The Military as a Moderating Power: a study with Bolsonaro supporters in São Paulo

Abstract

The election of far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro as president in 2018 marked the end of the two-party (PT and PSDB) dominance in presidential elections since 1994 and the return of a self-declared right-wing politician to power, which had not occurred since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. In the city of São Paulo, a region that stretches from the beginning of its East Zone towards the North Zone, had been identified as a stronghold for the conservative right-wing vote (Pierucci, 1999) in the 1985 mayoral elections and 1986 governor elections. While this trend disappeared in subsequent elections with the lack of competitive conservative right-wing candidates, this region returned as a main area of support for Bolsonaro in São Paulo for the 2018 presidential elections. This research returned to this region and sought to understand the views of this electorate and what their motivations to vote for Bolsonaro were. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with voters who canvassed for Bolsonaro in the 2018 elections, and who are residents in the aforementioned region, as well as ethnographic observations from right-wing demonstrations, which were performed to recruit interviewees and to learn more about their agenda. This presentation discusses some of the findings of this research, in particular the role of the military in the view of these interviewees. Overall, they see the military regime period as positive; associating it with virtues such as “order”, “discipline”, “honesty”; and attribute to the armed forces a sort of “moderating power”, which means that, in their view, they can – and should – interfere in politics if the situation demands it, even at the cost of democratic institutions.