Jair Bolsonaro: And Brazil consecrates the villanocracy | Opinion

On the eve of the first round of the presidential elections in Brazil, the hope was floating in the air that Jair Bolsonaro and everything that the current president represents was just a historical accident. The illusion was undone on Sunday night itself, when the electronic ballot boxes gave the news that some of the Brazilians who had provided the worst public service had a guaranteed seat in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate. The expectation that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva could be elected in the first round, as indicated by the latest polls, was also frustrated. With 48.43% of the votes, against 43.20% for Bolsonaro —a difference of more than six million voters—, the dispute goes to the second round with a very difficult scenario for the former president: Lula won in 14 states, while Bolsonaro did so in 12 and in the Federal District, but lost to the current president in two of the most important electoral colleges in the country, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. There are those who affirm that, in Brazil, the conservative wave has come to stay, nested in the extreme right, as happens in other countries of the world. I don't see it that way. What is there is not conservatism, but something that we are not yet able to name and that we could perhaps call villanocracy. Calling conservatives those who vote for the worst knowing they are worse is like calling a three-legged chair antiquity.

See: General Eduardo Pazuello, the Minister of Health so incompetent that he sent oxygen to the wrong state and left covid-19 patients dying of suffocation in Manaus, even though he had been warned that it would happen, was the second most voted deputy from Rio de Janeiro. Luiz Henrique Mandetta, his predecessor, dismissed for defending that covid-19 should be faced with science, was defeated. Ricardo Salles, the Minister of the Environment who caused the deforestation record in the Amazon for the last 15 years and who defended in a ministerial meeting that the Government and its allies should take advantage of the fact that the press was busy covering the pandemic to “make everything happen” the cattle”, which meant weakening environmental legislation and approving laws that would allow the depredation of the jungle and other biomes, obtained almost three times as many votes as the world-renowned environmentalist Marina Silva. Known as the “muse of poison”, Tereza Cristina led the Ministry of Agriculture until running for the Senate elections, during which time more than 1,600 pesticides were approved. She has been chosen. Damares Alves, Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights who defends that boys wear blue and girls wear pink, she lied about her resume and irregularly adopted an indigenous girl, she has also got her place in the Senate. Astronaut Marcos Pontes, who verified with his own eyes that the Earth is round, but was Minister of Science of a government of flat earthers, has guaranteed his seat in the Senate. And General Hamilton Mourão, Bolsonaro's vice president, notable for defending the dictatorship, is another who will torment the upper house.

The list of notorious villains chosen is long. Calling voters who make this kind of choice conservatives makes no sense. Legitimate conservatives should repudiate this misconception. Elect an Environment Minister who destroys the environment, a Health Minister who destroys health, a Women's Minister who calls women's rights "gender ideology", an Agriculture Minister who poisons the earth, the air and the soil, to a Minister of Science who denies science is not conservatism. When these types of voters are called conservatives, they are legitimized. There is nothing immoral or unethical about being conservative. The very verb “conserve” is loaded with positivity.