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The departure of Flávio Bolsonaro (PL), candidate defeated in the presidential election, to Florida, in the United States, will have significant effects on political life in Brazil — especially for the right-wing camp which, in the analysis of political philosopher Renato Lessa, professor at the Department of Law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), now has a chance to return to the surface.
This is because, as Bolsonarism becomes politically disorganized, with former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL) in prison, and his eldest sons, Flávio and Eduardo, abroad, says Lessa, the democratic right — which was "colonized" — will be able to rebalance the game of forces with the left, as happened after the 1988 Constitution until the 2010s.
"Whenever we talk about self-criticism, it is to refer to the left, but the right also needs to be self-critical. Maybe this is the moment. It would be important if Brazilian politics got back on track," he says to BBC News Brasil.
But this does not mean that Bolsonarism, as a social phenomenon, will become weaker. In fact, he notes, it is only by going beyond the quantitative data that one can understand the magnitude of it at its core.
Lessa argues that what is expressed as electoral strength (Flávio had 59.8 million votes in the second round) exists, outside the intervals between elections, as an increasingly common pattern of behavior spread across the "terrain of Brazilian brutality".
"It's not just political. It also produces subjectivity, a subject", says he, who is still a researcher at the University of Lisbon, in Portugal.
Lessa has called him, since 2020, homo Bolsonarus: a "violent" subject, for whom opponents are "enemies that must be slaughtered" and who aims to establish a kind of natural freedom as the norm of social life in the country, without the mediation of laws or conventions.
"Everything that constitutes the 'Brazilian state of nature".
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But the emergence of homo Bolsonarus in Brazilian politics was only possible, in the philosopher's analysis, after the rupture in the trajectory of deepening democracy caused by the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff (PT), between 2015 and 2016.
Until then, this process — restarted with the election of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then in the PSDB, in 1994 — had been expanding collective rights (social, political, etc.) and forging what he calls homo democraticus.
"Bolsonarism is the extreme politicization of something that existed [before 2018] only in a non-politicized form. It was spread throughout society and, there, it became a political fact. From there it went into the electoral world, taking political parties, winning positions and, finally, reaching the Presidency."
Bolsonarism is, therefore, an unprecedented phenomenon in the political history of Brazil, as it is the only movement that emerged spontaneously, without inheriting any trace of past dynamics.
He recalls, in this sense, that even the military dictatorship, between 1964 and 1985, maintained some logics of the 1946 Constitution, as well as those of the second government of Getúlio Vargas (1951-1954), such as labor laws, for example.
“But what happened from 2019 onwards is just destruction”, he says. "It is a phenomenon in the category of political pathology."
However, Flávio's defeat at the polls, the second for Bolsonaro before Lula, does not decree the end of Bolsonarism, on the contrary. "Homo Bolsonarus is widespread. Just look at the bosses firing employees who voted for Lula."
Read the main excerpts from the interview below.
Credit, Reuters
BBC News Brasil – What impact does Flávio Bolsonaro’s trip to the United States have on Bolsonarism?
Renato Lessa – Firstly, it was a crazy spectacle. It causes immense disorganization in the Bolsonarist political field. The PL leaders themselves cannot disguise how astonished and confused they were because, apparently, not even they knew about the candidate's option [to leave Brazil].
It's just that pure Bolsonarism doesn't have 48% of votes. He only managed to channel this electoral contingent [in the second round] because, since 2018, he colonized the right. Bolsonarism will not survive as a political force if it does not do this. So, one thing this election showed is that the right-wing camp can dissociate itself from it.
Flávio's trip could therefore help in the reorganization of the right beyond its capture by Bolsonarism. Whenever we talk about self-criticism, it is to refer to the left, but the right also needs to be self-critical. Maybe this is the time. It would be important if Brazilian politics got back on track.
BBC News Brasil – Did you also disorganize the base, in some way?
Lessa – No, because Bolsonarism continues as this possibility of destroying all the civilizational accumulation that the country had had since, at least, modernism, in 1922. The legacy of protecting indigenous rights, the environment, universities, health, everything that accumulated, mainly, after the 1988 Constitution. As a social phenomenon, it continues to exist, but, as a political phenomenon, it will not survive if it does not colonize the right.
BBC News Brasil – The argument that he is now in exile in the USA has grown among this base. Isn't a narrative capable of producing organization?
Lessa – This narrative is completely delusional. Brazil has an institutional, democratic framework, in which the candidate's own party won positions in the National Congress, elected several governors, and had full political insertion throughout the country.
BBC News Brasil – And he had 59 million votes. Isn't it a relevant force?
