Brazil’s Coronavirus Crisis: Democracy Hanging by a Thread? 13 MAY 2020 By Flavia Bellieni Zimmermann Jair Bolsonaro has shown disregard towards the well-being of the Brazilian people, democratic institutions, the system of checks and balances, constitutional rights and freedoms, and freedom of the press. His raw display of egotism, insensitivity, ideological blindness, and hunger for power might prove to be excruciating amid a global pandemic. Since the beginning of the global pandemic, Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro downplayed the threat posed by the virus, declaring it was “a minor cold” and stating that he was not concerned about contracting the virus because of his “athletic physique.” When asked by the press about Brazil’s recent spike of coronavirus deaths, Bolsonaro brushed off criticism, answering: “So what? My name is Messiah [a reference to his middle name], but I cannot work miracles.” Brazil’s minister for foreign affairs, Ernesto Araujo, recently published an article in Metapolitica, an anti-globalisation blog, titled “Here comes the communist virus,” in which he declares: “The coronavirus wakes up again for the communist nightmare.” Araujo argues: “the virus appears, in fact, as an immense opportunity to accelerate the