Bolsonaro, it's your fault!

A crook is always a crook, and Bolsonaro is no exception. He has been trying to evade accountability for his words and actions for a long time, but eventually, the bill comes due. And it comes due heavily. 

Perhaps the captain imagines that his days as an obscure congressman are not over and that he can do as he always has: a boast here, a lie there, an irresponsibility a day, the laziness of someone who thinks he only owes explanations to others once every four years, when it's time to renew his mandate. This is made easier by never having left the electoral strongholds of the Military Village, the retired officers' clubs of the three branches of the armed forces, the widows of the dictatorship, and the militia-controlled strongholds in Rio de Janeiro. 

Now, however, as the occupant of the Palácio do Planalto (Presidential Palace), it is more difficult to rely on the short memory of the distinguished public and the ability to mold them with a handful of catchy pronouncements. The tricks that once worked no longer do. 

From the moment the pandemic began, Bolsonaro became obsessed with outsmarting everyone else. Firstly, he believed it would make people forget that Brazil was in a terrible situation, unable to handle an economic crisis that his own campaign had portrayed as easily solvable. He claimed that all it took was restoring "investor confidence" (through dismantling the 1988 Constitution) for the Brazilian economy to take off, something that never happened. 

Filled with nonentities, his government faltered in many areas and regressed in others. The fight against corruption and the firm hand against the lack of public security, promised and awaited by the population, also failed to materialize, buried by money laundering schemes, kickbacks, associations with organized crime, and the biased approach of an incompetent judge.

The captain saw a way out in the pandemic. That it would come in handy, that it would divert public attention from his administrative failures and serve as a reason to ask for more time, excusing his ineptitude. 

But the truly audacious move was bigger, a ploy to turn the pandemic into lemonade that he would drink with his cronies. From the height of his ignorance and arrogance, he bet that medicine and science were wrong and that the captain was the only one right (leading, naturally, this group of low-quality military men who cling to him). That the pandemic would be mild in Brazil. 

Bolsonaro never thought about the present or the immediate future of the disease. For him, only the day of victory mattered, which he assumed would soon come and on which he believed he would become a political millionaire. He imagined a double triumph: emerging from the worst health and economic crisis of the last hundred years as someone who knew how to respond to the virus and as a "man of vision" who prevented an "excess of worries" that would endanger the economy. It was just a little flu that wouldn't shake the economic foundation he was building. 

The latest Vox Populi poll shows that all these plans have gone wrong. Three months after the start of the epidemic in Brazil, the president's image is very poor, both in his response to the disease and in his management of the economy. The gamble of winning on both fronts has backfired. 

Since April, the proportion of people who positively evaluate his performance in dealing with the epidemic has fallen from 34% to 24%, while the opinion that it is "bad" or "terrible" has reached 49%. In other words, today, disapproval is double the approval rate.  

Three-quarters of those surveyed believe that the epidemic situation in Brazil would be better if Bolsonaro had not "encouraged people to leave their homes." Almost half, 48%, attribute to Bolsonaro the "sole responsibility" or "most of the responsibility" for Brazil having the second-highest number of deaths in the world. 

A slightly higher proportion, 52%, believe that the federal government is solely or primarily responsible for "thousands of small businesses going bankrupt and millions becoming unemployed." An even higher percentage, 58%, understand that the government "has an obligation to help small businesses during the crisis, but doesn't want to or isn't interested." 

Regarding the coronavirus and the economy, Bolsonaro only spoke nonsense to the vast majority of the population. Small minorities believe him: 16% think that the current situation of the epidemic "is less serious than they imagined at the beginning," the same percentage as those who think that "the economy will recover as soon as the pandemic is over." 

The captain's optimism is a source of ridicule for almost the entire country and the rest of the world. He thought he was very clever and that he would escape responsibility, but barely three months have passed and it has already caught up with him. In the eyes of most, he is responsible for what we are going through and will go through. 

Except for the bottom of the barrel that still supports him.