By Elisângela Mendonça
“We have never seen such a troubled government.” This is how the Politics Editor of the leading Brazilian newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo, Eduardo Scolesi, starts describing Jair Bolsonaro’s first 100 days ahead of Brazil’s presidency.
The milestone, reached this Wednesday (10/4), comes with a bitter taste for the president, though. An opinion poll by Datafolha – one of the Brazil’s most respected survey institutes – shows Bolsonaro facing the lowest approval rate for a first-term Brazilian president. The far-right wing leader was labeled as “bad” or “terrible” by 30% of respondents, almost as many as those rating him “good” or “very good”.
Since the country’s re-democratisation, in the late 1980s, all his predecessors had a better performance. This makes Bolsonaro even less popular than Fernando Collor de Mello, who became president in 1990 and shortly after was impeached following a financial scandal.
More than 60% of Datafolha respondents said Bolsonaro has performed below expectations. “Bolsonaro needs to fit in the job and show work” to get more support, Datafolha director Mauro Paulino wrote on Twitter.
The pro-gun former Army captain, who is often compared to Donald Trump, found his way to the presidency with pledges to fight crime and end corruption. He adopted a firm political outsider narrative, although he was an irrelevant congressional representative for nearly 27 years – only two bills proposed by him were turned into law. Now, he is replicating the usual inactivity with a scarcity of bills passed by the Congress in these 100 days.
Despite his expected political advantage and strong popular support – he got elected with 55% of the vote share – the chaos and blunders, in which his government is immersed, have eroded his support from Parliament and even former allies’, which brakes on his reforms.
In his first weeks, Bolsonaro published a document containing 35 goals to be met in his first 100 days, but only delivered a third of them up until now.
This period has been marked by infighting in his administration: two of his ministers were fired after scandals. His praise for Brazil's military dictatorship (1964-85) and an explicit pornographic tweet during Carnival have given critics a lot of material to work with.
Corruption suspicions against the president's family have also emerged in his first months as regulatory authorities said his son Flavio, who is also a senator, received suspicious payments. He is also under investigation for his close links to paramilitary groups, including one involved in the murder of the human rights defender, Marielle Franco, executed a year ago in Rio de Janeiro (see below).
“If you analyse the crisis this government has faced up until now, most of them were created by the president himself or people surrounding him. Even social media posts were turned into a massive governmental crisis,” Scolesi says.
In all, during the period, the government called the attention to 28 crises. On average, there were two controversies per week, including the dismissal of the Minister of Education, Ricardo Vélez Rodrigues, last Monday.
Scroll down to check some of the 28 controversies and missteps of Bolsonaro’s administration in a hundred days:
SUSPICION OF MONEY LAUNDERING
Flavio Bolsonaro, the president’s eldest son, who is also a senator, is under investigation for receiving suspicious payments totaling $25,000 in a single month from his former driver Fabricio Queiroz.
The driver also made a payment to first lady Michelle Bolsonaro of about $5,500. All involved deny any wrongdoing.
Ties with the militia
Bolsonaro family’s ties with a militia group in Rio de Janeiro raised further questions. Two of its members have been arrested for the high-profile killing of the Brazilian human rights activist, Marielle Franco. She was an activist and councilwoman who had been a vocal critic of the deployment of federal security forces to Rio de Janeiro’s poor districts.
One of the criminals, Ronnie Lessa, used to live in the same luxury condominium where Bolsonaro owns two houses. The second one, Elcio Queiroz, had posted a picture of him beside the president on social media.
Flavio Bolsonaro, one of the president’s son, was reported to have employed the wife and mother of this criminal group’s founder, Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega, who is currently a fugitive. The women were on his office’s public payroll until November last year.
Marielle Franco's case
Two days before the one year anniversary of Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes' murder (March, 2019), the police announced they had found out who pulled the trigger. However, they failed to name who ordered the crime, which to date is unsolved.
problematic ministers
Damares Alves (Human Rights)
“Attention, attention. It’s a new era in Brazil. Boys wear blue and girls wear pink,”
One of the two female ministers at Bolsonaro’s administration, Damares Alves, who is in charge of Human Rights and Gender Equality, created controversy by saying that "a new era has started in Brazil". She said that "boys wear blue and girls wear pink."
The remarks were caught on a video that also shows her chanting the sentence and being applauded. She is a feverous evangelical Christian and pledged to end the “ideological indoctrination of children and teenagers in Brazil”.
Photo Credits: Creative Commons
Video credits: Social Media clipping