Camila Rocha, Esther Solano, Jonas Medeiros, The Bolsonaro Paradox. The Public Sphere and Right-Wing Counterpublicity in Contemporary Brazil, Springer, Cham 2021, pp. 154, ISBN 978-3-030-79652-5

Abstract

The reviewed book is an exciting and in-depth analysis of the New Brazilian Right, precisely the Bolsonaro phenomenon. We are talking about a well-written book that handles an essential dose of information and boldly deeps into a complex and very topical issue.It is a must-read book if you want to know the emergence and consolidation of the New Brazilian Right, particularly the phenomenon known as Bolsonarism, where the authors reflect their eloquent mastery of this literature. As Marcos Nobre establish in the Foreword, "the book is simply one of the complete successful attempts to explain Bolsonaro and what he represents today in Brazil" (p. xii).The book's theme is within the studies on the radical right, political activism and public and counterpublics on the public sphere. Starting from the concept of public sphere conceived by Jürgen Habermas (1989), through a historical analysis of the bourgeois public sphere's development in key Western European countries, which produced studies on publics and counterpublics, authors will approach the study of the discursive strategy, called right-wing counterpublicity, that Bolsonaro and his supporters employed to explain Bolsonaro's victory to restore traditional hierarchies, values, and ways of life. From this point of observation, the authors propose a new explanatory frame to explain the rise of the New Brazilian Right, Bolsonaro's 2018 victory and Bolsonaro's first administration, that seeks to escape and avoids alternatives of the "populist explanation" in the "crisis of democracy" framework or "reductio ad fascimum" in the "fascist regression" framework.The book by Rocha, Solano and Madeiros is divided into five chapters, preceded by an introduction. It begins by pointing out that few political analysts took Bolsonaro's 2018 presidential candidacy seriously since the vast majority of them tried to explain his victory by referring to the unique circumstances surrounding his election.The thesis defended by the authors establish that those factors contributed to the rise of Bolsonaro to power. Still, it more profoundly requires going back in time, since the election of Bolsonaro was not the fruit of historical accident but rather the unprecedented result of similar political and social processes.To understand Bolsonaro's phenomenon, the book makes an exhaustive journey reconstructing the activity of the Brazilian right, active since 1940, until Bolsonaro's rise to power. In this historical journey, we must highlight the detailed study that authors make, especially in chapters two and three, of the trajectory of the Brazil right-wing, where provide relevant keys to understand its bridges with the new right-wing that would appear years later.The second chapter, divided into three parts, reconstructs the trajectory of the right that has been active since the 1940s, which its origins dated back to the contact network fostered over time by national and international pro-market think tanks, which were intimately linked to the expansion and the promotion of neoliberalism bas...