“Everyone wants to win the argument. But what we need is to win the election. I would like to count on everyone, everyone, death, those e todXs”, wrote a pre-candidate for the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil in 2026.
Which? The leftist Lula da Silva? No. Someone from PSOL, a party equivalent to the Portuguese Left Bloc? No. The author of that publication on social media was Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the right-wing radical Jair Bolsonaro, brother of the right-wing radicals Eduardo, Carlos and Renan Bolsonaro and stepson of the right-wing radical Michelle Bolsonaro.
The use of neutral language, which irritates everyone – and not death – the Bolsonarists, is the senator’s most recent attempt to move closer to the center, an essential condition for winning a vote, in which around a third of the electorate swings between Lula’s center-left and Bolsonaro’s extreme right.
Before Flávio, the natural candidate for Bolsonarism was Tarcísio de Freitas, the governor of São Paulo who, on Mondays, said he was willing to work with the leader of the federal government Lula and, on Wednesdays, quoted Martin Luther King, but on Tuesdays he ordered anyone complaining about the 57 deaths of innocent people in two months of police operations in São Paulo to “complain to the UN or wherever they go” and, on Thursdays, he wrote “Make America Great Once Again” on Donald Trump’s social network.
“I am a different Bolsonaro”, repeats, however, candidate Flávio, “more centered, more knowledgeable about politics, who wants to pacify the country”, he guarantees.
But he himself, before being invested by his father as a candidate and dressed as a moderate, said that the next president should “use force” if the Supreme Court denies a presidential pardon to get Bolsonaro out of jail and suggested that Trump would drop atomic bombs on Brazil if an amnesty was not approved.
Asked, already as a pre-candidate, if he had names for a possible government, he suggested his brother, Eduardo, Steve Bannon’s friend, fan of the AI-5the decree of the military dictatorship that introduced censorship and torture, that equated left-wing teachers with drug traffickers, that spread false news about vaccination, that was, according to allegations, one of the main instigators of the coup d’état perpetrated by his father.
“It’s easier to find Boitatá [serpente de fogo que protege as florestas no folclore indígena] than a moderate Bolsonarista”, compared political analyst Thomas Traumann on GloboNews. “This kind of muzzled Bolsonarista is a logical impossibility: it does not exist, just as there is no Nazism light or a moderate wing of the Ku Klux Klan”, opined political scientist João Filho in site The Intercept.
As Abraham Lincoln said in the famous phrase uttered long before Flávio was born: “You can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool all the people all the time, but you can’t fool everyone all the time” – or, in this case, “death”.
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