The 2022 Brazilian elections were nerve-wracking. On one side, the left-wing icon and two-term former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva whose regime helped to alleviate hunger and poverty for millions of Brazilians. On the other, Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right religious nationalist whose current fascist regime has sheltered Brazil from the world. Although Lula amassed 50.9% of the votes, it was only short of approximately two million votes that Bolsonaro did not win.
Since the beginning of Bolsonaro’s presidency, he did not shy away from showing support for Israel’s political far-right. On Dec. 2019, Bolsonaro broke the country’s long-standing moderate stance on Palestine, opening a trade office in Jerusalem and announcing that Brazil would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to the contested city—a direct attack against Palestinians.
Backed by millions of evangelicals, Bolsonaro’s policies mostly resonate with white, rich, Christian men. Bolsonaro’s support for settler colonialism and the Israeli occupation of Palestine is a part of a larger worldwide trend in which fundamentalist, far-right and right-wing organizations see Zionism as a successful example of the continuation of racist practices and European control over the native peoples of emerging nations.
It should be no surprise that this approach resonates with Bolsonaro’s voters, whose ideologically conservative and militarist agenda defends the Brazilian military dictatorship—from 1964 to 1985—in which the military attempted to hasten the growth of capitalism and foster a Brazilian “national integration” while enacting arbitrary laws and harshly suppressing left-wing political organizations and social movements.
In 2019, Bolsonaro stated that Nazism was a leftist and socialist movement after visiting the Holocaust memorial, indulging in Holocaust revisionism. This practice, however, resonates with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s previous speeches. In an earlier statement, the Prime Minister inaccurately spread the idea that Palestinians were complicit in the Holocaust by asserting that “Hitler did not want to exterminate the Jews.”
Although Bolsonaro has not been re-elected and, thus far, has shown signals that he will transfer power to the elected president, his racist, extremist and overly conservative values still echo among his supporters. There is a chance that Bolsonaro does not make a political comeback, but as the world shifts into a political far-right trend, whoever comes after him might be worse.
