- The political relations of force have reversed, weakening the government. First, Bolsonaro lost more than half of the deputies in the party he used for the election, including Gustavo Bebianno, who directed the election campaign, and the federal deputy, Joyce Hasselmann; soon afterwards, the popular state deputy Janaína Pascoal in São Paulo; subsequently, he lost the support of the governors of Rio de Janeiro, Witzel and of São Paulo, João Doria; Mandetta, the Minister of Health, and Sergio Moro, Minister of Justice and main proponent of the Lava Jato (Car Wash) operation. In the current juncture, Bolsonaro has neither the social and political strength for a self-coup nor does he face the prospect of an imminent impeachment. The majority of the ruling class has already broken with Bolsonaro, but has hesitated about his displacement during the heat of the pandemic. The fate of the political situation remains uncertain. But it will be conditioned by a catastrophic dynamic, and it signals Bolsonaro’s weakening. In this context, Bolsonaro, the maximum leader of a neo-fascist current that maintains mass influence, albeit a minority, continues to agitate for more powers: the defense of a self-coup in the service of a Bonapartist project, but he does not have the strength to take the decisive steps to advance. Therefore, he seeks to consolidate the support of the Armed Forces, with a greater presence of Armed Forces officers in the Ministries, and the expansion of his parliamentary base with the integration of parties from the center into the government. He has been repeatedly contradicted, especially since March, by dozens of decisions by the Supreme Court (STF). While Bolsonaro tries to protect himself from impeachment, the leftist opposition remains divided. The majority of the working class in union-organized sectors is already in opposition, and the new urban middle class with higher education degrees is in the process of rupturing, frequently going to the windows of their apartments and houses to protest within the quarantine conditions. PSOL has decided to support the presentation of an impeachment request through the initiative of popular leaders. But the PT still falters.
- Faced with the difficulties of the economy to overcome the stagnation of the GDP (which has varied below 1%, since 2019), and the loss of allies and support in the majority of the National Congress, Bolsonaro had been defending a position of a self-coup à la Fujimori in Peru in the 1990s. The clearest expressions of this were national demonstrations in support of the president on March 15. The national political scenario, however, began to change, radically, with the first impacts of the pandemic crisis, and through its economic reflexes. Initially, Bolsonaro and the economic ministries of the federal government underestimated the effects of the pandemic. They remained on the defensive from March 8 until March 15, when a growing division in the ruling classes and a fissure in the government began to open up. On the one hand, in relation to the pandemic, the Ministry of Health under Mandetta, from a right-wing party, DEM (Democrats) allied with the government, and the vast majority of state governors, preached social isolation, distancing themselves from Bolsonaro’s denial position. On the other hand, the economic ministries lived days of paralysis, adopting innocuous measures such as the pre-announced dollar auctions, which consumed US$45 billion of the imposing US$375 billion in reserves, while the Brazilian stock market melted, causing its first recorded circuit breaks and temporary closures.
- The government countered and tried to go on the offensive but failed. On the one hand, Bolsonaro denounced Congress for “preventing him” from governing. Suspected of contracting covid-19, Bolsonaro said he was threatened and did not accept isolation. Fed by the most extreme neo-fascist wings in his family environment that compare to the Tea Party of the American Republicans (Marco Rubio, for example), he called demonstrations on March 15 whose participants called for the closing of the Congress. However, between March 15 and 21, in the field of combating the pandemic, differences within the government deepened. While Bolsonaro continued to deny the effects of the pandemic, putting the economy first, part of the government’s support base such as the DEM, with the Ministry of Health at the helm, and the rest of the new center, like the PSDB and the PMDB, followed by their respective governors, mayors and parliamentarians – including those of Bolsonaro’s erstwhile party, the PSL and the PT, most concerned with the municipal elections scheduled for October, insisted on the policy of social isolation. On March 16, Bruno Covas, the mayor of Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo, decreed a state of emergency and some public universities like the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) in the interior of the state, begin to suspend classes. It is in the course of this arm wrestling, by insisting on maintaining economic activity, in detriment to combating the pandemic, that Bolsonaro increasingly isolated himself, and bourgeois sectors began to move to the opposition. The situation changed when the bourgeois majority passed over to the opposition.