Becoming sovereign: Brazil’s far-right election win

A sweeping victory

The far right scored a sweeping victory in Brazil’s elections on 4 October. The presidency will be decided in a run-off on 25 October, but even if Flávio Bolsonaro loses the elections are an unprecedented success for Brazil’s far right. Bolsonaro’s PL won 121 Chamber seats, making it the biggest party in the Lower House. Only in the Northeast of Brazil, the poorest and racially most diverse part of the country, did the Workers’ Party (PT – Lula’s party) win.

Why? It baffles me that many seem to vote against their personal economic interests, against their concerns for safety and security, and for someone who de facto goes against their cherished Christian agenda of family and church. What do ‘Bolsonaristas’, whose leader is serving a 27-year prison sentence for attempting a coup d’état and for plotting to murder his political opponents, then care about when they go to the polls?

Family values, sex parties and billions of Euro’s

The hypocrisy of the far right is not a weakness: it is part of its appeal. Take Flávio Bolsonaro. He says he wants a country that is guided by Christian family values and opposes abortion rights, queer rights and sex before marriage. He likens his campaign to a religious war against the evil left, as if he were a crusader. But what does Flávio himself do? His former business partner has accused him of taking part in parties with sex workers, organised for him and his friends. He is under investigation by the Supreme Court for corruption and money laundering in connection with Banco Master, a bank whose fraudulent collapse left an 8 billion euro hole in Brazil’s deposit guarantee fund and cost pension funds an estimated 2 billion euro. Do people really imagine that their finances and Christian morality are in good hands with this man? I believe most people who vote for him know better. They see the hypocrisy – and my point is that this is precisely why they vote for him.

Rights to the city

I regularly spend time in São Paulo, where one of the main concerns of the Paulistanos is safety. The far right promises to ‘clean up’ the city and to remove the criminals, the homeless, the drug addicts and other so-called ‘vagabundos’. Both São Paulo’s mayor and the state governor support Bolsonaro and have had years to deliver. Yet the homeless and drug addicts are still there. They used to get together in an area called ‘Cracolandia’ until brutal police operations drove them out. 

Now they sleep, beg, and use drugs all over the city. When I walk through the city centre, I constantly have to watch my step to avoid human faeces. If anything, the city feels less safe in recent years, especially for women and at night. Paulistanos see this every day, and they complain about it – yet they vote for the far right again.

A third example, again from São Paulo. The city’s street carnival is organised by so-called ‘blocos de carnaval’, neighbourhood organisations that parade through the streets with music and dance. ‘Acadêmicos do Baixo Augusta’ is São Paulo’s largest mega bloco, drawing crowds of over a million people. Its parade festively shows that everyone has the right to the city: queer, black, women, men – all celebrate together. The far right objects to racial inclusion and what it calls ‘gender ideology’. Instead of supporting the blocos, the city gave the stage to Scottish DJ Calvin Harris, whose electronic dance music has no Brazilian roots but appeals to a young, white, ‘middle-class’ audience. And where did the municipality schedule it? Exactly: on the same street and on the same day as Baixo Augusta’s parade. The city was warned time and again that this was going to be dangerous. What made it worse was that the police had closed off Praça Roosevelt, a nearby square, with three-meter-high metal panels. The mayor did not listen, and Calvin Harris drew an estimated million plus young people. It was chaos. On social media people could see youngsters being crushed by the crowd, with nowhere to go. When pushing them back did not work, the police started beating them with their batons. The mayor marginalised Baixo Augusta and the inclusivity it stands for, and everybody could see the incompetence. And what do people do after having witnessed the violence inflicted on their kids? They vote for the far right, again.

Hypocrisy as sovereignty

These three vignettes stand for major themes of the elections. The promise that your finances and Christian morality are in good hands: failed. The promise to be tough on crime: failed. The promise to roll back ‘gender ideology’ and racial inclusivity: white ‘middle class’ kids get beaten up by the police. To be clear, this is of course not my agenda; I am looking at it from the perspective of far-right voters. Why vote for these Bolsonaristas when they so clearly failed to deliver what you care about, even in a city so firmly in far-right hands? I suggest that we need to read the hypocrisy through Giorgio Agamben’s figures of the sovereign and the homo sacer. The sovereign, Agamben argues following Carl Schmitt, is the one who decides on the state of exception: when the laws and rules that govern society can be suspended. The homo sacer, in Roman law, was a person who could be killed with impunity. It is a life without legal or political protection. The hypocrisy is, in fact, an act of sovereignty. 

