By ALEXANDRE ARAGÃO DE ALBURQUERQUE*
The holding of the debate at Band ratified the structural contradictions that sustain the candidacy of the Brazilian extreme right
“Bolsonaro lies. Nothing he says should be taken seriously. He is not worthy of the Presidency” (Sérgio Moro, 10/01/2022).
To the surprise of many, at the end of the presidential debate, on Band, the far-right candidate posed for the cameras with his former Minister of Justice, Sérgio Moro. On December 29 of last year, Sérgio Moro, also a former director of the US consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal, declared in an interview that he had been exonerated by Jair Bolsonaro for not having interfered in the investigations carried out by the Federal Police and the Federal Revenue, to protect their children Zero One, Zero Two, Zero Three and first lady Michele. Most likely, he must have “painted an atmosphere” between them, as Jair Bolsonaro likes to say, so that they could pose together and united at the end of Sunday’s debate.
The extreme right candidate's effort in the final five minutes, in which he was isolated to deliver his speech, was to mobilize his cattle through the figures that make up his ideological heritage. As the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) reminds us, an ideology is much more than a system of ideas and beliefs. It subscribes to logics of action. Therefore, its dimension is practical, it aims at practical results even if it is at the same time cognitive and axiological. It seeks to connect to the symbolizations that occur in the everyday world of social classes, in order to produce forms of consciousness, for the maintenance of the status quo.
In the final stage of the debate, instead of presenting his government platform, he devoted himself to revisiting the religious issue, defending the family, criticizing gender diversity. As always, he used the lie, when he stated that Lula is against religious freedom; he presented himself once again as a defender of the traditional Christian family, when he himself, Jair Bolsonaro, is already on his fourth marriage, with children from three different women; in addition to trying to present himself as an example of a Christian, vacillating between Catholicism and Protestantism. It should also be remembered that for him, in his authoritarian aberration, the Brazilian State should not be secular, but confessional.
Philosopher Márcia Tiburi, on her Twitter page, highlighted the chronic falsehood of the candidate who defends the traditional family, revealing that the couple Michele and Jair hide the eldest daughter she had with a married man before the current relationship, to maintain the image from an evangelical conservative family.
According to Juliana Dal Piva in the book Jair's business (Zahar) – the result of more than three years of investigation, aiming to unravel the secret past of the icon family of the Brazilian extreme right – Jair Bolsonaro began his romance with her while he was married, configuring betrayal to his previous wife, making Michele his mistress.
The holding of the debate at Band came to ratify the structural contradictions that sustain the candidacy of the Brazilian extreme right: a project of power based on lies, on hatred of what is different, on the inability to welcome cultural diversity, on the exacerbation of individualism to the detriment of solidarity and of civil fraternity, encouraging the culture of violence (weapon sales) and the law of the strongest, in total subservience to US power, stifling any dream of national sovereignty in terms of multipolar geopolitics, in addition to cultivating enmities and tensions with sister countries of the Latin American continent.
This was the climate painted, through the Bolso-fascist ideological tactic. It is up to voters, on the next 30th, to reject this authoritarianism completely, to return Jair Bolsonaro back home, so that Brazil can resume the path of participatory, inclusive and distributive democracy.
*Alexandre Aragão de Albuquerque Master in Public Policy and Society from the State University of Ceará (UECE).
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