Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro appeared to take a step back from the ledge Thursday night, issuing a conciliatory statement two days after pledging to ignore Supreme Court rulings and declaring that only God could remove him from office.
Game status: Bolsonaro addressed on Tuesday, Brazil’s independence day, rallies of about 100,000 followers in Brasilia and São Paulo. They were thought of as a show of strength, with their sliding approval ratings and investigations against him piling up.
- “A lot of people were prepared to commit violence for Bolsonaro,” said Gustavo Ribeiro, the editor-in-chief of the Brazilian Report, which covered the rallies. He spoke with Brazilians who had been confident of storming the Supreme Court building in a January 6 uprising.
- Bolsonaro’s dispute with the court began in 2019 with an investigation into troll armies on social media, and several subsequent investigations have led to Bolsonaro and his associates.
- After Bolsonaro began launching attacks on the electoral system (threatening to reject any election that was not held with paper ballots), the high court opened new investigations that could make him ineligible to run, Ribeiro told Axios. “That’s when it became an MMA fight.”
The last: Bolsonaro said in the statement that he had spoken “in the heat” and that he had no intention of attacking the Supreme Court. Brazil’s currency rose after it appeared Bolsonaro would not deepen the crisis.
- “[I] would guess the explicitly challengable nature of Bolsonaro’s threat this week to disobey Supreme Court rulings, & [the growing] support for Congress and the pro-impeachment political elite contributed to that decision, “an American Quarterly editor, Brian Winter, posted on Twitter.
What to see: Ribeiro says Bolsonaro has committed multiple crimes attributable, but “has done a bit of snooker in the political establishment.”
- “Do nothing and just let him move the goals more and more? Or do you opt for large-scale confrontation and then exponentially increase the risks of an abrupt rupture? “
- “It’s a loss-for-loss situation now,” he says.
Although Bolsonaro is willing to take a step back, your followers may not be.
- Bolsonaro met Thursday evening with protest leaders of pro-Bolsonaro truckers who have blocked roads across the country, Reuters reports.
- Bolsonaro was initially reluctant to disallow the blockades despite the economic implications, but eventually did so in an audio message last night.
- Some truckers did not believe the message was really from Bolsonaro. And one of the leaders who met with Bolsonaro told Reuters he did not tell them to stop.
Meanwhile, Monday, Bolsonaro issued a decree temporarily banning social media companies from removing most content without a court order – the first time such a policy has been attempted nationwide, according to the NYT.
- Social media giants have not said whether they will comply and the move could be blocked in the courts.
- The background story: YouTube has removed several of Bolsonaro’s videos to include erroneous information about COVID-19. He and his supporters have also spread messages warning that the 2022 election will be rigged.