To underestimate Jair Bolsonaro is a mistake

Jair Messias Bolsonaro is not the first Brazilian president whose political ability is underestimated by most analysts. For a long time, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's ability to govern the country was doubted. Before him, it was almost unanimous the opinion that Itamar Franco, the vice-president who took office as a result of the first impeachment in the country's history - of Fernando Collor de Mello, in 1992 -, was so "incompetent," "foolish" and "headstrong" that he would sink the nation into the chaos initiated by his predecessor.

Mr. Bolsonaro spent 28 years in the Chamber of Deputies with only one concern: re-election every four years. It was not difficult, after all, his only agenda was to defend the privileges and advantages of military corporations, what, of course, meant supporting the interests of the state bureaucracy, the State within the State, the country's autochthonous power, patrimonialism by definition.

The current president defended the salaries of the military during the period of one of the greatest wage squeezes of the civil service in history - the first years of economic stabilization, after the launch of the Real Plan in 1994. With the abrupt fall of price indexes from around 2,800% to 50% per year, the huge imbalance of public accounts appeared instantly in budgets, since, before, chronic inflation eroded the real value of spending, creating the illusion that the public sector did not spend more than collected.

Among other measures, it was up to the first president elected in the post-Real era - Fernando Henrique Cardoso - to halt the evolution of civil servants and military salaries to contain, at least, the public deficit. In Mr. Cardoso's first term (1995-1998), the nominal deficit - a concept that includes all expenses, even interest on debt - reached 7% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

For Deputy Jair Bolsonaro, shouting against Mr. Cardoso's wage squeeze and winning votes in the military family was easy. This explains the hatred devoted by the military personnel to the former president. In an interview with Valor in 2019, General Augusto Heleno, minister of the Institutional Security Office (GSI), one of the closest aides to the President of the Republic, said that "Lula is terrible, but Fernando Henrique was worse, huh?," an obvious reference to Mr. Bolsonaro's main target in the years when he was seen only as a folk figure of the Brazilian right.

Perhaps, not even in his dreams Mr. Bolsonaro had believed...

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