Ele Não: How Brazil’s Far-Right President Used Social Media to Seize Power 

On January 1, the world’s fourth largest democracy, Brazil, will inaugurate an avowed homophobe – who advocates torture and the murder of political opponents – and social media helped it happen.

Referred to as “Trump of the Tropics”, Jair Bolsonaro, a former Army Captain of the Social Liberal Party (PSL) who are neither socialist nor remotely liberal, won the Brazilian presidency vote with almost 60% percent of the vote. That’s over 50 million people voting for a man who in 2014 told congresswoman Maria do Rosario “I wouldn’t rape you because you don’t deserve it”. Whilst the comparisons to Trump are understandable, the nature of Brazil’s young democracy – and the fact the most popular opposition figure is in jail – make the situation even more precarious.

Although presented as some kind of ephemeral populist wave, Jair Bolsonaro’s election was years in the making. An all too familiar scenario of a reactionary racist and misogynist being given a platform to “shake up” the mainstream order played out in the Brazilian press and on television. Matters were not helped by the corruption scandals which have engulfed his opposition, the Workers Party (PT). In the past few years a scandal name Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) saw just about every major figure in Brazilian politics caught up in some form of corruption allegation. The president Dilma Rousseff was impeached and Lula da Silva, the immensely popular former left-wing leader imprisoned on what many believe are spurious charges.

With the left disarmed and the centrist interim president Michel Temer’s approval rating dropping to 4% in the summer of 2018, the circumstances in which Bolsonaro would thrive were set. He utilized the same sort of bombastic and attention grabbing rhetoric that served fellow right-populists Trump and Duterte (of the Philippines) well. His outrageous quotes and attacks on minorities would spread across Twitter like wildfire as he continued to be booked on dozens of mainstream chat shows. What started as something of a novelty act for television directors soon went viral on social media and once the genie was out the bottle, there was no way for the mainstream establishment to stop it.

One of the most effective tactics used by Bolsonaro’s supporters to rile up Brazilians was to add thousands of people at a time to WhatsApp groups and use them to spread pro-Bolsonaro propaganda. For example, preying on concerns of liberalisation among the country’s religious conservatives, the groups spread messages which claimed to show that children were being “taught homosexuality” at school. They showed images of fake manuals and even milk bottles with phallic teats, calling them “mamadeiras eróticas”. They also spread stories which insinuated opponent Haddad drove a Ferrari and lived an opulent lifestyle.

They were all lies.

“I don’t even have a car,” Haddad responded. “I get around on the underground, on the bus, by bike and by Uber.” But by this point the lies had resonated and the damage was done.

Why WhatsApp? Tania Menai, writing for Slate.com explained that “Brazilians use WhatsApp, which locals call Zap or ZapZap affectionately, for everything”, going on to say that the 120m users of WhatsApp in Brazil prefer it to traditional texting because of the variance of data plans in the country. In times gone by, contacting millions of potential voters surreptitiously using technology would either have been too visible on Facebook or Twitter or too expensive via text messaging. WhatsApp allowed the campaign to both target voters under the radar with propaganda that would’ve been easily disproved in the mainstream press or on public social media platforms for less than $3m USD.

This was 21st century political campaigning done to devastating effect.

It can be said that geography played its part too, with Bolsonaro garnering overwhelming support in the major cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paolo and the capital Brasilia. Haddad on the other hand did well in the north-eastern states which had been Lula’s heartlands but it was never close to being enough to prevent Bolsonaro winning. The contrast between the metropolitan, tech-savvy Bolsonaro supporters and the provincial Haddad supporters who never quite took to him in the way they did his predecessors was stark and alarming.

Fernando Haddad accused Bolsonaro of running “a veritable criminal organisation with businessmen who are using undeclared money to pay for false messages on WhatsApp” but ultimately his protestation was futile and it was clear from early on that the homophobic former Army Captain Bolsonaro would be president.

Attacks on LGBT people in Brazil are not new. This is a country that is both simultaneously the largest catholic country on earth and the one most rapidly embracing evangelicalism. For LGBT people, they are between the proverbial rock and a hard place and they have found themselves perhaps most venomously targeted by Bolsonaro supporters. The man himself infamously told a radio show in 1989 that he’d rather his son die in an accident than be gay and describes himself as a “proud homophobe”.

The international reaction to Bolsonaro’s victory has been equally concerning. Firstly, international stock markets and big business reacted with satisfaction after he overcome the centre-left Workers Party (PT) and then followed a wave of congratulations from across the globe. Donald Trump wished him “congrats” on his preferred medium of communication, Twitter and said how much he was looking forward to “working side-by-side on trade, military and everything else”. Fellow ‘strongmen’ Rodrigo Duterte and Vladimir Putin joined him in congratulations.

Perhaps the most truly alarming characteristic of Jair Bolsonaro’s personality is his tendency to go out of his way to praise one of Brazil’s most infamous men: Colonel Ustra. Ustra, a prominent figure in the military dictatorship which brutally ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, was a prolific torturer whose crimes are too depraved to detail and was even rumoured to have personally tortured impeached president Dilma Rousseff during her time in prison for being ‘subversive’. With all this in mind, Bolsonaro has delighted in calling Ustra his hero and indulging his fantasies of torturing left-wingers, saying ‘I am in favour of torture — you know that. And the people are in favour of it, too.’

Bolsonaro will be inaugurated on January 1 and fears are growing by the day about whether the reality of his presidency will be as horrifying as he has promised or if perhaps many of the awful things that he said on the campaign trail were simply a ploy aimed at mobilising his base. That sort of complacency characterised the reaction to Donald Trump’s victory and it can be argued that it is hindering the so-called Resistance to this day. Like Trump, Jair Bolsonaro has not gone to any lengths to disguise the magnitude of his hatred for minority groups and it is those groups who are most likely to be failed by the failure of the mainstream to respond.

As for the question of the how authentic Bolsonaro’s menace is, in the words of Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”.