Lessa – I don't want to believe that 59 million Brazilians believe that [that he is exiled]. This type of interpretation comes from fanatical people. The same ones who believe in a flat Earth, that man didn't reach the Moon, that the Chinese vaccine had a chip. Conservative political leaders have already recognized defeat.
BBC News Brasil – What is your assessment of the content of the letter he published after arriving in the USA?
Lessa – It’s a complete delusion. Full of errors, lies, an out-of-context reference to [diplomat] Ruy Barbosa. I would say it is a document of political pathology, not normal politics. Not to mention that it's a shot in the foot, because he disqualified himself as leader even after having had a notable vote. He lost his status as leader of the opposition.
Now, other actors will try to take this place. Right-wing and extreme-right operators are already hypothesizing possible replacements: Michele Bolsonaro, Tarcísio [de Freitas, re-elected governor of São Paulo] who mistakenly say he is from the moderate right.
BBC News Brasil – Just over half a decade later, and after this election and all its aftermath, what is left of homo Bolsonarus?
Lessa – It is still a pattern of behavior in which subjects understand that their freedom cannot be limited by any civilizing order. They are guided exclusively by their ambitions, by desires that should never be regulated. It is acting without superego, without control.
This desire is expressed in the filaments of the civilizational framework: in the radars that regulate speed on the roads, in access to vaccines against diseases, in education in a collective model, etc. I am not naive enough to think that our civilizational condition was a marvel, but there was an accumulation going on.
BBC News Brasil – And why was it possible to interrupt it?
Lessa – It's just that, since the election of Jair Bolsonaro [to the Presidency, in 2018], there has been a radical new thing in Brazil. It is not just the transfer of power from one political aspect to another, of a force capable of winning elections, but the rise of a movement to destroy the environment in which Brazilian politics had been conducted until then. It has such disruptive characteristics that, at that time, it didn't even have a name. There was a kind of analytical perplexity. We were seeing an unprecedented phenomenon, which presented itself with total brutality, without mediation. We need to draw on the repertoires we already have.
Several names were used to try to clarify what that was, but what really gained strength was "fascism". But it was strange, because the program of historical fascism, in the Italian context of the 1930s, actually aimed for rigorous social organization. The concept of "totalitarianism" fit very well to explain it: it was the attempt to place the entire society within the State, emptying any spontaneity, any associative particularity. That fascism wanted to normalize every inch of society.
Brazil in 2019 was precisely the opposite: the objective was to free society as much as possible, throw it into total freedom, deregulate laws until it was governed only by its own spontaneous dynamics, in which subjects are naturally unequal. It is up to a public right to minimize this inequality.
It is no surprise that the 1988 Constitution appeared as a victim [during Flávio's campaign]: it is a public right, one of those civilizing references — the result of a long process that Brazil was building during the 20th century. The utopian horizon of Bolsonarism is to completely destroy this. This is not just political. It also produces subjectivity, a subject. It's Homo Bolsonarus.
BBC News Brasil – What is this idea of freedom in opposition to?
Lessa – It’s an unrestricted, natural freedom, as if there were just us and nature. It is in contrast to regulated freedom, consolidated for a long time in the West, which is the idea that my right to freedom is absolutely identical to yours and that, if they collide, there is a legal framework to regulate this potential conflict. In this sense, we are facing the brutalization of politics.
BBC News Brasil – Did this guy only emerge on the Brazilian scene in recent years?
Lessa – This speech already had potential consumers before it was invented. He had great luck. It could have stayed where it always has: being shouted at by marginals with no political weight. But it is as if their receivers had already been installed and spread across the entire country, speaking a similar language: that of violent men. Everything was already there: torture, persecution, violence. What did not exist was a coagulation point at which these things could be synthesized and gain political consistency.
Bolsonarism is the extreme politicization of something that existed [before 2018] only in a non-politicized form. It was spread throughout society and, there, it became a political fact. From there he went into the electoral world, taking political parties, winning positions and, finally, reaching the Presidency.
BBC News Brasil – Is it dominant in the country’s daily life today?
Lessa – It’s not like that. Part of the electorate votes for this group because they think it is a better alternative. In fact, it is the leaders who fulfill the characteristics of homo Bolsonarus: the bellicose and accusatory language, the use of words not to communicate, but as a weapon of depreciation, the perception of the adversary as an enemy that must be slaughtered.
In the second round campaign, in 2018, Jair Bolsonaro gave a speech promising to send the left to the "end of the beach". He was referring to Ponta da Praia, in Restinga de Marambaia [in Rio de Janeiro], where the military threw the bodies of political prisoners during the dictatorship. In other words: if they could, they would kill. They are envelopes of extreme violence that is contained only because there are still institutional environments in which violence cannot reach its ultimate consequences.
