It was 6.59am on Wednesday when Jair Bolsonaro fired off his first tweet of the day from what must rank as one of the most unusual campaign headquarters in political history.
“While they insist on fallacies, labels and this fixation with the word ‘dictatorship’, more than 14 million people are unemployed, citizens are held hostage in their own homes, there are 60,000 homicides and 50,000 women are being raped each year,” declared the far-right frontrunner to become Brazil’s next president. “This is what the people care about! It’s urgent!”
Sixty-eight minutes later, at 8.07am, a second, 241-character salvo emerged from the fifth floor of one of Brazil’s most exclusive hospitals.
“We want to rescue our long-lost values and get Brazil out of this swamp of violence and corruption they have put us in!” Bolsonaro told his 1.5 million Twitter followers. “Our country can’t take another four years [of this].”
They were just the latest Trumpian dispatches to emerge from São Paulo’s Israelita Albert Einstein hospital, where Bolsonaro has been staying after being stabbed on the campaign trail on 6 September.
When the rightwing populist was attacked – almost one month to the day before the 7 October vote – analysts and relatives alike predicted it would turbo-charge his bid for the leadership of Latin America’s largest country.
Fast-forward nearly three weeks and those predictions have largely come true. Bolsonaro continues to top polls with about 27% of the vote, compared with the 21% of his closest rival, Fernando Haddad from the Workers’ party (PT) of jailed former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
“As disastrous as it was for him personally … politically it was quite good for him,” said Brian Winter, a Brazil expert and the editor-in-chief of AmericasQuarterly.
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