The rule of law does not matter when Flávio Bolsonaro says he is fighting a spiritual war for the family while allegedly having parties with sex workers – people that his own rhetoric barely recognises as human beings. Far right politicians can say they are tough on crime but make the city even less safe. This hypocrisy does not undermine the far right; the far right thrives on it. It symbolises the sovereign status that Bolsonaristas aspire to. They are the ones who decide when the rule of law can be suspended and which lives count. Sometimes this is quite literally so. Someone told me about a dinner party he had attended. Over a glass of beer, one of the guests – who, as usual, was carrying his gun – casually said something like: ‘You know what I would like to do tonight? Go out on the street and just kill someone, just someone, for fun!’ The sovereign needs the homo sacer, those who can be killed without it counting as murder.

Silenced and amplified voices

This misogynist, racist, queerphobic and classist discourse spreads via social media, which amplifies the division between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Even those working at the margins of the economy, who like to see themselves as entrepreneurs (think of Uber drivers) are drawn to it. But not all voices circulate equally. Chavoso da USP, the pseudonym of Thiago Torres Moura Santos, is a sociologist and left-wing influencer who fiercely and eloquently speaks out against politicians who criminalise the poor. With his oversized sportswear, Oakley sunglasses and tattoos on his neck and face, he stays true to the funk culture of the urban periphery. He had more than a million followers on Instagram until November last year, when Meta blocked his account without explanation and has also blocked other left-wing influencers.

Let me contrast this with Júlia Zanatta’s social media exposure. She has been re-elected to the Chamber of Deputies for Santa Catarina with a record 560,000 votes. She is vehemently against abortion, supports the Bolsonaristas who were staging a coup d’étatin January 2023, and strongly opposes so-called ‘identity politics’, except her own. She wears her hair in braids wrapped around the crown of her head, often decorated with flowers – a style that evokes the Bund Deutscher Mädel of the Nazi era. On TikTok we can see how she took to the streets to celebrate her victory. Surrounded by enthusiastic supporters and expensive cars she walks the streets with a whip in her hand, beating the road in front of her. She screams: ‘This is historic, this is a lot of votes! I want more votes! It went with the whip!’ To give these words more force she cracks her whip again. Is ‘this went with the whip’ only an innocent way to claim a massive victory? Or is it less innocent in a land that was the last to abolish slavery in the Americas? The imagery of the plantation overseer (feitor) – who whips whoever stands in his way and decides over other people’s lives – is palpable. Slavery is not a relic here but continues to resonate in fantasies about social and moral order. These images circulate freely on social media.

Dignity on credit

Why does this appeal not only to wealthy Brazilians, but also to the middle-class? The dignity of the ‘middle-class’ hinges upon unsustainable consumption patterns that make the distinction between us and them fragile. The newest iPhone must be bought with credit cards that charge more than 400% per year. Their lifestyle is possible because of cheap labour: cooks, waiters, nannies and domestic workers. They are also needed as ‘the other’ against whom one can feel superior. I have often heard people refer to ‘their’ worker as a useless pawn (peão). As if life were a game of chess in which pawns are easily sacrificed for the king.

Lula and the PT campaigned to shorten the working week from six to five days. The middle class perceives this as a threat – not only because it raises labour costs, but even more so because it undermines the sovereign’s freedom to decide over the lives of others. At the same time, Lula is humiliated for being a Northeasterner who came to São Paulo to shine shoes and work in the factory. His poverty-alleviation programs and the partly successful emancipation of women, Brazilians of color and queer people threaten these distinctions. The elections have to reinstate the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Others, disillusioned, simply stop voting: while voting is compulsory in Brazil, more than 33 million people – 21 per cent of the electorate – did not vote, a record number.

A sovereign needs a homo sacer

A sovereign is nothing without a homo sacer. Voting for the Bolsonaristas shows that you are, or at least aspire to be, someone who decides when and where the law can be suspended; someone who rules, or aspires to rule, over the dignity and the lives of others. Someone who handles the whip. Ironically, the far right’s failure to deliver is precisely what fuels its success. Hypocrisy performs sovereignty.

 

An earlier and extensive version can be found on FocaalBlog.