BBC News Brasil – Would these environments be more managed by the Judiciary, for example?
Lessa – They believe that democracy is majority government. The tension with the Judiciary comes from the idea that everything that cannot be elected by vote is illegitimate. In this logic, the courts must submit to the power of the majority, and not be counter-majoritarian actors that can decide against this political majority, that is, operating within the country's legal framework.
BBC News Brasil – But they are questioning, precisely, the electoral result now.
Lessa – It's just that, when they lose the election, they question everything.
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BBC News Brasil – Isn’t this the result of a global phenomenon? Are there similarities with the case of Javier Milei, in Argentina, or with Donald Trump, in the United States, for example? In other words, is there a homo trump or a homo milei?
Lessa – Certainly. MAGA [Make America Great Again, revived by Trump in the 2015 campaign], in the United States, has its own behavior, a language, a standard. Milei too. These autocrats come to power only because they manage to create movements with adequate subjectivities. These are people who believe in these things and act accordingly. That's why we have to invent our subjectivities too. And they are out there: in Brazilian music, in youth, in quilombos, in university life, in politics itself, competing for space. We have enough mortar to form them.
BBC News Brasil – Homo Bolonarus is a consequence of the construction of Brazil, therefore.
Lessa – Of course. Each place has its own mortar. North American history coexists with the tradition of a very hard right, from the South, of white supremacism — a much more pronounced racism than that of Brazil. In France, this is expressed in nostalgia for the time of German occupation, the Vichy Republic, and, in Spain, with the memory of Francoism.
Each country has a historical fit with its possibilities of generating destructive prototypes to the civilizational accumulation that the West was creating throughout the 20th century. In fact, they are the destruction of the 20th century itself. They want to return to the pre-Enlightenment period, back in the 17th century.
BBC News Brasil – Homo Bolsonarus, in his analysis, is based on reinforcing the "natural inequality of subjects", without mediation. However, Lulism prevailed in Brazil for more than half of this century and now won the election again. Why was this possible? Is there an opposite desire there, that is, for "artificial equality"?
Lessa – Lulism and Bolsonarism are not comparable terms, because they do not belong to the same category. I prefer to talk about "Lula's presence in the contemporary Brazilian political framework", because he is a strategic character in the country's democratization process.
One of the first to notice this was Fernando Henrique Cardoso himself. Lula represents the inclusion of a perspective of more social equality in the field of democracy, in a period of transition that consolidated political, liberal, individual and social rights, that is, collective rights. It was this ballast that made him victorious in the 2002 and 2006 elections. That's what Lulism is.
Bolsonarism is a category of political pathology. He redesigned Brazilian society along individualistic lines, fitting, in a very adjusted way, with the narrative of entrepreneurship, which did not come from him. This is a mutation in the world of work, a fragmentation [of collective models] for individual careers.
But, in Bolsonarist Brazil, it was welcomed as a symptom of the desire for this natural freedom. People understand that they do not need to be protected by the State, that it is a tormentor that they need to get rid of in order to undertake.
BBC News Brasil – How did this guy form so quickly, that is, in a span of just over a decade, considering that, in your analysis, the effort for collective rights was part of the success of "Lula's presence"?
Lessa – These are not abrupt changes. People are still there. Homo Bolsonarus is not the entire Brazilian population, nor can the electoral successes of this group be explained by the simple fact that everyone is a bit Homo Bolsonarus. What is new is the prospect of destruction. Things had continuity.
Just look: the military dictatorship itself maintained labor legislation, unionization, electoral recruitment... It even organized elections — and it was, even so, a dictatorship: it tortured political prisoners, killed people, etc. It broke with the Republic created in 1946 while at the same time inheriting elements of it. The delicate point of this diagnosis is that, in Brazil in 2019, the outbreak of destruction found a terrain where this plant could spread.
BBC News Brasil – What terrain?
Lessa – The terrain of Brazilian brutality. The violence that has always existed among us. The habit of subjugating certain people — the poorest, black people, women, indigenous people, social types marked by vulnerability —, everything that constitutes the Brazilian state of nature: businessmen who do not pay taxes, employers who do not pay for the social rights of their domestic workers, employers who default on their Guarantee Fund. They range from small, everyday illegalities to major "Vorcarian" frauds.
There is diffuse violence in Brazilian society, a kind of social magma in which inequity, inequality, indifference and even cruelty are present. What we had been trying to do, since the Revolution of 1930, the Constitution of 1946 or the Constituent Assembly of 1988, was to try to create a universalizable rule that would transform this magma in some way.
