On the eve of Brazil’s elections, Bolsonaro turns the country’s bicentennial to his own ends
Lilia Moritz Schwarcz is senior professor at the Universidade de Sao Paulo, global scholar and visiting professor at Princeton University. She is the author ofOn this year’s Brazilian Independence Day, marking the 200th anniversary of the country’s break with Portugal, President Jair Bolsonaro gathered tens of thousands of supporters along the Esplanade of Ministries in Brasilia, the capital. The giant procession on Sept.
The country’s path to independence wasn’t a conventional one. In the early 1820s, Brazil was being ruled by Portuguese prince Dom Pedro , the son of King John VI of Portugal. The royal family had fled to Brazil after Napoleon A painting of Pedro I at Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia. The monarchy ended in a coup against the second emperor, Pedro II, in 1889.Members of Brazil’s defunct royal line hold the imperial flag at a 2018 gathering of the Braganças’ descendants in Rio de Janeiro.Sept. 7, when Pedro I declared independence in 1822, remains a day of celebrations like this one at Rio's Copacabana Beach. But the story of what exactly the emperor did and what it means has changed a lot.
Independence or Death, an 1888 painting by Pedro Americo, is displayed at the Paulista Museum in São Paulo. Also called the Cry of Ipiranga, the painting features Pedro I, middle, declaring the break from Portugal in the fields where the museum now stands.But the narrative hijackings would not end there.
Mr. Bolsonaro did the same thing again this year. He presented himself not as an emperor, but as a “myth” ; not as an authoritarian ruler, but as the guardian of order who must sometimes exercise force to keep things “on the straight and narrow.” In other words, his would be an “autocoup”: a coup d’état in which a lawfully elected head of state seizes power from the other branches of government, unafraid of nulling democracy.
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