Nationalism,Economic Liberalism,and Populism in the Bolsonaro Government

Nationalism, Neoliberalism, and Populism

The argument of this article is developed first by situating economic nationalism as just one dimension of nationalism, which can be understood more broadly. For that purpose, Vincent (2002; 2013) defines nationalism in terms of (1) people’s understanding deriving from their belonging to groups, which have their own history and tradition and/or culture expressed through the nation; (2) national identity as the cement that gives individuals existential meaning; and (3) a frame for values and concepts such as freedom, equality, rights, and autonomy, which can only be understood or operationalized when placed in a national context. He also argues that twentieth-century nationalism is different from what characterized the formation of the nineteenth-century European nation-states. While formerly it had a certain unity of content because it served as the ideological discourse that gave meaning to those nation-states (Anderson, 2008), once these were established the ideology took on a diversity of types that had not existed previously.

Because the ideology involved is broad in content, nationalism is considered to depend on other ideologies in order to offer political solutions in different contexts (Vincent, 2013: 551). Accordingly, nationalism can be present both in left-wing, postcolonial movements and on the right of the political spectrum. When anchored in conservatism, it tends to assume that the formation of hierarchies and elites is natural. Since it is proper for conservatism to value order and authority (Freeden, 2006), this strand of nationalism tends to discredit individuals’ capacity for self-government, which in turn tends to produce mistrust of the democratic model itself. In this modality, the nation is identified with an idealized past that must be preserved.

Beyond being a political ideology, nationalism can also refer to a certain position on the functioning of the economy. Helleiner (2002) coined one quite widely accepted definition of economic nationalism in terms of the imperative of serving national interests and protecting national identity; it works to promote national unity, identity, and autonomy, which are to be achieved through a variety of economically nationalist policies (see also Bluhm and Varga, 2019). There are, however, variations in economic nationalism depending on countries’ socioeconomic situations, institutions, and political systems and their international positions.

In economics, nationalism has its roots in the work of Alexander Hamilton (1966 [1791]) and the German economist Friedrich List (1904 [1846]), who advocated protectionism in certain circumstances as an instrument for fostering industrialization in less-developed countries in what became known as the “infant-industry argument.” In that respect, nationalism is regarded as opposed to economic liberalism.

Bresser-Pereira (2019b: 853) defines economic nationalism as “an ideology that emerged with the formation of nation-states and only gained substance in the nineteenth century” and that presupposes “the existence of a nation able to form a coalition of nationalist and developmentalist classes and specify a national development project” (856). Nationalism assumes a society in which citizens share the conviction that the state and government should further the interests of national labor and capital—in other words, foster the nation’s economic development by its own means. Since the nation is the chief agent of economic development and nationalism is the ideology of the nation-state, developmentalism and nationalism are regarded as nearly synonymous, the former definable as an “ideology of development directed to industrialization and resting on moderate state intervention in the economy and on furthering national interests in a world in which competition among nations is stronger than cooperation.”

Another concept relevant to our argument is neoliberalism. Depending on the theoretical approach, it can be an ideology (Freeden, 2006), a rationality (Dardot and Laval, 2017), a political and economic philosophy (Palley, 2018), or a mode of socioeconomic organization (Duménil and Lévy, 2005). Palley (2018), for instance, understands neoliberalism as a liberal political and ideological project one of whose main vectors is the dismantling of the welfare state and one that reflects the neoclassical economic ideas propagated mainly by the Chicago School. In this respect, it is regarded as providing an intellectual rationale for the deregulated market as the main mechanism of economic coordination.

One comprehensive way of understanding neoliberalism's effects is to see it as a mode of social organization aimed at ensuring that the interests of high-income social segments prevail, especially as promoted via financial channels and institutions. This is underpinned by an ideology that extols the virtues (and results) of market self-regulation and proposes the commodification of areas not yet fully subject to market rules as a means of optimizing the allocation and use of existing resources. The main neoliberal propositions thus include minimizing state intervention in social welfare provision and in the promotion of economic development; guaranteeing a regulatory framework to enforce market laws and private property rights, including an apparatus favorable to market deregulation; privatizing state-owned enterprises to increase economic efficiency; increasing the influence of financial institutions over nonfinancial institutions; and prioritizing monetary stability by central banks (see Duménil and Lévy, 2005). Another basic concern is instrumentalizing the state in imposing market imperatives in a process that tends to replicate itself internationally (Saad Filho and Johnston, 2005: 3).

