ST. PAUL. After ten years of absence, the amazing singer Marisa Monte has launched a new album and the towing song is called Calm; everything that today’s troubled and divided Brazil needs. The country is still in the midst of a pandemic, a second wave that has been going on for six months, but once again politics is inflaming minds, with the left back in the streets against President Bolsonaro, whose executive is under fire for a vaccine supply contract suspicious to say the least. The deal in question is between a small Texas-based company, Davati Medical Supply, and the federal government. The company would have proposed to sell 400,000 doses of the Astrazeneca vaccine in late February for a total of $ 6 billion. But, according to his local representative Luiz Paulo Dominguetti, the deal did not go through because a senior health ministry official told him that they would have to increase the price of each dose by a dollar; a bribe that should have gone under the table. An attempt at corruption, which is being investigated by the special parliamentary commission of inquiry which has been investigating the executive’s work on the pandemic for two months.
“I will leave – Bolsonaro said several times – when you find a case of corruption in my government.” Now many are asking for his head and even among the parties in the center of his convenience allies in Brasilia a certain unease is beginning to grow. Yesterday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in about two hundred cities to ask for an impeachment trial. There were the representatives of the left parties but also, and this is the first time this has happened, some moderate exponents, convinced that perhaps the tear may be possible. Bolsonaro, for his part, is going straight and has indeed radicalized his position. He denies any possible corruption and harangues almost every day I count the “enemies of the Fatherland” who would be ready, in his opinion, to make a coup or fraud in the next presidential elections, which are set for the end of 2022. He speaks to his hard core and mobilize his own, a la Trump, for the long electoral battle, which will be no holds barred. Although Brazil has an electronic voting system that has been praised for years all over the world, the president and his loyalists have long been calling for a return to manual ballots. “They can only beat us with fraud, we must eliminate the machines because they can be easily manipulated by hackers in the service of the left.”
To try to distract public opinion, football takes care of it, with the selection of Neymar and his teammates involved in the Copa America which is played between Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia. Brazil agreed to host it after Colombia and Argentina had forfeited the protests and the health situation. With empty stadium games broadcast in alternative channels to the powerful Rede Globo, openly against the government, Bolsonaro’s Copa, as it has been called, has reached the semi-finals; Brazil will face Peru, Messi’s Argentina will face Colombia. Bread and circus, a final victory will only favor him in view of the next elections. His opponent at the moment most quoted is the former president Lula da Silva cleared of all convictions for corruption. One is the opposite of the other, the two feed each other in a perspective of extreme polarization.
For many Brazilians, however, the hypothesis of a Lula-Bolsonaro run-off is the worst of scenarios and for some time they have been desperately looking for a third way to the center. The names circulated so far do not seem to be able to take off. The surprise could come from Eduardo Leite, moderate, 36, governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, one of the most conservative in terms of morals. Leite came out on a TV show this week. “I am a gay governor and not a gay governor, just as Obama was a black president and not a black president. I am proud of who I am, Brazil must finally overcome preconceptions of all kinds ». His speech was applauded by many, making him known outside his state. A starting point for launching on a national level.