169 Ruling Through Chaos in Brazil: Bolsonaro’s Authoritarian Agenda for Public Health Carolina Alves Vestena Introduction Brazil has been making headlines not only because of the deforestation and the wildfres in the Amazonian rainforest but especially because of the economic crisis and the catastrophic management of the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. After a period of democratic recovery post-dictatorship and 13 years of a social democratic government of the Workers’ Party, Brazil faces once more a highly authoritarian ruling project under President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro’s way of ruling is characterized by a profound personalism and priori- tization of his own interests. Although he was elected in 2018 as a member of the Social Liberal Party (Partido Social Liberal – PSL), he left this party by the end of the frst year of government due to an internal leadership crisis and alleged corrup- tion affairs (Mazui and Rodrigues 2019). Party changes are not, however, a novelty in his political pathway. Since the beginning of his political career as a regional deputy in the State of Rio de Janeiro in 1989, Bolsonaro has been in eight different parties. 1 He remained member of the Christian Social Party for a long period (between 2005 and 2016) and, then, in 2016 moved again to the PSL for the elec- tions of 2018. Currently he is striving to create a new party named “Alliance for 1 Jair Bolsonaro was a member of the following parties during the respective periods: 1989–1993, PDS (Partido Democrático Social); 1993–1995, PPR (Partido Progressista Reformador); 1995–2003, PPB (Partido Progressista Brasileiro); 2003–2005, PFL (Partido da Frente Liberal); 2005–2005, PP (Partido Progressista); 2005–2016, PSC (Partido Social Cristão); 2016–2018, PSL (Partido Social Liberal); and 2019, Aliança Brasil (Mazui and Rodrigues 2019). C. A. Vestena () Institute for Development and Peace, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany e-mail: carolina.vestena@uni-kassel.de © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Falkenbach, S. L. Greer (eds.), The Populist Radical Right and Health, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70709-5_10