Look, cards on the table: I don’t know for certain, and nor do you, whether Flávio Bolsonaro – the man widely tipped to become the next president of Brazil after Sunday night’s election – really did steal an island from Richarlison. There are lawyers involved, claims and counter-claims, and in any case, adjudicating land ownership disputes between right-wing strongmen and Tottenham reserve-team strikers lies very much beyond this column’s spectrum of expertise. It’s why, for example, this newspaper took no official position on the well-publicised battle between Rodrigo Duterte and Vincent Janssen over that Polynesian isthmus.
According to Richarlison, a few years ago he purchased an island off the southern coast of Rio de Janeiro, and has the documentation to prove it. Richarlison says Bolsonaro tried to buy it from him, and when he refused a lawyer named Willer Tomaz simply turned up and annexed it. Tomaz has accused Richarlison of lying, arguing that he has a public deed registered at the notary’s office.
Bolsonaro, for his part, has denied any connection with the island in question and described Richarlison’s intervention as “politically motivated”. All of which offers just the tiniest sliver of insight into an election that – in common with most modern Brazilian elections – has by turns been rancorous, divisive, wildly surreal and littered with contested facts, where the fake news sounds real and the real news often sounds fake. They just create entertainment content about politics.” And this being Brazil, of course, it has been an election indelibly inflected by the ultimate entertainment content: football, its symbols and tropes, its ability both to explain and reflect a country torn along multiple planes.
As president, Flávio’s father Jair – a deeply weird ex-military man who refers to his four sons by number – made a concerted effort to politicise the yellow national team shirt, appropriating it as an emblem of his campaign and wearing it at rallies. Numerous footballers – Neymar, Ronaldinho, Rivaldo, Dani Alves, Thiago Silva, Lucas Moura – allied themselves explicitly or tacitly to his cause. In part this can be explained by the wider appeal of the Bolsonaros within Brazil’s evangelical Christian community, from which 20 of the 26 players in Brazil’s World Cup squad this summer came.
Many are followers of neo-Pentecostalism, a highly commercialised brand of evangelism fuelled by 24-hour TV preachers, megachurches and vast ostentatious displays of material wealth, in which the individual is cast as the architect of their own fate. The disaffected young urban men from which both Bolsonaros draw their base have little use for the minimum wage increases or welfare programmes established by current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. They dream not of union membership but entrepreneurialism and influencer clout, conceive of society not as a collective struggle but as a game with winners and losers, where the aim is not to build order but to conquer the chaos.
In this world Neymar – currently whiling away the last of his fading light at Santos – is not a cautionary tale, a potential all-time great footballing career that essentially disintegrated into frivolity and waste. In this world Neymar is an aspirational hero, a man who accumulated wealth and celebrity status beyond his wildest dreams, and did it all with a defiant wink, by apologising to nobody. Neymar has, of course, publicly backed the younger Bolsonaro before this election.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
