Brazilian President Bolsonaro spoke warning words about the corona virus in a TV speech last night. This is new: until now, Bolsonaro has constantly put the severity of the epidemic into perspective and criticized the measures that are also in force all over his own country. On Monday he demonstratively took to the streets in the capital Brasilia to mix with his supporters.
Now he calls the crisis “one of the greatest challenges of this generation”. Bolsonaro says he is deeply concerned about living under these restrictions, but also about the job losses that will result from the outbreak. The far-right president has reportedly been pressured by the military leadership to moderate his tone.
With this turn, Bolsonaro makes the same move as his American counterpart Trump, whom he admires greatly. It, too, initially denied the seriousness of the virus outbreak and even referred to it as a ‘hoax’, but now it prides itself on the measures taken in the US. “I got it right from the start,” he tweeted a week and a half ago.
Pots and pans protest
More than 40 percent of Brazil’s workforce is undeclared and cannot put money aside. The price of medicines in the country has frozen, Bolsonaro said it will take two months longer than announced.
During Bolsonaro’s speech, as in his previous speeches, there was a pots-and-pans protest: people rattled with kitchen utensils from their balconies and behind their open windows, shouting slogans like “Down with Bolsonaro!” and “Killer!”.
Last week, the president called Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, as “a flu” and called on “to resume normal life,” which was severely criticized. Twitter removed some videos in which Bolsonaro openly questions the need for quarantine measures.
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