COMMENTARY Now that defeated Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro is in Florida, fleeing investigations, his legions of fans here should recall how his father damaged their image in 2023.
Like many of my colleagues, I was dead wrong about Sunday’s Brazilian presidential election.
But this week, after watching the cowardly antics of the loser, right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro — who I believed would win — I’m dead glad I was wrong.
That’s because Bolsonaro has turned out to be, in Brazilian Portuguese slang, um banana — a real wimp.
A potentially dangerous banana at that.
Bolsonaro can’t accept his surprising but legitimate defeat to leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or face the federal investigations into his alleged corruption (allegations he denies) that he insists are rigged against him by a left-leaning Brazilian judiciary.
So this week, after refusing to concede Lula’s victory, Bolsonaro snuck out of Brazil to Argentina, then Ecuador, then Miami and South Florida, into the open arms of President Donald Trump — a kindred spirit who lacks the character to accept his own electoral defeat in 2020.
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Fleeing to Florida is the same banana move Bolsonaro’s father, former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, made after losing to Lula in 2022.
And it’s scary to recall that while Jair was brooding in Orlando, he was covertly inciting supporters to riot on Jan. 8, 2023, in Brasília, where they violently ransacked federal buildings and screamed for Brazil’s military to stage a coup.
Instead, the army brass testified against Jair, who last year was convicted in Brazil for putsch-plotting and is serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest.
It’s scary to recall that while Bolsonaro's father was in Florida, he was inciting the violent Jan. 8, 2023, insurrection in Brazil that screamed for a military coup.
So is the son here in Florida now to foment another Jan. 8 in Brazil?
If so, I’d advise the state’s large Brazilian and largely Bolsonarista diaspora — three-fourths of whom voted for Flávio Bolsonaro and worshiped Jair even more cultishly — to reconsider showing Flávio the same unconditional amor it lavished on Jair during his 2023 stay.
Ugly optics
It turned out to be a pretty bad look for Brazilian expats then, and the optics would be even worse now.
What Florida’s Bolsonaristas never seemed to get is that the 2023 optics were doubly ugly for them:
To many of their non-Bolsonarista countrymen in Brazil, it looked as if they backed the Jan. 8 insurrection. To many folks in the U.S., it looked in turn as if they also condoned the deadly MAGA uprising on Jan. 6, 2021, that trashed the U.S. Capitol in a bid to reverse Trump’s loss.
Most Brazil watchers, in fact, agree that Jan. 8 was simply a copycat of Jan. 6.
But even if Flávio Bolsonaro has come here merely to hide out from the federal probes and other sordid scandals he faces at home, that in itself seems reason for Florida Brazilians to think twice about welcoming him to the state as if he were Jesus entering Jerusalem.
And if they think I’m just parroting Lula’s fans — for the record, I criticized Lula for running again because I believed that, at age 80, he’s simply too old to lead Brazil effectively for another four years — then I’d point them instead to the example of many conservative Brazilian voters.
The reason I and so many others assumed Flávio Bolsonaro would win the runoff election is that, while Flávio got 47% and Lula 45% in the Oct. 4 first round, 8% opted for other, mostly conservative candidates — and we expected that share to go for Flávio on Sunday.
We were, as I said, dead wrong: just about all of it went to Lula, whose runoff take was 52% to Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48%.
Why? Turns out, just as there are Never-Trumpers among conservatives in the U.S., there is a sizable cohort of Bolsonaro-Nunca conservatives in Brazil. And, as much as they might disdain Lula — especially his leftist economic policies, which have put Brazil in a fiscal hole — they just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Bolsonarismo.
They couldn’t disregard not only Flávio’s scoundrel reputation, but the MAGA-style, white Christian nationalist cruelty of the Bolsonaro movement itself — whose reactionary ideology was responsible for the sneering COVID denialism that helped plague Brazil with the world’s second highest number of pandemic deaths when Jair Bolsonaro was president.
Even many conservatives who voted for Flávio Bolsonaro say they did so, as one here in Miami told me, “tapando meu nariz” — holding their noses.
That odor has once again come to Florida.
