On Thursday night, Brazil — and the entire world — were gripped by television news clips showing Brazilian presidential hopeful Jair Bolsonaro hoisted on the arms of his supporters and suddenly stabbed by an assailant.
The near-assassination comes as polls almost universally show Bolsonaro — congressman and retired Army captain, whose viper-tongued comments have led to him being nicknamed “the Tropical Trump”— the front-runner in presidential elections October 7.
There has been widespread attention in official Washington on the elections, given that Brazil has the largest economy in Latin America.
On Friday, reports from doctors revealed that Bolsonaro, 63, had lost 40 percent of his blood from the stabbing but was making a recovery. TV clips on Friday showed the wounded candidate in a hospital bed, talking and grinning,
According to the last Ibope poll completed on September 3, Bolsonaro tops the crowded race with 22 percent of the vote, followed by Foreign Minister Marina Silva at 13 percent, and former São Paulo Gov. Geraldo Alckmin 9 percent. An unusually high 30 percent of the electorate is undecided less than a month before the balloting.
But that’s not all: despite the contempt in which politicians are increasingly held by voters, despite the fact that Silva and Alckmin are traditional politicians who head the two major political parties, virtually every poll shows either of them defeating Bolsonaro in the runoff October 28 (if no one in the nine-candidate field gets a majority in the first round).
“This election has been more emotional than rational,” said Thiago de Aragão, partner in the Brazilian political analysis firm Arko Advice. “There is anger and a feeling everything is wrong in Brazil. Bolsonaro embodies this type of narrative that everything is wrong, and someone different is needed to straighten things out.”
With crime and terrorism on the rise (60,000 Brazilians were murdered last year), “law and order” candidate Bolsonaro calls for changing laws to make it easier to citizens to own guns. Moreover, he supports the death penalty and has praised Brazil’s military dictatorships from 1964-85 for their handling of violent uprisings.
The retired military man also has a major following among evangelical Christians for his strong anti-abortion stance.
Disgust for traditional politicians has been underscored, de Aragão explained, by a vast investigation of corruption known as Lava Jato (Car Wash). The sensational probe brought down scores of elected officials and political power brokers, including former President Lula da Silva.
Likening it to Italy’s “Operation Clean Hands” investigation in the early 1990’s, de Aragão noted that its result was to destroy the major political parties in Italy.
“And that paved the way for an unconventional populist — Silvio Berlusconi — in 1994,” he said, “So you see the parallel here.”
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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