Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals

Academic Year 2020 – 2021

PANDEMIC BACKSLIDING
Autocratising discourse practices during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil
and the US

Dissertation submitted by
POL ALBERTI VIÑAS

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER’S IN INTERNATIONAL SECURITY

SUPERVISOR: Martin Shaw

Signature page

Pol Alberti Viñas

DNI 39389701Q

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on Pandemic Backsliding in Brazil and the US, entitled PANDEMIC BACKSLIDING
Autocratising discourse practices during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil and the US

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Place and date: Manresa, 15/09/2021

Word count: 9976

 Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Professor and supervisor Martin Shaw for his critical comments on
previous drafts as well as the advice and feedback provided that made the completion of this
research an enjoyable experience.

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CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. Literature review
2.1 Discursive practices of authoritarian regimes
2.2 Discursive practices of backsliding democracies
2.3 The role of the infodemic
3. Methodology
3.1 Foucauldian Discourse Analysis
3.2 Operationalisation
3.3 Case Selection
4. Case Study
4.1 Discursive Practices in Brazil
4.2 Discursive Practices in the US
5. Analysis
6. Conclusions
7. References

ii
Abstract

Since the early months of 2020, the world has been collecively battling against the devastating
pandemic of SARS COVID-19. However, some countries decide for themselves the extent and
the severity of health measures applied to stem the disease. Brazil and the US have suffered a
great deaths and infections amidst the rules of Presidents Donald J. Trump and Jair M.
Bolsonaro. The rise these two charismatic populist nationalist leaders has caused a great
increase in political polarisation. This study contributes to the debate with the perspective that
leaders in already backsliding democracies can use polarising discursive practices to
instrumentalise the pandemic to strengthen their grip to power and set the agenda for
autocratising the country’s government. The research will make use of Foucauldian Discourse
Analysis to capture and break down the discourses of both leaders that denote the construction
and reinforcement of power relations using the pandemic as a cornerstone. These official
discourses are also accompanied by another epidemic of misinformation which stems from non-
governmental sources and yet is utilised by both leaders to promote their agenda. The findings
reveal that both leaders indeed did use the pandemic in an attempt to promote themselves as
legitimate autocrats, largely by downplaying the disease and adopting a denialist stance which
served only to further rally the population who already showed support for them before the
pandemic, and caused a massive surge of political opposition both among the voters and public
officials.

KEYWORDS: Pandemic, COVID-19, discourse, discursive practices, Brazil, US, Trump,

Bolsonaro, polarisation, misinformation, democratic backsliding, autocratisation.

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 1. INTRODUCTION

We know from history that crises signify a turning point for human societies. That is because
every epidemic in history, from the black plague to tuberculosis to HIV has left a sizable mark
on humanity. Diseases have altered the course of social and political history and arguably have
helped in the creation of the modern state as we know it (Hammond 2020).

In accordance with various philosophical traditions within IR, the state is a sovereign political
entity that autonomously determines the fate of its populace and decides for the administration
of its territory (Kliem 2020). Despite the fact that international institutions like the World
Health Organisation foster cooperation between countries, there has been a tendency for some
states to exclusively take matters upon themselves when dealing with the pandemic (Kliem
2020). COVID-19 distinguishes itself from previous pandemics which happened in recent
decades, mainly because of its vast geographical pervasiveness and global socioeconomic
impact. While the WHO declared a worldwide emergency requiring some degree of draconian
policy, states have opted for all sorts of discursive practices that range from completely ignoring
to severely increasing the strength of those same WHO policy recommendations.