According to Dardot and Laval (2017), to achieve these goals neoliberalism takes the form of a rationality based on the competitive logic of the market that ends up penetrating all dimensions of social life. Thus individuals, society, and the state begin to behave along neoliberal lines, and the state’s actions are reoriented to protect this state of affairs. In the process, state action turns authoritarian in fending off all challenges to the trend. Brown (2019) agrees with this analysis, adding that the set of neoliberal ideas and practices translates into an assault on social democracy and Keynesian economic policies. To achieve this aim, neoliberalism often works in favor of submitting national sovereignty to international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. However, neoliberalism’s victory over social democracy is seen to have generated an effect unexpected by its theorists, such as Hayek, Friedman, and the “ordoliberals.” In their original formulation, they advocated emptying democracy of its substantive content and replacing it with an authoritarian technocratic order. After four decades, however, the practical result of these ideas was an undemocratic political culture that produced right-wing populist models supported by demagogues.

Laclau (2005) came to similar conclusions, highlighting the affinities between populism, neoliberalism, and conservatism. When the three elements are combined in the same government, an authoritarian shift becomes a clear threat. This is what Brazil's experience under the Bolsonaro government is showing.

Although it is bound up with experiences that date from the nineteenth century, there is no consensus in the social sciences on the concept of populism. In the course of the twentieth century, this categorization contemplated regimes of differing ideological shades and situations, and this has contributed to disagreement over its definition. However, academic debate on the subject has gained new impetus with the recent rise of governments and movements labeled as “populist.” In the midst of this scenario, this maturing concept has made it possible to understand political, social, and economic events relating to it.

Laclau (2005) argues that populism can be understood as a mode of grassroots organization resulting from the juxtaposition of a series of social demands not met by institutional channels of democratic representation. He sees these dissatisfactions—although heterogeneous in origin—as rooted in a widely shared hostility toward the establishment. Given the scenario of economic stagnation, labor precarization, and a shrinking middle class that has descended on Western economies since the final decades of the twentieth century, populism has been associated in the literature with developments from globalization (Milanovic, 2016; Rodrik, 2018). In that context, populist political movements have instrumentalized grassroots disillusionment with politics to their electoral benefit.

It is against this backdrop that the literature has discussed the populist modus operandi for attaining power through institutional channels. Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017) propose to explain this in terms of an ideology mobilized for electoral gains. To that end, they argue, its core comprises three basic concepts: a “people,” deliberately treated as homogeneous, which is portrayed as having a “general will” thwarted by the action of a “corrupt elite,” which acts only in its own interest. This alienation of the establishment from the rest of the people allows institutional channels of democratic representation to be discredited, warranting direct channels of communication between populist leaders and their constituencies. In addition, in view of the thin core of populist ideology, it is not only possible but inevitable that it will be combined with other ideologies. It can thus be understood why the “populist” label has come to be applied to historical experiences ranging from neoliberal to developmentalist governments. In this light it can be understood that the Bolsonaro government is a populist venture mobilized by way of a conservative nationalist discourse.

Urbinati (2019), meanwhile, has sought to develop a political theory of populism for understanding the modus operandi of populist leaders now in power. As is also suggested by Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017), she points out that the exclusion of the political establishment from “the people” comes to mean that all those who do not form part of the populist electoral constituency are excluded from the populist notion of “the people.” One extreme consequence of this is that, in populist rhetoric, “the people” can come to constitute a minority of the country’s population. This is done by establishing a constant election campaign climate designed to mobilize the support base and, in parallel, undermine the traditional institutions of democratic representation (for instance, political parties, the media, and Congress). Thence the recurrent efforts by populist leaders to communicate directly with their bases are facilitated today by the use of social media but were historically accomplished by institutional mechanisms such as referenda and plebiscites. These channels for communicating with voters allow populists to blame the establishment for any lack of concrete policy outcomes benefiting the population. In fact, the populists’ relation with their electoral constituencies is guided by faith in the leaders and not by the results delivered by their governments. Ultimately, this can lead to a resignification of democracy itself, where only the populist electoral base enjoys legitimacy as “the people,” while all others are seen, on the contrary, as hindrances to fulfilling the will of “the people.” The swings toward authoritarianism resulting from this behavior, which use institutional channels to destroy the pillars of liberal democracy, are being widely discussed (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018).

