Right wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro won 46 percent in the first round of voting for president of Brazil, short of the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff on October 28. Bolsonaro will face off against São Paulo Mayor Fernando Haddad of the Workers’ Party, who got 29 percent in a country beset by a bad economy and political corruption. Leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Haddad’s party was barred from running by the Superior Electoral Court.
Bolsonaro has been a member of Congress for seven terms and is most famous for his anti-LGBTQ, anti-women, and racist remarks that earned him federal hate crimes charges. He is a former captain in the army, is assembling top military leaders in his circle, and wants to use the military to “purge a corrupt ruling elite,” the New York Times reported. He is backed, as Trump was, by a burgeoning evangelical population in Brazil. The first round voting pulled out 80 percent of eligible Brazilians.
Out gay journalist Glenn Greenwald, an American who lives in Brazil, called Bolsonaro “the most misogynistic, hateful elected official in the democratic world.” This leader of the Social Liberal Party (!) has five children, first four boys and then “in a moment of weakness,” he said, a daughter. He called a female member of Congress “not worthy of being raped.”
Bolsonaro said he was “incapable of loving a gay son” and would prefer such a son “die in an accident” — though he also said he would try to “take a whip” and change him. He has threatened to “beat” gay men if he sees them kissing publicly and attributes what he says is a rise in homosexuality to drugs and women working outside the home.
