Brazil, we all reckoned, was one country that’s a leading light of what goes under the strange tag ‘Global South‘. Essentially, Brazil, regardless of government in place or quality of the national football team, was seen as standing by its own Latin American cultural credentials, a counterpart to much of the world otherwise awash with hard US soft power. For all its samba and Pele, though, it turns out that it’s just another copycat. Almost exactly two years after Donald Trump bhakts stormed the US Capitol building in Washington on January 6, 2021, to deny their big chief’s defeat in the presidential polls, hundreds of fanboys of defeated Brazilian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro invaded the Congress building, presidential palace and Supreme Court building on Sunday in Brasilia. The lack of originality was telling.
For those who have maintained that the ‘far-left’ and the ‘far- right’ are ‘two coins of the same side’ must admit now that at least in the 21st century – Bolshevik Russia and Emergency India in the 20th century are history now – the ‘far right’ are the worse losers. The equivalent to this soreness via muscle-flexing would have been if Brazilian fans had trashed Croat fans after losing to Croatia and crashing out of this World Cup. Thankfully, soccer is not American football the way some strands of Brazilian politics have become.
