Is Jair Bolsonaro a classic populist?
Is Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro a classic populist? This article tries to answer this question by testing whether the political discourse of Bolsonaro fits the tenets of two major theories of populism: Mudde and Kaltwasser’s and Laclau’s. We analyse the entire text of his presidential campaign platform to find that Bolsonaro’s discourse has almost no room for a ‘concept of the people’ or of nation, a fact that problematizes the bulk of the literature on populism, including its major theories. Conversely, his discourse is structured around the concept of corruption, which is tightly linked with a strong anti-left and anti-PT sentiment. It is corruption that connects the different regions (themes) of his discourse. We then run a computerized similarity analysis to confirm the central placement of corruption regarding the whole of his discourse and its different regions.
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