Credit, Getty Images
BBC News Brasil – But one of the common arguments in Brazilian social historiography is that the country was built, precisely, on this violent magma. To what extent does your diagnosis merely perceive that the country is back to normal?
Lessa – Many things are in dispute in societies. There are disputes to see who governs and other, substantial ones, to know who we are, what type of country we want or what our normative horizon is. Since modernism, there has been an effort to recreate Brazil through art, literature, sensitivity, imagination and public law.
It was the Electoral Code of 1932, which gave political rights to women, for example. Labor law with the idea that employers have certain obligations and workers have rights, etc. This attempt to achieve natural freedom, now, is as if we wanted to go back to before 1922, before modernism. But society reacted. Young people are out there on the street. Homo Bolsonarus exists, but so does 'homo democraticus'.
BBC News Brasil – The next question was: which guy won at the polls? Homo democraticus?
Lessa – Yes, because it was an explosion of popular participation. The street made a difference, in the same way it had done in the Diretas Já movement, in 1985, or in the amnesty campaign [in 1979]. If, in 2013, people took to the streets in a way that we still don't fully understand, it has now returned with strength, but with focus, and without the command of a political party. But this guy who broke out is not yet fully formed. We have to see the developments from now on.
The question is also about how to prevent Homo Bolsonarus from being the prototype of Brazilian behavior, because he is like a character that people are adopting. They are simply not like that [bolsonaristas]. In fact, they fit into this prototype due to affection, ideological identity. It has attractive power. In this sense, Homo Bolonarus is an artificial creature. The other half of Brazilians, who did not vote for this candidate, who is not reducible to homo Bolsonarus, just needed to meet to talk and produce another artificial figure.
BBC News Brasil – Can Bolsonarism, in this sense, end?
Lessa – No. Homo Bolonarus is widespread. Just see the bosses firing employees who voted for Lula, people being killed out there. He is not defeated.
BBC News Brasil – To what extent is the idea of homo Bolsonarus not just the continuity of a structural characteristic of Brazil?
Lessa – I wouldn’t put it in those terms. Things are concomitant. Brazilian democracy, for example, had a trajectory. It had been in a sequence since Fernando Henrique Cardoso until it was broken by the impeachment [of President Dilma Rousseff, in 2016] — which only existed because she did not have a majority in Congress. Everyone lost there: the actors who accelerated the process — the PMDB and PSDB disappeared —, the right, the center-right, the left. Only the far right benefited. She saw an opening to become a majority electoral force in the 2018 elections. There are things that happen because there is long-term preparation, and there are others that happen due to the current situation.
Lula's victory, in 2022, was an attempt to restore the PT to a new sequence. The party returned to power believing that it could resume history after interrupting the trajectory of democracy through Dilma's impeachment. The problem is that this line of continuity had already been broken. There was another trajectory with new political subjects, with the very strong evangelical politicization, with the use of social media, with new ways of carrying out political struggle — through the press, through meetings, through life in parliament. The capture of minds is uncontrollable.
BBC News Brasil – PT won the election again. Where does he start from now?
Lessa – He has to create a new trajectory. But this election was different, because, in 2022, there was no common perception that the main enemy is Bolsonarism.
BBC News Brasil – One of the classic interpretations of Brazilian society also came to a 'type' of man: the 'cordial', described by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda in Raízes do Brasil, from 1936. Is there any relationship between these two subjects?
Lessa – None. Sérgio drew attention to how essential the affective dimension is in interactions in contexts that require impersonal regulation. It had more to do with calling a politician "my friend" [to get benefits]. The dimension of affectivity is linked to the private world, of affections, while the dimension of politics has to do with procedures of a universal nature. This guy brings feelings from the emotional world to solve problems in the public world. A cordial man is not violent. In fact, he can be violent, but for other reasons, other circuits. Homo Bolsonarus demands a violent subject. He is convinced that the adversary is an enemy that needs to be slaughtered.
BBC News Brasil – You also write that Bolsonarism aims to "end the statehood" of society. But why does he compete for control of the State?
Lessa – Because it’s the only way to get power. Until the 1970s, the enemies of democracy had a coup d'état as their favorite mechanism for taking power. It was tanks in the street, military dictatorship, etc. Today, elections are seen as an opportunity. Isn't this what the literature calls populism? That which gains power via "democratic" elections, because everyone voted, etc., but whose result is the disfigurement of the framework that allowed the election itself.
BBC News Brasil – In 2020, you said that Bolsonarism was an "artificial animal in the making", and projected its defeat. Now, with Lula's turnaround, what will survive of him?
Lessa – We can't know, but now we know that there is resistance. It wasn't just an electoral victory: it was a symptom of this resistance. It was the dispersion of Homo Bolsonarus.
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