The Bolsonaro Government’s Economic Policy

The Bolsonaro government’s neoliberal measures and its foreign policy of alignment with the United States of Donald Trump constitute a position that finds no parallel in far-right governments anywhere else in the world. There is continuity between the Temer (2016–2018) and Bolsonaro (2019–2022) governments in their implementation of a neoliberal agenda of orthodox macroeconomic policies, as was recognized by Temer himself (BBC, 2020). Boito Jr. (2020) considers the Temer government different from Bolsonaro’s one in that, although submissive, it was discreet about this where the Bolsonaro government was ostentatiously nationalist. This stems from the conservative nationalism guiding the Bolsonaro government and from its populist behavior, neither of which was seen under the Temer government. Boito Jr. argues that Bolsonaro’s nationalism is conservative and fascist, with a “pro-capitalist, racist, patriarchal ideology, which to Bolsonarists are attributes of Brazilian nationality”—a nationalism also expressed in discourse opposing globalism and the multilateral institutions and in its fetishization of national symbols.

However, while there seems to be no doubt of Bolsonaro’s conservative nationalism, the same is not true of his economic nationalism. In this regard, the evidence points to a deep-rooted antinationalism that extends to foreign policy, given the government’s slavish alignment with U.S. interests (at least during the Trump administration) and its adoption of neoliberal economic policies leaning strongly toward denationalization. Paradigmatic examples in this regard include the change in the oil exploration regime applied to Brazil’s Pre-Salt deposits at the request of foreign oil corporations and Bolsonaro’s decision, right at the start of his government, not to exercise his veto power (the golden-share clause) over Embraer’s incorporation by Boeing. It cannot be stressed enough that Embraer was one of the few Brazilian firms that were competitive in the sophisticated technology sectors.

In fact, historically, Brazilian conservative nationalism has not displayed a pattern of economic and political autonomy from the United States. One of the ideologues of the military dictatorship, ² Golbery Couto e Silva (1981 [1967]), argued in a Cold War context that Brazil should align itself with the United States’ interests. The supposed rationale was that there was a powerful external enemy represented by communism that threatened the Western Christian tradition of which Brazil was part. In that conjuncture, alignment with U.S. power was crucial in that it guaranteed a powerful ally and, at the same time, kept Brazil within the sphere of influence of a Western Christian country. In other words, it can be assumed from this experience that, for Brazilian conservative nationalists, an economic policy subservient to American interests may be a sign of nationalism—although in a very different sense from the economic nationalism defined above.

A similar interpretation can be perceived in a 2017 text by the foreign minister of Jair Bolsonaro’s government between January 2019 and March 2021. In “Trump e o Ocidente” (Trump and the West), Ernesto Araújo (2017) argued that the then-president of the United States represented a lost ideal of the Western Christian tradition that had “died in Europe to all effects but flourishes in the United States.” Both the former minister and the current president are untiring in their praise of the writings of Olavo de Carvalho, the chief ideologue of the Brazilian far right, whose decadent reading of the West goes hand in hand with the blame he places on the same communism as was used decades ago to justify the military regime’s joining the U.S. bloc in the Cold War.

Given this ideological framing, it must be said that the Bolsonaro government is part of a wave of conservative nationalist experiments around the world but contrasts with them in its antinationalist economic policy agenda. Bluhm and Varga (2019) note that, although governments in Eastern Europe and Russia may be authoritarian and conservative, the state can be seen to be conservatively developmentalist and leaning away from the neoliberal approach by financing specific sectors and controlling key sectors of the economy. Bolsonaro’s Brazil thus diverges from these far-right governments. It even differs from Erdoğan’s Turkey, which initially applied neoliberal policies but has been expanding its welfare state and at the same time transitioning, since the 2018–2019 crisis, to a “reluctant developmentalism” involving greater state involvement in the economy (Akcay, 2020).

