“I am Messiah, but i do not make miracles”

pandemic and political myth in the crisis of the Bolsonaro government

Abstract

The election of the current president of Brazil in 2018, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, represents an international trend, experienced in the last decade, of the rise of right-wing conservative and authoritarian governments. From his campaign to the presidential election, Bolsonaro and the bolsonarism have presented militarism and Pentecostal Evangelical religiosity as the basis of their spectacular media performance. These essential elements of bolsonarism translate into a form of social representation of the political of his predispositions to use the institute of the state of exception, whose consensus is built from narratives that articulate the political myths of conspiracy and salvationism with a Christian and anti-communist background, which he revisits the tradition of right-wing political cultures from the period of the Military Dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985), with the addition of new neoliberal motifs. This chapter analyzes, based on this speech, the performance and actions of the Bolsonaro Government and of bolsonarism during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Our approach articulates the theories and methods of Raoul Girardet and Ernst Cassirer to the speech act theory of the Collingwoodian school, taking as a political-philosophical basis the discussions on the tensions between Human Rights and the State of Exception.