Jair Bolsonaro runs the risk of being ineligible or even detained for, among other things, participation in the attacks on the 8th in Brasília. But even if he escapes justice, allies and opposition agree that he has lost electoral capital, showing that he has been politically silent since voting in October and physically absent since rival Lula da Silva took office. In Florida, on vacation, he witnessed the international shock caused by the invasions, he saw a minister arrested, the millionaire cost with the presidential card revealed and the starvation on native reservations, which he widely ignored.
Where would the 58 million votes he won in 2022 be with the former president predictably eliminated in 2026?
Right, sensing the vacuum, moves to fill it. For the social scientist Jorge Chaloub, who studies the post-war Brazilian right, “Bolsonaro neither founded a party nor succeeded in completely dominating a party, so the tendency now is for his field to pulverize”. Anthropologist Letícia Cesarino, from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, stressed that “the far right in Brazil is not just Bolsonarianism,” speaking to the Brazilian edition of the newspaper Deutsche Welle.
“Bolsonaro’s lethargy, since his defeat in October, has opened up a gigantic space in the race for the leadership of the opposition against the Lula government,” said Thomas Traumann, a researcher at Faculdade Getúlio Vargas, in a column in the Place Power360. “And the real threat that the Federal Supreme Court’s investigation into the Jan. 8 attempt will end with the suspension of their political rights made the dispute public.”
Traumann moved up three names on Bolsonaro’s succession list. “The dispute for the orphans of Bolsonarism is between Bolsonaro’s deputy, Senator Hamilton Mourão, and the governors of Minas Gerais, Romeu Zema and São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas”.
The kick-off was given by Mourão (of the Republican party), with whom the former president maintained a tense relationship, in an end-of-year speech on radio and television. “Leaderships that should reassure and unite the nation around a land project let silence or inconvenient and harmful protagonists create a climate of chaos and social collapse,” the former vice president said in a clear attack on Bolsonaro.
And in the hours after the January 8 coup, Mourão was already claiming the role of “anti-Lula”. “The arbitrary detention of more than 1,200 people, currently detained in precarious conditions in the facilities of the Federal Police in Brasília, shows that the new government, in keeping with its Marxist-Leninist roots, is operating in an amateurish, inhumane and illegal manner. acts”.
In the same tone, Romeu Zema, re-elected governor of Minas Gerais by Novo, a kind of Brazilian liberal initiative, said on January 8 that “there was a mistake made by the radical right, which, remember, is a minority, and there was also a mistake, maybe even deliberate, by the government so that the worst would happen and he would play the victim later”.
Tarcísio de Freitas, governor of São Paulo, like Zema, was present immediately after the attacks at the meeting of governors proposed by Lula, but unlike his colleague from Minas Gerais, he shook Lula the following day after the meeting. hand. True to his pragmatic reputation, the Republican politician handled the privatization of the Port of Santos, one of his campaign flags to which the President of the Republic did not close the doors.
But there are more Brazilian candidates for Ron DeSantis, the politician challenging Donald Trump’s influence on the US right. The president of the evangelical bench in the Chamber of Deputies, Sóstenes Cavalcante, of the PL, the same party as Bolsonaro, says the former president has two paths left: lead the opposition or become a mentor.
“Bolsonaro helped fuel an electoral field that is a mixture of nationalism, private initiative, agribusiness, big businessmen, and the religious and military segments”. “Tomorrow”, he underlined in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, “Tarcísio de Freitas or Romeu Zema could fulfill this role, but also Jorginho Mello [governador de Santa Catarina]Ronaldo Caiado [governador de Goiás] and Michelle Bolsonaro herself, who has become very charismatic”.
Unlike Sóstenes Cavalcante, right-wing deputy Kim Kataguiri (União Brasil), founder of the Movimento Brasil Livre, a group that rose to prominence during the demonstrations for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, is no longer a Bolsonarist. For him, the right-wing electorate is “ready to embrace new leaders, not least because Bolsonaro has already signaled that he is losing control of his electorate, even the most radical core, with the latest events in Brasilia and with the attacks that Bolsonarists exchanged”.
“There is”, for Kataguiri, “a leadership vacuum and his silence is proof of it”. In this context, the MBL, which intends to become a political party, will “build Danilo Gentili’s 2026 candidacy,” he assures. Gentili is a talk show host and comedian.
Asked if the solution would not remind Ukraine, since the representative of the European country, Volodymyr Zelensky, is a comedian, Kataguiri recalled that Ronald Reagan, the former US president who is seen as a reference for the MBL, also moved from the screens to the White House in 1981.
However, an article in Gazeta do Povo, a Curitiba newspaper with right-wing connotations, quotes a source close to Valdemar Costa Neto, president of Bolsonaro’s party, as assuming that the former president “is still a key player [na direita] but not the only one”. According to the article, the own core of former president Zema or Ratinho Júnior, governor of Paraná, both in their second term, launches as alternatives. Paulo, vital state for the project on the right.
The newspaper also guarantees that Bolsonaro is aware of most of the movements and does not take his departure from the scene for granted.
“Bolsonaro is not dead,” Traumann recalled in his column. In recent years, buoyed by popular violence and the online machine that supports it, it has run over former governor of São Paulo João Doria and former judge Sergio Moro, supposedly competitive aspirants for right-wing standard-bearers.
THE ALTERNATIVES
TARCÍSIO DE FREITAS
Seen, in the Infrastructure portfolio, as Bolsonaro’s most active minister, he was elected governor of São Paulo at the age of 47, with the image of a technician. To prove that he is not a “rooted Bolsonarist”, the day after the attacks in Brasília he had a working meeting with Lula, who displeased the radical right but must have seduced the centre. It plays against you to be in the first term – the most likely will be to try for re-election in 2026.
ROMEO ZEMA
Like Tarcísio, the 58-year-old governor of Minas Gerais doesn’t fit the definition of “root Bolsonarista,” not least because he belongs to Novo, a party similar to the Liberal Initiative but unlike its counterpart in São Paulo , he is in a second term, which will give him the freedom to try Planalto in 2026.
JUNIOR MOUSE
Second-term governor of Paraná and son of Ratinho, legend of national trash TV, at 41, heads a list of right-wing governors with a word to say in 2026. As Ronaldo Caiado, 73, re-elected in Goiás, or Jorginho Mello, 66, recently elected to Santa Catarina.
MICHELLE BOLSONARO
With kids 01, 02, 03 and even the non-political 04 in the crosshairs of justice, the former first lady, aged 40, is the only person nicknamed Bolsonaro to run for president in 2026 – the suggestion came of Sóstenes Cavalcante, leader of the evangelical bench, like her, in the Chamber of Deputies.
HAMILTON MOURIO
All the governors mentioned and of course Michelle have, to varying degrees, Bolsonaro’s sympathy. Not your former vice president. Elected senator, he will try to win the vote of Bolsonaristas, even if he is a critic of the former president. And he is already trying to position himself on the right side of pole position for 2026. He is 69 years old.
DANILO GENTILI
He gained fame in the CQC programme, which mixed humor with journalism, on TV Bandeirantes, before migrating to competitor SBT and hosting the much-watched The Noite. Like Mourão, he is right-wing but critical of Bolsonaro. The name of the 43-year-old comedian was launched, very seriously, by Kim Kataguiri, deputy of União Brasil.
Source: DN
