The Populist Radical Right in Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro

The presidential candidacy of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018 was the Populist Radical Right's (PRR) first one to be electorally successful in Latin America. His election disrupted the prevailing pattern of political and electoral competition and was responsible for: i) breaking with the foundations of the party system that had been in operation for more than two decades in the country; ii) the "change of the guard" on the political right, where the "conventional right" was replaced by the "far-right", particularly the PRR. The rise of this new political right in Brazil is complex and multifaceted. Although it is possible to assert that Bolsonaro belongs to the PRR, there are still few studies that analyze how Bolsonaro articulates the three defining attributes of the PRR: nativism, populism, and authoritarianism, as well as their interaction in the Brazilian context. This paper aims to analyze how those attributes compose Jair Bolsonaro's discourse both in the 2018 elections and throughout his presidential term, which ends in 2022. Therefore, and according to the research questions proposed by the panel, three topics will be addressed: a) how Bolsonaro articulated authoritarianism and nativism with populism, as recent studies show that populist attitudes played a reduced role in the 2018 presidential elections (Castanho Silva, Fuks and Tamaki 2022); b) how populism and the definition of members of "the pure people" and "the corrupt elite" can be associated with the mobilization of negative political identities, particularly anti-establishment and antipetismo ones (Fuks 2021); c) what is the role that new political positions play in PRR, particularly moral conservatism and law and public order and whether these would be inserted within defining attributes or would actually be new attributes to be added to the Brazilian context and amplified in Latin America. Finally, the articulation between authoritarianism and nativism in Brazil will be analyzed by associating nativism with ethnic-racial groups and authoritarianism with the past of the military dictatorship.