepen through social networks.

The worst thing is the human cost that measures such as those described, applied abruptly to battered societies, end up having on the most vulnerable groups.

It is striking that when, for example, before the last Brazilian presidential election, favela mothers were asked what they feared most, more than two-thirds responded that their children would be hit by a stray bullet.

It is the most graphic result of efforts that are not really characterized by great results even in the areas in which they are considered strong.

The problem, furthermore, is that not only people suffer from these situations.

The agendas of the extreme right also affect the national interests of countries with weakened states and an abundance of strategic raw materials whose global demand is growing exponentially.

With the extreme populist right, the vicious circle of the dependent insertion of Latin American countries into global markets, far from being resolved, is worsening.

Shouldn't we question the rupturism promoted by those in favor of everything changing so that nothing is transformed?

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Juan Agulló

is a doctor in Sociology, professor and researcher at the Federal University of Latin American Integration (UNILA) in Brazil.

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