There is also supposed to be a contradiction between the Bolsonaro government’s antiglobalist foreign policy stance and its policy favoring foreign capital over domestic businesses. This raises the issue that Operation Car Wash ³ seems to have been one of the factors contributing to a certain “criminalization” of developmentalist policies in Brazil in that it favored the narrative that such policies led to a bloated state and thus were responsible for growing corruption. On that logic, the best way to combat corruption would be to downsize the state. Guedes sold that narrative to Bolsonaro, convincing him that the expansion of public spending had led Brazil to stagnate and perverted politics, while also accusing the public banks of funding powerful business groups solely because of their political connections.

In this regard, in his acceptance speech on taking office as economy minister, Guedes declared: “Private pirates, corrupt bureaucrats, and creatures from the political swamps have partnered against the Brazilian people.” In the same speech, he stated that he understood the movement of which he was part to be a center-right alliance made up of economic liberals (himself), on the one hand, and social conservatives (Bolsonaro), on the other. That coalition was expected to be fundamental in removing the center-left—responsible, in his view, for a mixture of corruption with excessive government spending—from power. Guedes argued that downsizing the state would make Brazil’s economy more efficient and eliminate incentives to “thievery.” “The greater the degree of intervention in the economy, the lower the growth rate and the greater the degree of corruption” (quoted in Folha, 2019b).

The literature (Mannheim, 1981; Freeden, 2006) indicates that, unlike liberalism and socialism, there is no economic discourse intrinsic to conservative ideology. Accordingly, depending on the political conjuncture, conservatives’ preservationist instincts may lead them equally to advocate a state that is interventionist in the economy or to adhere to neoliberalism. In the same way, neoliberalism (Rosanvallon, 2002; Freeden, 2006; Lynch, 2021) subordinates politics to the economy and may accept different political views providing that they uphold its pillars of noninterference in the market and deregulation of private enterprise. In the Brazilian case, the marriage was between President Bolsonaro’s conservative nationalism and populism and Guedes’s neoliberalism.

The Bolsonaro government thus continued with the neoliberal economic agenda implemented since the Temer government—a series of policies that Paula and Oreiro (2021: chap. 4) termed a “Brazilian Thatcherism,” comprising conventional deployment of macroeconomic policies—monetary policy directed to inflation targets, austerity in fiscal policy (which has included capping expenditures), and a floating exchange rate policy and the introduction of liberalizing reforms including (1) a labor reform approved in late 2016, introducing a series of measures to bring greater flexibility to the labor market; (2) a spending cap, which implemented a 20-year freeze on real government expenditures by stipulating that public spending would be adjusted by the prior year’s inflation; and (3) a social security reform approved on November 12, 2019.

In addition to liberal reforms, at the start of his administration Guedes promised an ambitious program of privatization of state enterprises that would raise some R$1.2 trillion, an amount sufficient to repay the public debt at the time (Folha, 2020d). However, because of political difficulties and the government’s own ineffectiveness, the privatizations made little progress in the first two years of Bolsonaro government. The one exception was the sale of 30 percent of government shares in BR Distribuidora, leaving it with a 41 percent minority holding. In late 2020 the president of Petrobrás announced that sales of its refineries would be resuming, now favored by the Supreme Court decision that refinery privatizations no longer needed congressional authorization (Valor, 2020).

In 2021, the Bolsonaro government resumed its program of privatization. In this connection, on June 21, 2021, Congress approved the government’s proposal to privatize Eletrobrás, the major Brazilian electric utilities company, with the reduction of the government share in the total equity stake from 60 percent to 45 percent (G1, 2021a). On July 5, 2021, the government announced its intention to sell 100 percent of its equity in Correios, the state-owned postal service.

