Supporters of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) block BR251 during a protest against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s (PT) election victory. Photo: Diego Vara/Portal
Idea for a nearfuture bestseller: Reconstruction of Jair Bolsonaro’s first 24 hours after the October 30, 2022 election results.
Part of the story is well known: Former President Lula (PT) was narrowly elected commander of the country for the third time, an unprecedented feat.
After the result was announced, the former metallurgist, who spent 580 days in prison, celebrated his win at a party with his supporters on Avenida Paulista.
“Brazilians want to live well, eat well, live well. He wants a good job, a salary that is always adjusted above inflation, he wants quality public health and education. They want freedom of religion. He wants books instead of guns. He wants to go to the theatre, go to the cinema, have access to all cultural assets, because culture feeds our soul. The Brazilian people want hope again,” he said.
End of the story? So so.
Miles away, the first president of the republic not to get a new term in the race for reelection locked himself in a private bunker, leaving a whole country wondering where he was going. Without hearing from him, some of the supporters decided to act on their own and block the lanes of the streets to protest Lula’s election.
In one of those surprising twists in the plot, it wasn’t the landless, the homeless and other social movement activists who made headlines for promoting disorder, as Bolsonaro has always accused the left, but his own supporters who came to him as a defender of the Disorder saw law and order. (Isn’t that hilarious? No. Roberto Jefferson, a Bolsonarista who shot police when he learned he would be arrested for encouraging violence and threatening a judge, can prove it. Carla Zambelli, who killed a voter by chased the streets, too ).
The President’s silence led to all sorts of uprisings and also to many theories.
Some believe that while the circus burns, he’s just resting and catching up on the days he really worked this year not as president, but as a candidate.
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It must not have been easy swapping weekends of motorcycle and jet ski trips for a busy schedule of meetings with leaders and supporters. Nor can it be easy to pretend all the time to care for a part of the population that in other times you only wanted to lose sight of due to pandemics, war, birth control and abortion pills.
Tired, he may have just started the first of many sleep therapy sessions he’s entitled to from now on.
But that’s just one of the possibilities.
Another is that he simply believed he was a divine messenger on earth and had no plan B up his sleeve in case he failed or denied it when he promised to be elected, God willing. God and the voters didn’t want it.
True, there were samples of rebellion here and there, like his idol Donald Trump did when he took a stub from the US polls and began what had gone wrong with the invasion of Capitol Hill.
The lawsuits with which the cronies responded to an attempt to break into Congress in Washington and win victory in the muque certainly weighed like a shadow on the Brazilian pastiches at this point. But it’s good not to underestimate what assistants can do who have accumulated salaries and benefits and now don’t want to return to retirement and life without a privileged position.
You have to think about plan B, but thinking isn’t exactly the group’s forte.
This hypothesis rules out the sleepy version of the character from the bestseller.
Instead, another theory is that Bolsonaro hasn’t batted an eyelid since learning he can no longer say that the minority should bow to the majority.
There should be no shortage of people at this point whispering in the captain’s ear that now is the time for the coup.
Across the country, a small group of truck drivers and angry voters are calling on Bolsonaro to step down from his Sierra Maestra and herald revolution through military intervention and armed civilian soldiers. Then the bestselling author would be one of the rare survivors of a country on the brink of collapse.
But time is the enemy: by this time, the most relevant players have already recognized their opponent’s victory. Leading politicians from the USA, Europe, China and Latin America join in. And also the heads of the Brazilian judiciary and legislature.
Even the broadcaster, which had acted like a moat for Bolsonarismo in recent weeks, recognized and demanded that the (still president) acknowledge the defeat.
But a day and a half after the setback, Bolsonaro had not shown his face or said what he planned to do or not do.
Perhaps he is too busy now to concern himself with side issues such as transition, respect for the democratic rite and transfer of power. And enjoy the cesspool to the sounds of Leonardo and a bucket of condensed milk.
Bolsonaro has never known how to behave as president since his election.
Perhaps it is asking too much to expect him to behave as an unelected president is expected to behave.
In the betting pools there are those who imagine that one of those times he’s just alone in his room playing with his little men from the Commandos in Action. And that the transition has already begun in his absence while someone is tasked with entertaining the President and preventing him from doing anything crazy.
We may never really know what he did, said, heard, thought and how Jair Bolsonaro acted in the first hours after the election.
Would he have gathered his assistants in a bunker, as in The Fall, to deliver the final rebuke for the campaign’s strategic mistakes? Had he rushed to burn secret files that could be opened in two months, not a hundred years?
Had he just slipped out the back door and, like a Peter Sellers character, discovered that there was a world other than his hateful garden and, at the age of 67, begun to live and discover the good and simple things in the world?
Gossip networks, which make traces on social networks their own journalistic research system, guarantee that a major crisis in the family will prevent Bolsonaro from prioritizing the country’s emergencies at this time.
That’s because First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro would have unfollowed her husband and one of their children on Instagram. A cryptic message was subsequently posted on the same network. Crisis at Vivendas da Barra? Nobody knows for sure. There are things only Dalton Trevisan could have predicted from the alcove lock.
All of this makes a good screenplay for books and films in the future.
None of them will be better than the one that scholar Carlos Hotta envisioned on Twitter: “a film where the authoritarian president loses the election, flees in the trunk of a car to be stuck in the street because of demonstrations by truck drivers protesting his.” Favor”.
Wouldn’t it be too much?
As a thriller, the story of Brazil under Bolsonaro would make a great feature film.
It is a pity that this country, in the clash of conjectures, realities and absurdities, has already become the screenplay of a sad documentary series based on hallucinogens and true events.