The Army General Staff has already turned away from him: is the Trump of the Tropics falling into the epidemic?

The government was beheaded by the president and then resigned by the staff

Earlier this week, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro carried out his biggest change of government to date, firing six ministers at a time. Two weeks earlier, the health minister had already been replaced, with the fourth politician consumed by the country at the head of the ministry since the outbreak. It also shows that one of the drivers of the change of government is the epidemic in Brazil, the country is also among the most affected by the epidemic worldwide.

After a major change of government on Tuesday, practically all Brazilian army personnel voluntarily resigned, the heads of the three arms, the army, the navy and the air force, left. According to information from The Guardian, the generals met with the new defense secretary on Tuesday and then, after discussion, decided that they would all resign. According to the local newspaper Folha de Sao Paolo, it has never happened before in Brazilian history that the top three army generals resigned because they disagreed with the president.

According to the news, the Defense Minister was replaced by the President because they differed as to who the army should be loyal to. The head of the ministry declared that they were serving the constitution instead of the president, and the generals seem to have agreed with him. According to a local Guardian correspondent, the debate may suggest that

Bolsonaro was trying to gain more influence within the military and engage the personnel at his side, but the generals did not want to help with that.

This, in turn, indicates that there is a layer within the military that rejects the author’s authoritarian methods and is unwilling to support him in anything that may be a major factor in the future.

The epidemic is sweeping, the president no longer jokes

One of the starting points for the government shakeup was that the coronavirus epidemic would hit Brazil prominently, with more than 300,000 people killed as a result of the disease so far. And the third wave hasn’t even peaked in Brazil, with 2,780 deaths on Tuesday at a new record since the epidemic broke out.

Globally, Brazil has so far registered the second most infected place, with 12.6 million infected with the coronavirus. More people have gotten sick in the United States alone in the last good year. The Brazilian health authority, Fiocruz, recently drew attention to the fact that more and more infections are registered among young people, and the proportion of young adults is also increasing in the intensive care units of hospitals.

The country is now in a situation where the health care system has collapsed just as the virus is taking more and more victims among young people.

– He stood up in the Fiocruz statement. The authority noted that they had seen a six-fold increase in the number of patients in their forties compared to the beginning of the year.

According to a BBC article, the foreign minister may have failed in the country’s poor relations with China, India and the United States, which could have contributed to Brazil’s lack of access to sufficient vaccines.

Bolsonaro could even fall for this

President Jair Bolsonaro has treated the coronavirus in an “interesting” way since the outbreak. At first, he opposed all restrictive measures, arguing that their economic damage was greater than the effects of the epidemic. He also simply asked the people of the country to “stop whining” about the coronavirus.

Then, watching the epidemic curve get rougher, last week the president marked 2021 as a “vaccination year,” with a sharp turnaround, having previously rejected all types of vaccines and supported alternative therapies. Now, Bolsonaro also points out that vaccines will soon allow Brazilians to return to their normal lives.

The fact that support for Bolsonaro is falling, in part due to mismanagement of the epidemic, will also contribute to change, and elections will be held in a year and a half. According to a poll conducted by the Datafolha poll in mid-March, 43% of people believe that the president is responsible for the epidemic. 54% of those surveyed rate Bolsonaro’s performance in treating the epidemic as bad or very bad, compared with 48% in January. At the same time, the president continues to have the support of about 30 percent of the population.

Overall, the BBC’s Latin American correspondent says Bolsonaro is experiencing his biggest political crisis these days since his inauguration in January 2019.

The question is if Bolsonaro does not vote peacefully next October, a political expert who told The Guardian could easily see events like the one in the United States in January this year when supporters of Donald Trump stormed the Capitol to prevent Joe Biden. was installed. And in a situation like this, the question is where the military would rank if the president now replaced staff with loyal supporters, but that would keep his critics within the military.

But who could be a potential winner for Bolsonaro in a year and a half? The president’s concerns are compounded by that the court recently dropped corruption charges against his predecessor, Luiz Ignacio Lula da SilvaMany hope that the leftist politician will stand in the elections against the current president in 2022. And that, experts say, would rewrite everything on the Brazilian political map.

Cover image: Andressa Anholete / Getty Images