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Bolsonaro’s Political Woes Mount While Covid-19 Ravages Brazil

Bolsonaro’s Political Woes Mount While Covid-19 Ravages Brazil

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- “So what? Sorry. What do you want me to do about it? … I can’t work miracles.”

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s response on April 28 to the news that his country had surpassed 5,000 coronavirus deaths wasn’t exactly encouraging.

Bolsonaro has made a point of being as contrarian as possible during the pandemic, refusing public-health guidance even as Brazil’s hospitals are overwhelmed and gravediggers work as fast as they can to bury the dead.

Bolsonaro’s Political Woes Mount While Covid-19 Ravages Brazil

Now Brazil faces a frightening outlook. Weeks after Covid-19 cases surged in other parts of the world, the number of people to test positive continues to rise in Latin America’s biggest country, with no peak in sight. Bolsonaro has approached these extraordinary times in his typical manner: headstrong, blunt, and outrageous. His refusal to embrace social distancing—even for himself, as he regularly carouses through crowded public markets—has turned him into a global outlier.

Not that he’s been all alone: President Trump at first denied the seriousness of the pandemic and wanted social distancing to be over by Easter. Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador shrugged off caution as well; in mid-March he was still hugging and kissing supporters as the global body count rose. But no leader has rejected Covid-19 medical guidance like Bolsonaro.

Before he blurted out his now notorious “So what?” Bolsonaro consistently downplayed the gravity of the pandemic. Since March he’s called it “overblown,” “not a crisis,” a “fantasy” invented by the media, and just a “little flu,” all despite the fact that most members of his entourage on a visit to Mar-a-Lago later tested positive for the virus, some of them becoming ill. When Brazilian governors tried to get a grip on the outbreak with quarantine measures, he chastised them for hurting the economy.

Bolsonaro thrives on backlash, so when people started criticizing him for not wearing a mask when he greeted supporters, he doubled down. “Don’t be surprised if you see me in a packed subway car in São Paulo or on a ferry in Rio,” he said. “It’s a demonstration that I am with the people.” And when his health minister undermined him by backing social distancing measures, Bolsonaro fired him.

Meanwhile, Brazil is seeing its number of Covid-19 cases grow at a faster rate than the U.S. or the U.K. As of May 6, the Health Ministry reported almost 116,000 cases and 7,958 deaths. At the same time that shopping malls started to reopen in response to chiding from the president, Rio de Janeiro’s state health secretary called the curve “out of control.”

A public-health crisis like the one Brazil is facing would be a heavy lift for any president. But the coronavirus is only one of Bolsonaro’s problems. He’s tangled up in a severe political crisis as well.

In 2018, Bolsonaro was elected handily on an anticorruption, anti-establishment, pro-nuclear-family platform in a Trump-esque wave of “Make Brazil Great Again” populism. Since then he’s carried with him a base of supporters from the military, the wealthy elite, and the religious right. Recent events inside the government have split that base, thrown Bolsonaro’s cabinet into disarray, stalled his political agenda, exacerbated his poor relationship with Congress, and left him in a battle with the Supreme Court and under federal criminal investigation.

Things unraveled in two short weeks: On April 16, Bolsonaro fired his health minister. On April 24 his justice minister, Sergio Moro, the most popular politician in Brazil, resigned and accused Bolsonaro of trying to replace the head of the federal police with someone more sympathetic to him. Bolsonaro has denied the accusation. (The federal police have been carrying out investigations that could potentially implicate the president’s sons.) Three days after that, the Supreme Court allowed federal prosecutors to open an investigation into Moro’s claims. And on April 29 the court blocked Bolsonaro from nominating a close ally as the new federal police chief.

Bolsonaro’s Political Woes Mount While Covid-19 Ravages Brazil

The drama has many observers wondering how the country is going to ride this out. In a videoconference for a legal magazine on May 4, three former Brazilian presidents—Michel Temer, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Fernando Collor de Mello—all agreed that an institutional crisis could be on the way. Bolsonaro’s words have “created restlessness and exasperation” at a time when the country needs “peace,” said Collor.

Then there’s the economy, which had been sputtering when Bolsonaro took over with his promise to instill liberal reforms. Now, those efforts have been wiped out or set aside. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund see the Brazilian economy contracting 5% in 2020. The real has lost almost 30% of its value this year, making it the worst performer among the world’s main currencies. Boeing Co. canceled a highly anticipated $4.2 billion deal with Embraer SA, an aerospace conglomerate whose shares are part of Brazil’s benchmark stock index. And there is widespread concern that Economy Minister Paulo Guedes, the neoliberal rudder of Brazil’s ship, might bail.

“We don’t need to add a political crisis to the huge health and economic crisis we are already dealing with,” Candido Bracher, president of Itaú Unibanco Holding SA, said on May 5 during a press conference call.

Unsurprisingly, Bolsonaro’s popularity has taken a hit, especially after Moro’s departure. A recent XP opinion poll showed his disapproval rating at an all-time high of 42%. The majority of respondents—67%—saw Moro’s exit as having a negative impact on the country, and 49% said they expect the remainder of the Bolsonaro administration to be “bad” or “terrible.”

Yet every weekend, many of his supporters wrap themselves in Brazilian flags in the capital, Brasília, holding signs demanding the “closure” of Congress, calling the Supreme Court a “national embarrassment,” and sometimes even pleading for a return to military rule. For now, Bolsonaro “still has his support base,” says Mauricio Santoro, a professor of politics at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, “but absolutely he will lose some of them because of this.” The next presidential election is not until 2022, but October’s municipal elections might offer a glimpse of the future.

Bolsonaro is unlikely to be removed anytime soon, even though more than 30 requests for his impeachment have landed on the desk of lower house speaker Rodrigo Maia. Maia has pumped the brakes, saying on April 27 that Congress should have “patience and balance to deal with what is most important: the life, employment, and income of Brazilians.” It turns out there may be a limit to the number of crises Brazil can endure at once.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.