Brazilliant! As widely expected, the hard-right, populist candidate Jair Bolsonaro has won the 2nd and final round of the Brazilian Presidential Election, taking 55% of the vote against the 45% for Fernando Haddad from the left-wing Workers Party. Notice the conspicuous lack of centrist candidates in the final round? This was a hard-right guy against a hard-left guy and luckily the right guy won.
Although Brazil is not Europe nor America, it is loosely part of the West, and this result is yet one more piece of evidence that the centre of politics is being hollowed out, while the extremes become stronger. As W.B. Yeats prophetically put it in his poem "The Second Coming":
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"
So, what can we expect from "Brazil's Trump" as the media have dubbed him? Actually a better comparison would be President Duterte of the Philippines, because, compared to these two guys, Trump is a big softy who just wants to be loved by the Blacks and the Good Mexicans.
With Bolsonaro in power, we will see a "gloves off" approach to Brazil's crime wave, which is the legacy of Left-wing leniency and incompetence. Bolsonaro's flagship manifesto promise was to relax the country's gun laws, to allow ordinary Brazilians to own guns. In a recent TV interview he said:
"Every honest citizen, man or woman, if they want to have a weapon in their homes - depending on certain criteria - should be able to have one."
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| The Left's old trick of comparing opponents to Hitler failed to work again. Maybe they will stop using it now. Nah, they are too moronic for that and will keep "normalising" Hitler in this way. |
Bolsonaro will also be something of an economic nationalist, deciding his policies according to the national interest.
One of the planks he ran on was privatising certain state-owned industries, such the oil company Petrobras and the electric utility company Eletrobras. But he later reversed his stance on selling off Eletrobras because he said it could lead to it being bought by Chinese investors. He is still in favour of selling off part of Petrobras.
In short, he will privatise where it cuts waste, increases efficiency, and provides competition to help the consumer, but will maintain state control of industries that are of strategic importance to the country.
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| The Left also tried to sway the election by mobilising old boomer pop stars, like Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, to tell people how to vote. This also didn't work. |
But the most significant point about Bolsonaro's victory is that it takes power out of the hands of the underclass and restores it to the largely White middle and upper classes. The previously dominant Workers' Party was essentially the representative of Brazil's poorer classes and races, and, as a result, was heavily addicted to "gibs" and corruption, which was bad for the economy.
With the victory of the trash-talking Bolsonaro, the traditional social order and economic vitality of Brazil has been restored -- and political correctness just died.