There are two theoretical assumptions underlying Temer’s and Bolsonaro’s strategy of “Brazilian Thatcherism.” The first is that economic growth can be stimulated by policies directed toward supply (reducing taxes, cutting back regulation of markets, building pro-market institutions (property rights, good corporate governance, etc.), and creating the right conditions for the business environment to improve, which is regarded as fundamental to attracting foreign capital. The second, the expansionary fiscal contraction hypothesis of Alesina and Ardagna (2010), is that fiscal contraction can boost private-sector confidence and encourage new consumption and investment decisions, thus triggering a crowding-in effect in private spending and therefore stronger economic growth. These assumptions pose two problems. The first is that, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic crisis in Brazil had to do with a lack of demand rather than with supply-side problems. Following a strong recession in 2015 and 2016 (GDP fell by 3.4 percent per year on average), the Brazilian economy remained semistagnant from 2017 to 2019 (mean growth was only 1.51 percent per year), while the unemployment rate was 11.6 percent in February 2020 compared with 6.5 percent in December 2014 ⁴ and was accompanied by a strong increase in precarious (informal, intermittent, part-time, etc.) occupation. In fact, since 2015 the Brazilian government has been cutting its expenditures, which—according to the liberal creed—should, in combination with the liberal reforms, result in stronger growth. This did not happen: the neoliberal strategy has yielded very disappointing results.

The second problem is the fragile empirical underpinning for the expansionary fiscal contraction hypothesis: the literature, in addition to overlooking significant variables, has never identified more than patterns of correlation rather than causality (Paula and Pires, 2017). Important, in Brazil’s case, Constitutional Amendment 95 imposing the spending cap prevents any fiscal policy management, which is a fundamental tool for smoothing out the economic cycle. On the one hand, if the economy grows faster than expected, government revenues will rise more than forecast, but it will be unable to spend the surplus because its expenditures are limited by the rule just introduced. On the other hand, since the spending cap rule requires zero real growth in total spending, any real increase in mandatory expenditures entails reducing discretionary spending in the same amount (Barbosa, 2019). The outcome of this rule is that, given the difficulty of remaining within the spending cap target, the government finds itself forced to cut more and more discretionary expenditures (which is why Guedes has called for the removal of earmarks on mandatory expenditures).

Lastly, even though the fiscal rules were applied with some temporary flexibility in 2020 in order to address the economic and social effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed a broad set of emergency policies to be introduced, Bolsonaro and his economy minister reaffirmed their commitment to maintaining the spending cap in 2021, signaling a return to the “old normal” (the liberal policies and austerity that characterized the period prior to the pandemic) (Paula, 2021). Therefore, the government returned to a liberal agenda and orthodox economic policies in the form of implementation of a new round of reforms that included the approval by law (February 24, 2021) of the independence of the Central Bank of Brazil ⁵ and of the emergency proposal of a constitutional amendment approved on March 14, 2021, which implemented new types of restrictions on public expenses for the federal government and the subnational entities, with respective prohibitions that must be activated if certain limits are not complied with (mandatory primary expenditure greater than 95 percent of total primary expenditure).

Meanwhile, internationally, the Bolsonaro government had broken with the multilateralism and the progressive agenda that had guided Brazilian foreign policy in the past. In the culture war sparked by Bolsonarist conservative nationalism, this was one prominent dimension for asserting Brazil’s national identity as a conservative Christian country—a condition that, according to government ideologues, was under threat from supranational values and institutions (the UN, the World Health Organization, etc.). Casarões (2020) sees this as the source of its clearly antiglobalist stance, in tune with those of other ultraconservative leaders of the global far-right, who aim to discredit international agreements and organizations on the pretext of safeguarding nation-states’ sovereignty and their values, interests, and particularities.

In this concerted endeavor, the Brazilian government’s automatic alignment with the United States of Donald Trump in 2019 and 2020 was expressed in Brazil’s playing a role subservient to U.S. interests. Notorious examples in this regard occurred in 2019, when Brazil relinquished its developing-country status at the World Trade Organization in exchange for U.S. support for its application to join the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (which never happened), as well as granting the United States access to its military base at Alcântara (Casarões, 2020). Similarly, ever since the election campaign period, there has been a proposal on the table to enact regulatory and legislative changes to favor U.S. companies on the Brazilian arms and munitions market (Folha, 2020a).

In parallel, Bolsonarist guidelines for Brazilian foreign policy set the country on a collision course with some of its most important strategic partners. Especially relevant in this context were the relations with China, which has emerged as the United States’ main economic and geopolitical rival in the twenty-first century and has been Brazil’s leading trade partner since 2009. Under Bolsonarist guidelines, the relations between Brazil and China oscillated between ideology and pragmatism, reflecting power struggles within the Bolsonaro government and precipitating recurrent diplomatic crises in Sino-Brazilian relations.

