I woke this morning at dawn and reached for my phone with a sense of dread. The news, of course, was bad. Brazil, my country of birth, had moved a step closer towards electing a far-right president: Jair Bolsonaro of the Social Liberal party (PSL), who won 46% of the first-round presidential vote, with Fernando Haddad of the leftwing Workers’ party (PT), trailing behind at 28%. Millions of Brazilians across the world either despaired or cheered. WhatsApp is currently aglow with transcontinental family disputes. I delete my relatives’ offensive comments on Facebook, as standard. My mother threatens to never return home again. I haven’t seen Brazilians so divided in my life.

Brazilians are looking for change – but they are looking in the wrong place.

I haven’t lived in Brazil since I was a child, so I became aware of Bolsonaro as a presidential hopeful relatively recently – in early 2017, when he made an appearance at the Clube Hebraica Rio, a Jewish social club in Rio de Janeiro, where I was born. In his speech, he promised that if he became president, he would remove funding for NGOs; that every household in Brazil would own a gun; that there wouldn’t be “a centimetre” left for indigenous and quilombola reservations (quilombolas are the descendants of escaped slaves). The crowd of Jewish Brazilians – members of my mother’s community – responded with rabid cheers. Outside, leftwing Jews protested in disgust. I was horrified, but it seemed far-fetched that someone with such extreme views would be able to galvanise the entire country, far beyond that small crowd. How wrong I was.

Bolsonaro is Trump on steroids. He’s not a dog-whistler; he makes no attempt to hide his hateful, ill-informed views about women, gay people, indigenous communities and poor people, and his nostalgia for the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. He’s not alone in this nostalgia – a 2017 survey indicated that 43% of Brazilians support military intervention into government affairs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jair Bolsonaro in Rio de Janeiro. Photograph: Mauro Pimentel/AFP/Getty Images

I was born at the tail-end of the dictatorship, hearing stories from my parents, who were active against the regime when they were medical students. They were stories of fear and censorship; of friends and teachers being dragged out of university by police; my father was arrested and beaten; their friends were tortured – all of them teenagers, “just children”, as my mother puts it. After we moved to London, these stories seemed to ebb into the distant past.

Slowly, over the years, Brazil’s economy began to thrive. PT’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was president from 2003 to 2011, introduced several measures to improve racial and economic equality.

Now, of course, Lula is in prison for corruption. The idea of Brazil as a thriving Bric country has been swiftly forgotten. Violence is on the rise. The Brazilian Forum of Public Security (BFPS) recently reported that the country broke its own record for murders in a single year after 63,880 people were killed in 2017 – an increase of 3%. Reported rapes are up by 8%. Every day an average of 14 people are killed by police officers. Earlier this year, President Michel Temer handed over control of public security in Rio de Janeiro to the military. No wonder Brazilians are looking for change – but they are looking in the wrong place.

In Brazil, only the grandest of coalitions can now defeat Bolsonaro Read more

I grew up in London, often feeling resentful that my parents had brought me here; even with all my privileges, being a young immigrant was a confusing, sorrowful experience. This resentment softened a long time ago, but in the last few weeks, it has vanished entirely. I’m utterly grateful to be here, and not there – particularly now, as I prepare to become a mother for the first time. My heart goes out to those who may have to raise their children in a country whose president thinks it’s OK to tell a female colleague that he wouldn’t rape her, because she’s not worthy of it; a man who wants to revoke the rights of indigenous people, after centuries of suffering; who is pro-torture; who once told Stephen Fry, in an interview, that gay people are trying to convert children and expresses extreme homophobic views.

I can only hope that my fellow Brazilians will see the light in the next few weeks, before it’s too late, and my beautiful homeland trudges back to the darkness of its past.

• Luiza Sauma is a journalist and author of Flesh and Bone and Water. She was born in Rio de Janeiro and lives in London