As the current pandemic has exposed a certain degree of nullity of IGOs in front of Westphalian
state sovereignty, the latter is reaffirmed as the main institution holding both de jure and de
facto power over its population, economy and territory. As a result of individual state policies
in various countries, every activity of normal life ceased amidst shuttered shops and rampant
unemployment (Hamid 2020). States’ discursive practices range from the swiftest and most
effective of measures of containment to poorly managed desperate policies. Autocratic regimes
like Turkey serve as an example of a mixed response to the emergency, with an initial denial of
the severity of the virus thoroughly propagated via state-sponsored media (Bakir 2020),
alongside a strong public health system that made the country resilient to the effects of the
pandemic once its government took it seriously (San, Bastug & Basli 2020). Iran on the other
hand failed to appropriately respond to the crisis by not enforcing effective quarantine measures
before the virus completely spread; making it a ‘perfect example of an authoritarian government
attempting to look competent and effective by keeping the numbers low and restarting the
economy as quickly as possible’ (Yücesoy 2020). Some voices argue that authoritarian state
power has an advantage (Schwartz 2012) in increasingly restricting freedoms and takes hold of
the territory, exclusively focusing its efforts on maximum efficiency for the crisis response.

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However in both cases of Turkey and Iran, the initial denialist rhetoric of the pandemic had
spurred civilian discontent towards these governments and their policies.

Exogenous events like a global pandemic can significantly contribute to political agendas of
different countries, applying the logic of lessons learned thanks to history. Governments need
to redefine their discourses in accordance with the context of the pandemic. While political
discourse in modern democracies serves as a method of aggregating citizen’s opinions and
linking governmental policy to society (Dalton et al. 2011), it could also serve to promote and
justify nationalist and authoritarian shifts in the nature of the government. Adding to that, if the
citizens' opinions are shaped by what has been coined as an “infodemic” that pushes for the
surge of right wing authoritarianism and conspiracy theories, there should be a link to explore
and study between this phenomenon and the policies of democratic nation-states.

Power is the key fundament for ruling, especially in the state of exception of a pandemic. It is
the exception that sustains the rule and not the other way around, as the exception of the rule is
supported by the rule itself through causa necessitatis (Schmitt 1922). It all sounds much like
a Catch-22 situation, but it goes along the argument of this research, that leaders applying
measures under this state of exception have the potential of promoting authoritarian discourses.
In this context, learning from history would serve to raise awareness of how autocratising
discourses and narratives during times of emergency can be gradually normalised.

Hartman et al. (2021) have studied and established a correlation between perceived threats of
the virus amongst the populace and the waking of latent right wing authoritarian yearns in
Ireland and the UK. This is not a new phenomenon: from Cold War McCarthyism to the War
on Terror, democracies have made use of vilifying misinformation discourses to spur
overemphasised fears, which in turn justify authoritarian practices. However, what
distinguishes the COVID-19 pandemic from the aforementioned perceived threats, is that it is
not is not inherently derived from a sociopolitical challenge to the status quo, nor from a wilful
contestation coming from a hostile group (Kossowska 2011), but that it comes from nature.
State-sponsored misinformation has been found to be useful in facetiously portraying the
pandemic’s ravaging capacity in countries like Brazil and the US, but there is also
misinformation spreading in social media with no clear or traceable origin coming mainly from
bots. These bots initially fed from and spread COVID-19 conspiracy theories, such as QAnon,
and are also heavily associated with news links from extremely partisan websites (Himelein-

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Wachowiak et al. 2021). Such theories argue, for example, that the virus was made in a
laboratory or that it was deliberately released as a biological weapon, mixing 5G technologies
and a secret world-domination plot from Bill Gates and/or George Soros (Pazhoohi &
Kingstone 2021). Such discourses have been going on for years, and they evolved and adapted
to fit the narrative of the current pandemic. They decrease the will for compliance with safety
measures among the populace of democracies who have experienced some sort of surge in
populist right wing authoritarianism (Prati, Pietrantoni & Zani 2011; Quinn et al. 2013;
Allington et al. 2020). It seems that there is a well-established link between populist
misinformation discourses and the rise of right wing authoritarianism, but it remains to be
explored if such discourses have a similar effect in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

That is why this work will firstly assess the literature on current pandemic discourse dynamics
in both democratic and authoritarian countries, as well as presenting the discursive narratives
in misinformation campaigns about the pandemic both from public officials and in social media.
Later on, we will analyse via Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) the discursive practices
of political leaders in Brazil and the US, which will serve as a case study to test the hypothesis
that statist discourses about COVID-19 have a direct relationship with misinformation
discourses on social media. The research question will delve on “How discursive practices
about COVID-19 in Brazil and the US serve to promote autocratisation”. Therefore this work
will study the role and purpose of political discourse and misinformation campaigns in the
context of the COVID-19 pandemic in bringing about shifts towards authoritarianism.

