Brazilian president tweeted pornographic clip reportedly filmed during carnival in apparent attempt to hit back at criticism

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has sparked outrage, disgust and ridicule after tweeting a pornographic video in an apparent attempt to hit back at criticism of his administration during this year’s carnival.

Revellers across the country have used the annual street party as an opportunity to protest against their extremist leader who is notorious for his homophobic and racist remarks, and whose landslide election last year horrified progressive Brazilians.

In the north-eastern town of Olinda, carnivalgoers reportedly showered a giant carnival doll of Bolsonaro with beer cans, blocks of ice and expletives.

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In Rio de Janeiro, members of one carnival group gathered outside Bolsonaro’s seafront home to denounce his family’s alleged ties with mafia gangs.

Dissenting partygoers up and down the country have uploaded footage of huge crowds chanting obscenities at Bolsonaro under the hashtag # EiBolsonaroVaiTomarNoCu, which politely translates as #GetScrewedBolsonaro.

The chants were heard even at the heart of Brazilian carnival, in Rio’s Sambadrome.

Bolsonaro, who basks in comparisons with Donald Trump, appears to have taken the criticism badly.

Brazilian culture had been “destroyed by decades of governments with a socialist slant”, he tweeted on Tuesday morning.

Later that night Bolsonaro went further, tweeting a sexually explicit clip – reportedly filmed during a carnival event in São Paulo – which showed one man pleasuring himself before being urinated on by another.

“I don’t feel comfortable showing it, but we have to expose the truth so the population can be aware and always set their priorities. This is what many street carnival groups have become in Brazil,” Bolsonaro tweeted to his 3.4 million followers.

Anger, perplexity and a slew of previously inconceivable headlines ensued in some of Brazil’s top news outlets.

“Bolsonaro shares video of man fiddling with his anus and suggests it is a common scene during carnival,” wrote the Folha de São Paulo broadsheet.

“A porno tweet embarrasses the government,” said a headline in O Globo.

The rightwing website O Antagonista was also unimpressed and used a two-word headline to denounce Brazil’s president as “the pornographer”.

Bolsonaro’s critics lambasted him.

“He is a fascist, but he is also a failure the likes of which we have never seen in the history of our country,” tweeted the Brazilian anthropologist Rosana Pinheiro-Machado.

“Where is the decorum and the respect?” wondered Mônica Francisco, a leftist congresswoman from Rio de Janeiro.

“A president should, at the very least, show some respect for the country’s greatest party. A party that is a symbol of our diversity and our culture,” Francisco added. “All he is showing with this … is that he doesn’t know how to deal democratically with the spontaneous protests against him [during carnival].”

As the internet storm raged, many in Bolsonaro’s online army of supporters expressed support for his position, using the hashtag #BolsonaroTemRazão –Bolsonaro is right.

“Did the president lie? The carnival is really like this, an open-air asylum,” tweeted one user.

Antônio Carlos Costa, a church leader and human rights activist, tweeted: “The president of the republic owes an apology to the nation.”

There was no sign of such an apology on Wednesday morning.

Instead, Bolsonaro posted a bizarre second message in which he wondered: “What is a golden shower?”

Bolsonaro’s politician son, Eduardo, followed that by retweeting his father’s offending video with the message: “The left is sick.”

“What does Jair Bolsonaro make you feel?” the writer Lula Falcão asked his followers on Twitter. “Fear, shame or pity?”

Additional reporting by Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro