The former foreign minister of Brazil, Celso Amorim, compared President Jair Bolsonaro’s threats to the Supreme Court with the lawfare maneuvers that led to the removal of Dilma Rousseff and the imprisonment of Lula da Silva. “Bolsonarismo is a virus that took advantage of the lawfare infection”Amorim told Télam. He also highlighted that “Brazil is the epicenter of the international extreme right” and compared Bolsonaro to former US President Donald Trump.
After the mobilization carried out in Brasilia, the also former Defense Minister of the Lula da Silva government said that “If Bolsonaro sought to generate fear, that did not happen”. “Bolsonaro again launched a threat to the Supreme Court directed at a judge who is investigating him and who ordered the arrests of military police,” said Amorim, who added that the protests in Brasilia saw an important but not so significant public attendance: “There were many truckers and people linked to agribusiness”.
Amorim remarked that Bolsonaro “He didn’t make a big impression, he plays with fear of a possible blow but I don’t know if he has the strength to do it.” In any case, the former Brazilian foreign minister does not rule out “that he could promote a coup to survive, to avoid impeachment.”
After clarifying that it is necessary to await the evolution of the political and institutional crisis that Brazil is going through, Amorim warned that the challenge of the next government will be to resolve the deep division of Brazilian society. “The blows of the lawfare were overcome but now there is that of Bolsonaro. Society is very hurt”, he raised.
To close that deep rift, Amorim fully trusts former President Lula. “He is a great negotiator. Many people who were against him or against Dilma could be accommodated in a future government of Lula. That could generate a great national reconciliation,” he said.
The former foreign minister said that Brazil suffered two coups in recent years: the first against Rousseff and then the imprisonment of Lula. “Only an election with a good majority, which I think Lula is likely to obtain, can help to pacify the situation a bit.”, he expressed.
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