Bolsonarist Populism

Given this background, it can now be considered how Bolsonaro’s conservative nationalism was associated with populist behavior from the election campaign of 2018 on. The populist roots of Bolsonaro’s electoral victory reach back to the years prior to the presidential race, when grassroots dissatisfaction with the political establishment was already evident and brought together heterogeneous movements in opposition to the government (see Laclau, 2005). This scenario took shape with the protests of June 2013 and continued through the developments from Operation Car Wash and the severe political and economic crisis that assailed the country (Paula, Santos, and Moura, 2020) and culminated in the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the consequent rise of Michel Temer to the presidency—a position in which he would become the world’s most unpopular leader (DW, 2017).

In the wake of these events, in the electoral year of 2018 only 9 percent of Brazil’s population declared themselves satisfied with democracy and 90 percent of those interviewed by Latinobarómetro (2018) believed that Brazil was being governed “for the few.” This widespread discontent was also displayed in the scant 6 percent of Brazilians who perceived any progress in their country. Amid one of the worst economic recessions and postrecession recoveries in its history—mean real GDP growth was −3.4 percent in 2015–2016 and 1.6 percent in 2017–2018֡—and corruption scandals involving the traditional political elite, conditions, as diagnosed by Latinobarómetro, were ripe for populist adventurers to flourish.

In this regard, by July 2018, Bolsonaro’s populist strategy for disputing the elections was already clear. As noted by Bernardes and Barros (2019), his campaign launch speech ticked a series of boxes for items that the academic literature has identified as innate to populism. Bolsonaro presented himself as an outsider outraged at the corruption of traditional politics and chose corruption and ideology as priority targets in his campaign. These two elements were deployed to homogenize his political adversaries, which he branded as responsible for the national economic crisis: on the one hand, “the system,” particularly as symbolized by Congress, was eminently corrupt and spanned Brazil’s entire party-political spectrum; on the other hand, “the left,” especially the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT), was singled out as embodying the ideology that had taken over the apparatus of the state and led to the corruption scandals revealed by Operation Car Wash.

This served as the basis for a negation of politics that was to permeate candidate Bolsonaro’s campaign launch speech. Its counterpart, the opportunity to regenerate Brazil, was made to seem to reside in cultivating the values of conservative nationalism (hierarchy, obedience, honesty, and patriotism) that the presidential candidate had absorbed during his military training, which were presented as the path for the people to overcome the corrupt political system. In the future president’s words, “This year Brazil needs to elect a man or woman who is honest, has God in his heart, and is a patriot” (Bernardes and Barros, 2019: 22). One of Bolsonaro’s chief election campaign slogans—“Brazil above everything, God above everyone”—came to reflect his conservative nationalist agenda for the country.

Although this discourse had featured, with demophobic coloring, during Brazil’s military dictatorship, it was now reemerging in the twenty-first century in association with an international wave of right-wing populism. In this way, Bolsonaro kindled conflict between “the people”—homogenized by the crisis in representation demonstrated by Latinobarómetro (2018)—and the political establishment, which was depicted as thwarting the people’s will because it would act only to its own benefit. Indeed, those were the defining features of both his election campaign and his first two years of government. The keynote of Bolsonaro’s electoral campaign propaganda was set by the use of national symbols such as the colors of the flag and the armed forces. The latter was reinforced by frequent manifestations of public support from the military for his candidacy, which forged the inevitable link between the armed forces and the political movement dear to the government’s ambitions. In this vein, in April of the election year, the former commanding general Eduardo Dias da Costa Villas Bôas went so far as to threaten the Supreme Court explicitly and publicly against granting habeas corpus to former President Lula, then Bolsonaro’s main opponent in the presidential race (Conjur, 2018). A week before the second round of the elections, Bolsonaro promised “to sweep Brazil’s red bandits from the map” and described himself and his followers as “the true Brazil” (El País, 2018), thus offering empirical proof of the populism theorized in the academic literature.