1. LITERATURE REVIEW

The topic of this study relates to the purpose behind the role state actors have in promoting
autocratising discourses during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. To begin, some conceptual
clarifications are in order. First of all, it is important to define the distinction between the
manner in which authoritarian and democratic countries have dealt and are dealing with the
virus. Democracies experiencing a democratic backsliding are not the same thing as
authoritarian regimes, they are rather a sui generis category of democratic states experiencing
a certain form of deterioration of the quality of democracy. Backsliding can range from a blatant
coup d’état to a gradual deterioration of democracy, captured as a bid for authoritarianism from
either the president/prime minister, the citizenry, or both, usually involving a surge of
nationalist, personalist and populist rhetoric within the party line (Svend-Erik 2020) usually

4
accompanied by a massive spread of such messages in social media (Himelein-Wachowiak
2021). Autocratisation is a systemic trend towards autocracy, a ‘system of government in which
a single person (the autocrat) possesses absolute power to weaken institutions such as an
independent judiciary that sustain the democratic system’ (Keilitz 2020, p.8). Democratic
backsliding and autocratisation have been common features of the last decade, especially in
Western democracies, in which theoretically democratic governments have been afflicted by:

‘the pernicious effects of polarization; realignments of party systems

that enable elected autocrats to gain legislative power; and the
incremental nature of derogations, which divides oppositions and keeps
them off balance.’ (Haggard & Kaufman 2021)

Right wing authoritarianism RWA alongside cultural conservatism are the ideologies that
mostly pervade within the Bolsonaro and Trump’s administrations in Brazil and the US,
countries that have been observed to present a breeding ground for autocratic dissent among
the citizenry (Malka et al. 2020). A combination of the proliferation of a digital media
environment and a surge in hyperpartisan political propaganda has brought forth a new wave
of polarisation, poor journalism and misinformation (Graves & Nielsen 2017). Voters across
these two countries have been specifically targeted in misinformation campaigns that appeal to
personalism of prominent figures as well as appealing to the defeat of the other - an unrelenting
enemy who threatens the upright moral citizenry - all of it accompanied by an all-enveloping
nationalist discourse (Rosenberg 2019).

Arguably a global emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic plays a role in setting the agenda
for autocratising a democracy, as epidemics have shown to produce ‘fear, panic, stigma,
moralising and calls to action,’ reactions that accentuate when the virus is ‘new, unexpected, or
particularly devastating’ (Strong 1990, p. 249). Considering the unexpectedness and
perniciousness of COVID-19, it might as well stirred up those effects in a more pervasive sense.
Literature regarding emergency management makes a distinction between a predictable
epidemic which ‘permits agencies to prepare in advance and take advantage of lessons from
prior experience’ (Howitt & Leonard, 2009, p.4) and a novel crisis, experienced as a unforeseen
scenario ‘where there is little past experience to draw on’ (Schwartz, 2012, p. 314). For instance,
the South Korean management of the pandemic has received a lot of praising from the scientific
community, as it showed resilience and effectiveness in minimising casualties and protecting

5
the populace through - state of exception - safety measures which were already undertook
during the MERS outbreak in 2015 (Kim et al 2021). Therefore whilst the pandemic shook the
world as a whole, the response in every country varied due to its previous experience in dealing
with similar emergencies, alongside many other factors that have been the subject of study in
the last year. The type of regime has a great influence on the way states have dealt with the
pandemic, but ‘structural factors such as the level of development and the institutional capacity
of the state are highly likely to have a role’ (Petersen 2020, p.25). Especially economic
development, which determines the capability of a given country to provide both testing
equipment and vaccinations for the population. However, with a poor management of such
resources or a denialist rhetoric regarding the seriousness of the threat from a personified head
of state, development plays a lesser role in securing an appropriate systemic approach in
reducing the effects of the pandemic, due to inability and/or unwillingness to provide such
approach (Hamid 2020).

