Bolsanaro's Approach To "Governing" - Conspiracy Theories & Bible-Thumping - Collapses Under COVID
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As the novel coronavirus continues to spread, the president of Brazil—Latin America’s largest country—is now the most prominent world leader still questioning isolation measures. Almost 500 people have died from Covid-19 complications in Brazil so far, with more than 7,000 people diagnosed. Those with precarious living arrangements, subject to unreliable infrastructure and the vicissitudes of the informal job market, will be hit hardest both by the disease and the measures designed to curb its advance. As one resident of Brazil’s largest favela, or slum, put it: “If everything stops, it will end people’s lives! There will be nothing people can do to survive!” But while it is sadly predictable that the poorest should bear the brunt of a public health emergency, Covid-19 is also having a surprising impact on Brazilian politics. Quite simply, it has upended them, enabling large-scale public defiance of Brazil’s far-right president from both ordinary people and elected officials in ways that would have been unthinkable mere weeks ago.
Erstwhile political allies are now locked in bitter public squabbles. Ambitious politicians with no clear path up the political ranks have found fresh vulnerabilities to exploit and challenges to meet. Millions of people around the country are banging pots and pans out their window on a nightly basis in a distinctively Latin American vote of no confidence in their president. If the election of radical right-wing retired army captain Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency represented “the ultimate validation of a right-wing resurgence that started gathering strength in 2013 when massive demonstrations of general dissatisfaction clogged the arteries of the country’s major cities,” as I argued upon his inauguration, the current moment has exposed him as woefully out of his depth. With terrible force, the novel coronavirus has forced a sudden change of perspective about what matters in a leader.
In late 2018, Bolsonaro rose from the wreckage of the country’s economic and political crises to the height of elected office. As a dogged defender of the country’s 1964–1985 military dictatorship and a staunch social conservative, Bolsonaro had unmatched credibility in harnessing the reactionary fervor that gripped Brazil after more than a decade of center-left Workers’ Party, or PT, governance. In his broad rollback of that leftist legacy, Bolsonaro has championed social service cuts, privatizations, rescinded labor rights, and reduced protections for indigenous peoples and other minorities. Now, from his isolated perch, the president drags his feet, resists containment measures, and dismisses the coronavirus as “just a little flu,” while the governors of states large and small ignore his mixed messaging and urge citizens to adhere to the stark guidelines set forth by the World Health Organization.
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In addressing the pandemic, Bolsonaro’s government has drawn from the repertoire of dissimulation it has resorted to when facing prior public relations crises, whether over allegations of corruption or its apparent countenance of deforestation in the Amazon. To parry criticism from abroad, the administration calls it an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of a duly elected president. Domestically, he casts any attack as a boon to an opposition that, in reality, remains fragmented and unpopular. More than anything, Bolsonaro’s political fortunes have thrived on a diet of conspiracy theories and siege mentality. First, his party insisted that the moderate leftism of the PT, a party whose luminaries have been applauded by the likes of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, would inevitably and intentionally turn Latin America’s largest country into Maduro’s Venezuela. On this point, Bolsonaro was supported by voters and voices from the center to the far right of the political spectrum. Then came the idea that foreign leaders and international organizations were playing up the damage caused by fires in the Amazon as a way of ultimately wresting the rain forest out of Brazilian hands. On this point, Bolsonaro also drew considerable if decidedly less support. Now, casting doubt on the propriety of WHO prescriptions, the government has found itself appealing solely to its most fervent base—Pentecostal pastors with megachurches in particular. The problem for Bolsonaro is clear: Covid-19 is not an abstract threat that can be invoked with little consequence and manipulated to fit immediate political needs. It is real, it is here, and it is killing people. His political strategy of diminishing returns, confronted with reality, appears on its last legs.
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https://newrepublic.com/article/157185/coronavirus-end-jair-bolsonaros-presidency
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They are done after this. It's time to get real leaders back in charge. 
