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It would be hard to imagine stranger bedfellows than Ronaldinho and Jair Bolsonaro. Ronaldinho became a global icon in the 2000s, his carefree manner on the pitch belying an enormous talent that made him the best footballer in the world before the emergence of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. He was the son of a dockyard worker who died when he was just eight and grew up in poverty in Porto Alegre. Bolsonaro, by contrast, is the champion of Brazil’s rich — a bombastic far-right politician who has made his career directing insults at women, gay people, and ethnic minorities. And yet, in the increasingly bizarre world of Brazilian politics, the two have been drawn together. In December, Ronaldinho met with Bolsonaro and was pictured holding his book — an endorsement for his presidential campaign that drew headlines across Brazil. In the days that followed he was even rumored to be a possible senate candidate for Bolsonaro’s Patriota party, although both parties maintain that has yet to be agreed. The backdrop to this unlikely story is the turbulence produced by the 2016 parliamentary coup against Brazilian president Dilma Rouseff. For the right wing, her removal was meant to vindicate antipetismo, a fanatical belief that Dilma’s Workers’ Party (PT) was the root of Brazil’s corruption problems. The wave of corruption allegations which followed Dilma’s removal, embroiling even her historically unpopular successor, did little to give credence to their thesis. For the country’s left, the episode was filled with injustice — trumped-up charges of budgetary mismanagement, cast as corruption by a hostile press, used to depose an elected leader. But it also brought home how much the Left’s popularity had waned in the thirteen years the PT had been in power, with neither the party itself nor other forces on the Left capable of mounting an effective opposition to the coup. The saga has contributed greatly to disillusionment with the country’s political system. Earlier this year a Fundação Gétulio Vargas survey found that 83 percent disapproved of the government, 78 percent of political parties, and the same figure for politicians in general. 55 percent said they would not vote for an incumbent again. This set the stage for a dangerous new dynamic in Brazilian politics — the rise of anti-politics and far-right populism.

Right on the Rise To date, Jair Bolsonaro has been the most prominent beneficiary of this trend. A former army captain during Brazil’s dictatorship and seven-term Member of Parliament, he has made a career courting controversy with bigoted remarks. Notoriously, in 2003, he told a PT congresswoman she wasn’t deserving of rape when she raised its use by the dictatorship against women political prisoners. This has been supplemented over the years by incidents in which he described women politicians as “sluts” and “dykes,” pronounced he would prefer to see his son dead than gay, and said black activists were “animals” who should “go back to the zoo.” Most recently he dedicated his 2016 vote to impeach Dilma Rousseff to Carlos Brilhante Ustra, a colonel who headed the torture program during the country’s military dictatorship. Dilma, a former Marxist guerrilla, had been one of the program’s victims — a fact Bolsonaro knew too well, referring to the colonel as “the source of Dilma’s dread.” Despite his lack of political program, Bolsonaro is gaining ground ahead of 2018’s presidential election. In the latest opinion polls from Datafolha, he appears in second place behind former president Lula, attracting between 17 and 18 percent of the vote. With the distinct possibility that Lula will be ineligible to run — pending his corruption conviction being upheld by an appeals court this month — Bolsonaro may enter the race as favorite. Without Lula, he leads the field on between 21 and 22 percent. Bolsonaro’s base is well-defined — younger men from middle and upper-class backgrounds, with greatest concentration among evangelicals, whites, and those in his native southeast. But its narrowness is also likely to prove an obstacle to his progression in any presidential race: three times as many men as women pick him as their preferred candidate, while Lula draws four times as much support among the poor. This shouldn’t be surprising for a candidate who revels in authoritarianism. Bolsonaro not only justifies the country’s history of dictatorship, he promises brutal solutions to Brazil’s current security problems. In 2016, there were 61,619 violent deaths recorded in the country, the highest number on record. Bolsonaro’s response to this has been to propose an escalation of police violence, saying that officers would receive “medals not trials” for killing criminals. He has also said that police should be given a “carte blanche to kill” and, most recently, that “a police officer who does not kill is not a police officer.” Bolsonaro has also managed to build a reputation as incorruptible, one of the few politicians in the spotlight not to be affected by the scandals of recent years. This, though, may reflect more his nickname, “the myth,” than reality, given questions about his involvement with a gold mining project during his days in the military. His political program is no more substantive, offering few solutions for a Brazilian economy that has dipped in and out of recession for a number of years. The flimsy policy platform he presented to Bloomberg in October was intended to provide evidence of his growing sophistication in this area — but instead prompted the business magazine to draw attention to his “superficial understanding” of economics. Despite its lack of specifics, however, its broad contours were clear: Bolsonaro would support privatization, increased US involvement in the Brazilian economy, and continued pension reform. But getting this message out by traditional means will prove difficult. Due to its minuscule size, Bolsonaro’s Patriota party will only be allocated a small amount of airtime on state-sanctioned political broadcasts. As a result, his campaign will rely heavily on a strong social media presence. Bolsonaro’s official Facebook page has a total of 4.8 million likes, in comparison to Lula’s 3 million, and has 93.4 million interactions to Lula’s 66.4 million since 2014. This profile is supplemented by his rabid and faithful online following, sometimes known as the Bolsominions. Echoing his demagoguery and aggressive approach to political discourse these followers are organized into massive Facebook groups, often numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and are likely to play a significant role in the 2018 campaign. According to academic researcher Peterson Fernandes, who recently wrote about time he spent monitoring the groups, they are mobilized “as a matter of routine” against stories and personalities that criticize Bolsonaro. It is with the importance of this social media campaign in mind that Bolsonaro has courted celebrity endorsement — a path which led him to Ronaldinho.

