Interview with Alain de Benoist (edited by Nicolas Gauthier)

Elected president of Brazil last October with over 55% of suffrages, Jair Bolsonaro has assumed his duties. The left, who multiplies the anathemas against him (homophobic, sexist, racist etc.), speaks of a new wave of "populism" and says that his victory makes all the "right and far right" of the world rejoice. She's part of it?

Not at all. Bolsonaro has certainly benefited from the current wave of populism and has captured the votes of the popular classes who previously voted for the Workers' Party; but populism, I want to remember that, it does not have a precise ideological content. It's just a style, a way of matching political supply and demand; and this style can be combined with very different ideologies (Luiz Inácio Lula, the former president, he was also a “populist”). The right always gets Pavlovian when it hears that "law and order" will be restored.. The problem is that the law can be unjust and that order is often a legal disorder.

Naturally I will be careful not to put Bolsonaro's intentions on trial. I sincerely hope that he can put an end to corruption and bring some calm to a country where it occurs 64.000 murders per year (over half a million in ten years). What I notice simultaneously, is that he was first and foremost the candidate of the financial markets (the Sao Paulo stock exchange jumped by 6% the day after his success), of multinationals, starting with Monsanto, as well as the lobby of large landowners (the ruralist bench); furthermore were the evangelical churches, controlled by North American tele evangelists and imbued with Zionist messianism, to have given him the most decisive support. Former Catholic, he himself converted to evangelism, by being symbolically baptized in the Jordan, In the 2016.

But what does he essentially reproach him for??

I listened to Bolsonaro's various speeches and carefully read his program, which I find dismaying in several ways. After deciding to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, he announced the construction of a new highway through the Amazon, the opening to oil and mining exploitation of territories from which the native inhabitants will be expelled, as well as the systematic promotion of industrial agriculture to the detriment of environmental protection. So that things are clear, moreover, it coldly suppressed the Ministry of the Environment, whose functions have been transferred to that of Agriculture, and announced the disappearance of the Ministry of Culture. On a social level, intends to resort to the almost complete privatization of public companies, install a pension system based on the capitalization of pension funds, lighten tax burdens for the most powerful industrial groups, multiply tax exemptions for the highest income groups and implement widespread deregulation of the financial sector. If there are gods in Brazil yellow vests, they will hardly find their advantages there!
In international politics, Bolsonaro has adopted the same line as Donald Trump for what is most contestable about it: transfer of the Brazilian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, unconditional support for Saudi Arabia and Israel, distrust towards Europe and hostility towards China and Russia. Add to this his declared nostalgia for the dictatorship that has reigned in Brazil since 1964 al 1985, which I really don't like at all. I have seen a number of military dictatorships established in the past, from Greek colonels to Argentine generals passing through Pinochet and hisChicago Boys”. I found them deplorable, one more than the other.

However, Bolsonaro is presented as a nationalist…

More than a nationalist, this character, humanly rather empty and unscrupulous, it is in reality, come Macron, a liberal. It is enough to look at his entourage. The strong man of his government, who accumulates five ministerial portfolios alone, and Paulo Guedes, co-founder of the investment bank BTG Pactual, an ultraliberal educated at the Chicago school, former student of Milton Friedman, who also founded the Millennium Institute, of orientation libertarian and favorable to the use of pesticides, before raging with the Chilean military dictatorship. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ernesto Araújo, he is an anti-ecological diplomat linked to the interests ofagro-business. The Minister of Agriculture, Teresa Cristina, is the representative of ruralist bench. The Minister of Education, Ricardo Vélez Rodriguez, a Colombian naturalized Brazilian, he is a disciple of Antônio Paim, a former communist intellectual turned ultraliberal. And their common guru, Olavo de Carvalho, is a “thinker” who resides in the United States, where he offers philosophy courses "online”.
For me these are crucial facts. On principle, I would never approve of a turn to the right that would be accompanied by a strong return to liberalism.
source – https://www.eurasia-rivista.com/lelezione-di-bolsonaro/