In parallel, the candidate’s scorn for the traditional party system can be seen in another of his key slogans: “My party is Brazil.” In November 2019, in the first year of his term, the president decided to leave the Partido Social Liberal (Social Liberal Party—PSL), the party whose candidate he was, and at the time of writing of this article he had not joined any other. Days earlier, he had repeated his election campaign slogan (Estadão, 2019), revealing the intention to distance himself from the establishment and position himself personally as the legitimate spokesman for “the people,” which was limited to his electoral constituency.

After the electoral victory, his modus operandi continued to be to combine conservative nationalism with populist rhetoric, despite the steady advance of the neoliberal agenda. His acceptance speech to Congress on taking office made further references to the moral deficiency of the preceding governments, together with appeals to defend the “homeland” (quoted in Folha, 2019a):

Let me take this solemn moment and call on each member of Congress to help me in the mission of restoring our homeland and putting it back on its feet, to free it once and for all from the yoke of corruption, criminality, economic irresponsibility, and ideological submission. . . . Building a fairer, developed nation means breaking with practices that have proven harmful to all of us, blighting the political class and holding back progress. Irresponsibility has led us to the greatest ethical, moral, and economic crisis of our history.

In the second half of the first year of his term, in the midst of the environmental crisis caused by forest fires in the Amazon, which brought an international reaction calling for environmental preservation in Brazil, Bolsonaro made an aggressive speech to the UN General Assembly, supposedly in the name of national sovereignty (quoted in Folha, 2019c):

It is a fallacy to say that the Amazon is a heritage of humankind and a mistake—as attested by scientists—to claim that the forest is the lungs of the world. Availing themselves of these fallacies, one country or another, instead of helping, has gone along with the lies and behaved disrespectfully, in a colonialist spirit. They have questioned what is most sacred to us, our sovereignty.

Less than a month later, during a ceremony to commission a new Brazilian submarine, he once again made a show of voicing nationalist discourse on the pretext of defending the Amazon from purported foreign interests: “Out there, they are trying more and more to put us in a situation as colonized people. We will not permit that.” On that same occasion, he declared that Brazil had internal and external enemies: “Those within are the most terrible. Those outside, we will defeat with technology and determination and deterrents” (EBC, 2019).

Under the Bolsonaro government, given the subordinate role now assigned to Brazil in its foreign policy, the “internal enemies” indeed gained prominence. Within Brazil, the spectrum of the president’s disfavor extended to all those who opposed him: in line with the populist primer, they became enemies of “the people” and of the country. In that connection, during his government, Bolsonaro’s recurrent presence at his supporters’ antidemocratic rallies calling for the closure of Congress and the Supreme Court was representative both of the endeavor to maintain his electoral base permanently mobilized and of his struggle with the other powers of the republic. In the context of the public health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro made clear his illiberal view of the democratic system, declaring himself once more to be the only legitimate representative of “the people.” One example can be seen in his April 19, 2020, speech to supporters at a demonstration in front of the army general headquarters calling for military intervention in Brazil (G1, 2020a):

We don’t want to negotiate anything. What we want is action for Brazil. What was old has been left behind. We have a new Brazil ahead of us. Everyone, without exception, has to be a patriot and believe and do his part so that we can put Brazil in the position of prominence it deserves. The time of the scoundrels is over. Now it’s the people in power.

This “people,” as once again made explicit in Bolsonaro’s rhetoric, consists of the more radical portions of his electoral constituency, who deny any legitimacy to other channels of democratic representation and can count on gestures of support from the president in his public pronouncements. In the same direction, by rejecting any possibility of negotiation, the president also acted to undermine the credibility of the legislative and judiciary powers. On the following day, amid the repercussions of his participation in the rally, Bolsonaro declared: “I am the Constitution” (quoted in Folha, 2020b), revealing once again his understanding of the proper role of the President of the Republic.

In the demonstration mentioned above, the fact that it was held in front of the army general headquarters is symbolic for two other reasons: on the one hand, because of Bolsonaro’s past of repeatedly exalting the military dictatorship (Veja, 2019) and, on the other, because of the armed forces’ active participation in his government, reflected in the thousands of civil posts—including several ministries—distributed to serving military personnel and reservists. In July 2020, the number of military in civil posts stood at over 6,000—more than double the number in 2018, during the Temer administration (G1, 2020b).

