Bolsonaro’s own party officially buried

Launched in 2019 as a way to institutionalize Bolsonarism, the project to create the Alliance for Brazil party is officially done. This month, the proposed party missed its two-year deadline to present electoral courts with 492,000 signatures from voters supporting its creation. The party, however, managed fewer than 200,000 — which will now be discarded.

If the plan to create the Alliance for Brazil is brought back to life, it would have to start from scratch once again.

The group would be Brazil’s first overtly far-right political party since the redemocratization. With the bold plan of being “not just a new party, but the greatest one in Brazilian history,” this now-defunct political family was full of extremist symbols.

The name itself is a nod to the National Renewal Alliance, the ersatz “political party” of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. On the country’s electronic voting machines, Alliance for Brazil intended to be represented by the code “38,” in reference to the .38 S&W revolver.

At first, political observers believed that Evangelical churches could help Mr. Bolsonaro to collect the necessary signatures, which didn’t materialize. Last year, the president said he had abandoned the project, and late in 2021 joined the Liberal Party, which has a long history of corruption scandals. 

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