It has taken almost a year since the start of the pandemic, but now the popularity of the president of Brazil is starting to waver. Here I am. The South American country has recently passed the threshold of 200 thousand dead and it is one of the hardest hit also in terms of the economic crisis, given that according to a recent study by the Ministry of Citizenship as many as 14 million families, i.e. about 40 million people live below the poverty line. An alarming fact, for a country that a decade ago had been the driving force of South America, and which was "sterilized" for a few months thanks to the subsidies of 600 reais a month (about 90 euros) that Bolsonaro himself had allocated as a response to the emergency, while denying it from a health point of view. But in December the aid program was terminated and it is no coincidence that a very recent poll, dated January 22, saw the president's approval rating drop from 37 to 26%.
And yet, until a few weeks ago the figure remained very high, despite the evidence of disastrous management. Many will remember Bolsonaro's delusional statements on Covid last spring, when he called it "a small flu" and dismissed the tragedy by saying that "sooner or later we will all die". Not even the positivity recorded by the president last summer made him change his mind, and despite everything still in September (when the virus had already caused 100 deaths in the country) 40% of Brazilians even considered the work of the former army captain to be excellent. Now, however, the tide is changing: the subsidies have ended and the emergency has broken out again in the Amazon, especially in the capital Manaus where a few days ago there was even no oxygen to assist patients in hospitals. Oxygen which then arrived from Maduro's Venezuela.
Furthermore, Bolsonaro is losing strokes on the vaccine match. After having denied its usefulness, saying that he would not have done it and that "Brazilians will not be anyone's guinea pigs", he had to partially retrace his steps and recently the Ministry of Health has finally launched a campaign, agreeing with the Sinovac Chinese laboratory for the production in Brazil of 100 million doses. However, the Chinese vaccine is considered one of the least reliable, given that the initially announced efficacy was 78% (much less than 95% of the Pfizer serum distributed in Europe), subsequently lowered even to 50%. That is, in one out of two cases the vaccine would not be effective in protecting against Covid. However, the move was above all political, because before the ministry, the governor of the state of São Paulo, Joao Doria, had tried to launch the campaign, a centrist exponent whose popularity is growing so much as to probably make him Bolsonaro's challenger in the 2022 presidential elections.
Precisely for this reason Bolsonaro wanted to anticipate Doria's time, but at the moment this is not enough for him: after almost a year of denialism, 200 dead and a population reduced to starvation, for him it seems almost time for the showdown.
