The days of Bolsonarism are numbered

Essay: Monique Prado e RafaelMagalhães

Images: Rafael Magalhães

The July 3 rally was multifaceted: several fronts and with the participation of multiple social actors as workers, MST landless and housing activists, besides different and opposite political parties wich were organizing along Paulista Avenue.

Given the critical dimension of the political economy that we are going through, the act against the government joined antagonistic parties such as PSDB and PT.

There were many people shouting againt Bolsonaro making their own individual protests in very creatively ways. Punching dolls with the image of the brazilian President demonstrate popular discontentment and aversion. It was also possible to see some acts with a poetic tone burning fake money wwith Bolsonaro's image.

These mass riots don't look like they're going to retreat anytime soon without any result like the Impeachment or at least the weakening of Bolsonaro until the next elections as civil society has been resilient in organizing to express its demands.

On other side, if we make the class cutout what is perceived is the presence from a more affluent portion of society. Maria who wakes up at 5 am and leaves Grajaú to Moema was not present. However, this autophagy movement represented by manifestations that occur within communities and peripheral regions works as a counterpart to the manifestations on Avenida Paulista transgressing the idea that borders are not capable of shaking structures.

Moreover, these riots dialogue with the agendas of social networks demonstrating how the internet can be the extension of political territory. What is inferred is the dialectic between streets and networks. The posters, for example, bring dissatisfactions that are in trend topics on twitter. In any case, from 2013 until now, popular forces have undergone considerable political maturation: from the hot topics reported by Jornal Nacional to the CPI's, parliamentary inquiry committees, people are more interested on politics, due to the impact on the daily life of Brazilians who face situations such as unemployment, hunger, high inflation and the way the government has been dealing with the pandemic, especially with corruption scandals and grotesque anti-scientific denialism that gives rise to anti-vaccination movements. Inevitably, this led to the discredit, especially international, of Bolsonaro.

Unlike the Dilma government, in the current administration there is still an aggravating factor in relation to foreign relations and geopolitics, in other words, Bolsonaro managed to weaken not only the Government's internal policies but also State relations.

If, before, Bolsonarism looked for a cradle in Trump's rhetoric strengthening itself in a diffused agenda surfing popular dissatisfaction, especially, in public security whose totalitarian traits appear in the attempt to make the military police more autonomous, in the population's arms discourse, and in the equipping of government ministries by the Armed Forces, today his genocidal project has become crystal clear in the conduct of Covid-19.

Even in the face of a pandemic, where Brazil already has more than half a million deaths caused by the coronavirus, the riots are in full force. Civil society and political actors are aware of the anti-democratic thermometer of this Government, which manages necropolitics as its greatest project, through military operations carried out by the Army and the Police, having the military state control of who dies and who lives. Therefore, the discontent with the government is much greater than the fear of the deadly virus.

When Bolsonaro, as President of the Republic, vibrates with the death of a human life, publicly saying “another ID cancelled”, and repeatedly makes gestures that simulate a weapon or when he says he has to eliminate opponents or that minorities need to bow to the majority, he legitimizes and naturalizes death.

People on the streets are clamaring for the elimination of Bolsonarism whose main characteristic is the hate speech, which is found space in police TV programs like Datena that trivialize life, naturalize death and applaud executions on national television.

With the corruption scandals in addition to the disastrous results of this government, the question is how long will the "Centrão" sustain Bolsonarism?

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