Football and the Far Right It is difficult to describe just how good Ronaldinho was to people who never saw him play. His skill, creativity, and joyful attitude to the sport mesmerized fans during his heyday in the mid-2000s. Playing for Barcelona, he was far and away the best player in the world, a fact even their fiercest rivals couldn’t deny. In November 2005, Ronaldinho scored twice as Barcelona ran out winners at the Bernábeu, home to their traditional enemies Real Madrid. His performance was so spectacular that after scoring his second goal, in which he slalomed past the opposing defense before curling a shot beyond the goalkeeper, he received a standing ovation from the Real Madrid support. However, despite his incredible talent, which twice saw him voted World Footballer of the Year, Ronaldinho’s lack of dedication was always his weakness. He loved playing football, but not being a professional footballer. This took its toll when, during his final season at Barcelona, he suffered a string of muscle injuries and showed a general disinterest in returning to full fitness. He lost his stamina and crucial burst of acceleration, and was transferred to Italian club AC Milan in 2008. There, he gained weight, indulged in the playboy lifestyle for which he had become known and lost his place in the Milan team. He later had spells in Brazil with Flamengo and Atlético Mineiro, where he showed some flashes of his genius but struggled to remain fit and consistent. His last good season came in 2013, when he helped Atlético Mineiro win the Copa Libertadores, South America’s most prestigious club competition. But despite his success there remains an asterisk beside Ronaldinho’s football career: he was such a special player and brought joy to millions, but he could have been so much better. But if his career ended disappointingly, it was nothing compared to his first foray into politics. Throughout his playing days, Ronaldinho never discussed politics, always giving the impression that he had never given the matter much thought. While he has never been associated with the Brazilian left, his lifestyle and attitude towards the game seemed more suited to the bohemian and often left-leaning footballers of Brazil’s history than to the far right. This was especially the case given his upbringing. Born poor in the Vila Nova favela in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, a region where only 17.7 percent of the population declares as non-white — in comparison to 52.5 percent nationwide — Ronaldinho grew up with his parents and older brother in a wooden shack. His father held two jobs: working at the Porto Alegre shipyards and moonlighting as a security guard at the stadium of local club Grêmio, where Ronaldinho would get his first professional contract in 1998. He died in an accident when Ronaldinho was just eight. But his childhood poverty isn’t the only factor that makes Ronaldinho an unlikely ally of Bolsonaro. Ronaldinho, like the vast majority of Brazil’s great players, is black and even suffered racist abuse in his career. In 2014, upon signing for Mexican club Querétaro, a local politician sparked controversy when he referred to him as a “monkey.” While playing for Barcelona, he threatened to leave the field when his Cameroonian teammate Samuel Eto’o was the target of racist chants from opposing fans. Bolsonaro has a long history of making inflammatory racist remarks. While giving a lecture at a Jewish social club in Rio de Janeiro this April, he commented upon a visit he made to a quilombo, countryside communities originally founded by escaped slaves. He claimed that “the lightest black person there weighed seven arrobas,” a unit of weight used historically for slaves. He went on to say that the quilombo residents “aren’t even good for breeding anymore” and that the government is wasting money by helping these communities. In 2011, he appeared as a guest on a popular Brazilian primetime TV show and, when discussing the racial quota policy in Brazilian public universities, he declared that he “would not board a plane piloted by a cotista [a beneficiary of the racial quota policy, literally a “quotist”], nor be operated on by a cotista doctor.” He would later argue that the country’s National Indigenous Foundation was stealing land from whites to “give away to blacks and Indians.” Ronaldinho is far from the first Brazilian footballer to endorse Bolsonaro’s demagoguery. Felipe Melo, formerly of the Brazilian national team and currently playing for São Paulo club Palmeiras, posted a video on social media on International Workers’ Day earlier this year, praising the far-right candidate. “God bless all the workers and beat up the deadbeats, set Bolsonaro on them!” Melo snarled, in a tone befitting his aggressive and often violent personality on the football pitch. Days later, another former Brazilian national team player, Jadson (who plays for Palmeiras’ rivals Corinthians) joined Melo in support of the Patriota candidate, stating that he had “seen some of [Bolsonaro’s] interviews on YouTube and he seems to be a good person.” He went on to say that if Bolsonaro were to run for president, he would vote for him, citing the candidate’s “fight to preserve family values” as his justification. Melo and Jadson’s support for Bolsonaro could be explained by the fact that both are evangelical Christians, a segment of the population with which Bolsonaro holds significant support. Though Bolsonaro defines himself as Catholic, he recently traveled to Israel where he was baptized in the Jordan River by an evangelical pastor. He has since made Christian fundamentalism a key part of his platform in an attempt to gain support from a group which has, for decades, sought to gain control over the country’s presidency to defend its “Judeo-Christian heritage.”