“Brazil Above Everything, God Above Everyone”

Colonial Narratives are still routinely employed to make sense of developments in the Global South from a western-centric perspective. One example is the recent upsurge of (extreme) right-wing movements around the globe, which are often portrayed as simple variations of European or US-American developments. Jair Bolsonaro, the recently elected right-wing extremist President of Brazil, has for instance been repeatedly called the ‘Trump of the Tropics’. It is important, however, to acquire a more differentiated understanding of these developments in order to avoid oversimplifications, ethnocentric judgments and abridged responses to the challenges posed by them.The election of Jair Bolsonaro was the culmination of a long trajectory of political and economic crisis in Brazil. The presidential campaigns of all candidates revolved around possible explanations and solutions for the crisis. I analyzed Bolsonaro’s campaign material to identify narratives and frameworks that influenced his Presidential campaign. Videos from the social media accounts of Bolsonaro and PSL, the party for which he ran, as well as his government program were my main source. This core material was supplemented by references to Bolsonaro’s speeches, social media accounts and campaign events, which helped to illustrate and make sense of the results of the analysis.The research utilized an intersectional and decolonial perspective and the framework provided by the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse. The discursive elements identified by the approach (narrative structure, interpretative frames, classifications) structured the analysis of the concrete material. The central interpretative frames of the campaign were subsequently historically and geographically contextualized. This contextualization aids in questioning and complicating the aforementioned simplistic notion of Bolsonaro as a mere local modification of a quintessentially ‚Western‘ phenomenon. The central frames identified were a fight against ‚Gender Ideology‘, against ‚Communism‘ and support of the notion that Brazil is a ‚Racial Democracy‘. Finally, I brought these frames into a dialogue with the theoretical framework. It was shown that the campaign reifies colonial hierarchies and draws from eurocentric epistemologies, essentializing colonial structures of gender, class, race and sexuality as natural, national and god-given.