Between Populism and Nationalism: an Ideational Approach on Jair Bolsonaro's Speeches (2019 - 2020)

Is Jair Bolsonaro a right populist President? And does his populism have any trace of nationalism? Although part of the Brazilian press and public opinion classifies him as a populist, little empirical research on the subject has been developed. At the same time, the literature has noted that populist attitudes tend to mix with nationalist behaviors (De Cleen, 2017), but it is not clear whether Bolsonaro can be considered nationalist. In this article, we analyze his official 2019 and 2020 speeches (n = 334) from the ideational approach in order to answer our research questions. The concept of populism is measured dichotomously: it is defined as a set of ideas based on a Manichean worldview which understands politics as a struggle between two homogeneous and antagonistic groups: the good, moral and honest people versus the corrupt, immoral and evil elite (Mudde and Kasltwasser 2017; Hawkings and Kaltwasser 2019). Nationalism is defined 1) in its classic form, that is, an antagonism between ‘us’ and ‘others’, 2) as sovereignty (against foreign nations and international institutions) and 3) thought in civilizing terms (De Cleen 2017, Brubaker 2017 and 2019). To observe Bolsonaro's level of populism and nationalism, we divided the speeches into paragraphs. We consider using paragraphs as a unit of analysis a useful strategy because (1) it allows us to observe variations in the degree of populism/nationalism of the president, (2) it helps avoid measurement errors that consider a speech to be populist without having found a clear dichotomy between two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, and (3) it does not underestimate populism when it does not appear in the same sentence. The data shows a far-right populist president, with nationalist positions that value some aspects of 'being Brazilian' and ‘Brazilian sovereignty’. In particular, Bolsonaro brought to national debate the threat to the traditional values of the national community, stressing anti-genderism as a central element in his speech. At the same time, he uses populist rhetoric to attack his political adversaries, left-wing ideologies, minorities, the media, and the Brazilian government. Finally, we found some authoritarian elements in his speech, especially his consistent attacks towards the electoral process, that became more often as the mismanagement of the pandemic crisis cause the decrease of the support for his administration and his potential defeat in 2022 elections, according to recent public opinion surveys; and also because his proximity to the Armed Forces. We have been seeing the ability of the Legislative Lower House holding back his agenda, but our data does not allow us to foresee if his attacks against democratic institutions will represent a major problem if he is defeated in the upcoming elections.