BRAZIL’S SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM
President-elect Bolsonaro swept in from the far right
THE DIN IN BRAZIL’S LOWER HOUSE OF Congress was so loud the seven-term Congressman running for Speaker could barely be heard. His colleagues paid little attention, many speaking over him. Unperturbed, Jair Messias Bolsonaro forged on, waving a newspaper as he railed against his ineffective contemporaries.
The former army captain, then 62, won just four of the 504 votes that day in February 2017, a result that seemed to confirm his irrelevance in Brazilian politics. Yet an aide was streaming his diatribe live on Facebook, where it received 450,000 views and accelerated his nascent political movement. Just 21 months later, Bolsonaro has the full attention not only
