Thousands of Brazilians took to the streets in their cars to demand the accusation of Jair Bolsonaro, as polls showed support for the right-wing president over the handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
On Saturday, when Brazil’s official death toll at Covid-19 reached 216,000, left-wing and centrist protesters staged car rallies in more than 20 state capitals, including Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte and Belém.
The left-wing leader Guilherme Boulos tells protesters parading through São Paulo the rallies were the beginning of a ‘popular uprising against this genocidal government’.
‘We are here to announce that we are not going to wait [the next presidential election in] 2022, because lives are at stake. “Now is the time to defeat Jair Bolsonaro,” Boulos told dissidents. “He’s going to leave the presidency and go straight to jail.”
On Sunday, right-wing groups held their own pro-accusation events, including in Barra da Tijuca, a stronghold of Bolsonaro support in western Rio.
An online petition promoted by conservative former supporters garnered more than 180,000 signatures within three days. “President Bolsonaro is a curse on Brazil and … it is up to us, the people, to ensure its removal,” he said, accusing the president of endangering thousands of lives with his anti-scientific reaction to Covid .
Lucas Paulino, a lawyer who helped organize a rally in Belo Horizonte, said protesters were being driven by the horrific health invasion that took place hundreds of miles north in the Amazon. In recent days, dozens of patients in Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas, have died after a surge in Covid infections and a catastrophic lack of planning caused the hospital’s oxygen to run out. Brazilian health minister Eduardo Pazuello – whose critics call him “Pezadello” (nightmare) – has just traveled to the city to promote fake ‘early treatments’ such as hydroxychloroquine.
“It really showed us the extent of the federal government’s neglect of duty and denial of the Covid pandemic,” said Paulino, 32, a regional leader for a progressive political group called Acredito (I believe).
“The feeling that this negligence, this anti-democratic extremism, this denial of science, this failure, this glorification of authoritarianism, can no longer be allowed to continue, was trapped in the throats of many Brazilians,” Paulino said. added.
Political journalist João Villaverde, a columnist for Época magazine, said the drive-through demos – the first major outside mobilizations since the pandemic began – suggested the opposition to Bolsonaro was entering a new and unpredictable phase with the potential to end his presidency.
He said: “These demonstrations show our politicians that Brazilian society has reached such a level of anger and resentment over the state of affairs caused by the utter helplessness of Bolsonarismo, that they are prepared to protest even in the midst of of a pandemic. This has not happened before.
“All right, these were garages with protesters in cars. But it shows that society is on the verge of exploding. ”
Supporters of Bolsonaro, which claims that their opposition to coronavirus measures is intended to protect Brazil’s economy, rejected the protests. The president’s son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a politician, attacked the “rogue media” for slandering too much about what he described as an embarrassment of small demonstrations.
Villaverde, who has studied Brazil’s history of accusations, said he believes Bolsonaro was on the ropes two years after his four-year term.
“We are now very, very close to the moment when all the conditions exist for an indictment process,” Villaverde said, pointing to the Covid-battered economy in Brazil, the existence of multiple impeccable offenses related to the pandemic and shaky support. a congress.
Persistent street protests and a major collapse in public support were still lacking, which would persuade members of Congress to abandon Bolsonaro. One of Brazil’s leading pollsters, Datafolha, claimed on Friday that Bolsonaro’s rejection had jumped by 8%, while support had dropped from 37% to 31%. An accusation process would become more likely if it were to drop to about 20%, Villaverde said.
The coming weeks could be of great importance for the political survival of Bolsonaro, with the distribution of emergency coronavirus benefits from the government ending on Wednesday.
“We are on the verge of a very, very serious social problem,” Villaverde said. “Millions and millions of Brazilian men and women will be left indifferent in the middle of a second wave if we are already 15 million unemployed.”