THE CONSERVATIVE WAVE AND THE 2018 ELECTIONS IN BRAZIL
Contemporary Brazil; 2018 election; conservative wave.
The election of Jair Messias Bolsonaro to the presidency of the Republic in 2018 would be inserted in a broader phenomenon that has been identified by the name of conservative wave. The objective of this research is to analyze the possible relations between the conservative wave and the electoral victory of Bolsonaro. In order to do so, we investigate the recent trajectory of hegemonic disputes in Brazil, with the street protests of 2013 and 2015 as the framework for understanding the process of political and ideological formation of a new social field capable of replacing Lullism. We propose that a double movement was the basis of this historical process: on the one hand, structural changes in society that altered class dynamics and impacted cultural and political; on the other, the aggravation of a crisis of representativeness and trust that would have paved the way for the emergence of new social actors with an emerging worldview in the national context. The synthesis of these movements would be in the conformation of a national-political project that we defined as ultraliberal conservatism, a contradictory composition both programmatically and ideologically, aligning cultural conservatism with an economic ultraliberalism that borders on fanaticism.