At the same time, the president also became notable, since his election campaign, for communicating directly with his constituents through social media. Twitter has become an especially important tool for Bolsonaro to attack his political enemies and mobilize his voters. Meanwhile, one constant goal of his use of social media was to discredit the traditional media channels, which he portrays as propagators of fake news about his government. In April 2019 Época magazine (2019) conducted a survey of 3,000 of Bolsonaro’s tweets:

“Press” and “media” were mentioned more than 120 times, nearly always in a derogatory fashion. . . . The other topics that rivaled the press in the ranking of Bolsonaro’s tweets were his opponents. In this list are terms such as “left,” “members of the PT,” former President Lula (32 mentions), and other adversaries accused of being “corrupt,” of spreading “ideology,” and of working to transform Brazil into a “Venezuela.”

In other words, communication via the social media served the populist purpose of tarnishing the other democratic institutions and harassing the government’s opponents. These latter, in turn, were excluded from the conception of “the people” present in Bolsonaro’s rhetoric and ultimately presented as its enemies.

The populist modus operandi of Bolsonaro can be further noted in the unending political campaign he advanced once he took office. As we have shown, in the beginning of the pandemic, the Brazilian president joined demonstrations of his supporters, probably aiming at keeping his political basis mobilized. In 2021, as presidential elections were getting closer, his permanent electoral campaign agenda became even clearer, as he joined biker rallies across the country (G1, 2021b) and intensified his usual narrative of questioning the Brazilian electoral process, alleging that it was prone to fraud (Carta Capital, 2021). Meanwhile, he often referred to the Brazilian military as “my army” (Folha, 2020c), trying to blend himself with the state and implicitly threatening not to respect a defeat in the elections.

The populism practiced by Bolsonaro thus ends up being instrumental to the government’s ostentatious nationalism. On the one hand, the rhetoric appealing to national values and symbols such as the colors of the flag, national sovereignty, and the armed forces acts in this direction in the discursive dimension. On the other hand, his claim to be the only legitimate representative of “the people,” which is constructed by fueling conflict between the population and the establishment, is designed to dissociate the president from other politicians and thus grant him the prerogative of speaking on behalf of the nation—which is reinforced by direct communication with his voters, particularly through the social media. As explained above, the goal underlying this practice is to make the president personally the vector through which national interests are fulfilled, in line with the conservative nationalism that defines them.

Conclusion

This analysis has shown that there is no contradiction between the economic policy agenda pursued by the Bolsonaro government and the conservative nationalism guiding it. From the economic standpoint, the Bolsonaro government, by implementing an agenda that is neoliberal and—at least until the Trump presidency—subservient to the interests of the United States, applied policies at odds with the aims of achieving full national sovereignty and defending national interests. This combined with a conservative type of nationalism, driven by populist behavior including antisystem discourse, cultivation of a direct connection with “the people,” of which he declared himself the legitimate representative, and an exaltation of national symbols.

This combination of neoliberal policy and nationalist rhetoric seems to have no parallel in other recent experiences of far-right governments. This is because there is an apparent contradiction between the Bolsonaro government’s antiglobalization discourse, in line with that of most far-right governments, and its adoption of neoliberal policies strongly in favor of privatization and denationalization. Delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, this agenda was resumed in 2021 with the implementation of a new round of liberal reforms and the privatization of Eletrobrás.

Furthermore, although during the pandemic Bolsonaro reached an agreement with the “center bloc” in Congress (a set of political parties with no specific ideological orientation), he kept his populist modus operandi while avoiding impeachment. Indeed, this behavior was further enhanced as Brazilian presidential elections of 2022 got closer. In the face of his negligence in combating the pandemic and the economic crisis, polls quickly suggested that he was likely to lose reelection. As a consequence, in the remainder of Bolsonaro’s term, his populist actions intensified, which was not enough to stop Lula (PT), the opposition candidate, from winning the dispute and becoming president from 2023 on.

Our research points in other directions for future academic research. For example, understanding of the threats that the rise of conservative nationalism poses to the prospects of democratic governance seems not to have been explored in the literature. This could be done by way of studies comparing countries that are experiencing the phenomenon. Contributions to theory seeking to understand authoritarianism as an intersection among populism, neoliberalism, and conservative nationalism seem equally important. These are promising paths that deserve further investigation.