Natural disasters are rather a consequence of vulnerabilities exposed as a result of economic,

social and political occurrences in the international sphere (Blaikie et al., 2014). The
interconnectedness of our world provided the space for the pandemic, and with it comes an
unprecedented wave of disinformation combined with a reinforcement of authoritarianism and
the exploitation of the crisis to tighten the grip on power (Hamid 2020).

2.1 Discursive practices of authoritarian regimes

Backsliding democracies and authoritarian regimes have acted quite differently in their
handling of the pandemic (Petersen 2020). In regards to authoritarian regimes, there is literature
supporting the notion of an authoritarian advantage which rests upon ‘centralized decision-
making powers, public support for government initiatives, and government ability to shape the
tone of the crisis in the mass media’ (Schwartz 2012 p. 315) According to the literature,
autocratic rules ‘enjoy a greater political capacity and a higher level of insulation from
particularistic demands than do democratic regimes’ (Maravall 1994, p. 18). The power
authoritarian regimes have over the media and their control over the population provide them
with the capacity of defining dominant narratives and establishing an official perception of the
pandemic, China being a prime example for it (San, Bastug & Basli 2020). Another example of
that behaviour is found in Brazil - though not fully authoritarian, it is certainly under a process
of autocratisation thanks to the personification of President Jair Bolsonaro (Rhodes-Purdy &

6
Madrid 2019). The controversial politician has portrayed COVID-19 as a specific enemy which
aligns with ideological foreign enemies (Hoffmann & Barbossa 2020), making the Brazilian
administration a prime example of using the pandemic to promote a specific national agenda.
Using such a rhetoric has the purpose of framing the pandemic as an external other (Bashford
2014) and creates an implication that ‘everything is fine in the homeland, diverting the focus
from internal problems and the ineffective response to COVID-19’ (Hoffmann & Barbossa
2020) However, because of Brazil’s mismanagement of the pandemic due to denial and
pigeonholing of the pandemic as a “little flu” (Zimmermann 2020) the populace support for the
president has dropped significantly, similarly to what happened in Iran and Turkey (San, Bastug
& Basli 2020). These three countries are prime examples of state-sponsored denialist discourses
regarding the pandemic, with noticeable effects on their respective populations. This contrasts
with the aforementioned notion of the authoritarian advantage - save from the control over the
media and the narrative surrounding the virus in the case of China and Iran. The authoritarian
advantage of Iran and Brazil went awry when their initial discursive practices about the
pandemic turned against them once societal support dwindled as a result of such practices.

2.2 Discursive practices of backsliding democracies

The case of democracies is rather contrasting. The literature claims that the management of the
pandemic in a democracy is characterised by a dependence of public health on transparency,
public trust, and collaboration at the national and international levels (Berengaut, 2020). In
addition, it is expected that democracies have much more effective responses to natural
disasters, be it earthquakes or pandemics, especially in regards to the reduction of the mortality
rate (Lin 2015). For that purpose many democratic nations throughout the world, such as the
South Korean bid for severely restrictive discursive practices - albeit welcomed by the citizenry
- (Kim 2021), have turned to a state of exception in which particular freedoms have been
temporarily suspended to exert extraordinary measures to stem the disease (Keilitz 2020). In
that sense, some scholars encourage policymakers to ‘enhance public trust by developing
mechanisms to increase government transparency and interaction with the public’ (Schwartz,
2012, p.330) to reduce the long-term impact of these extraordinary measures. However,
trustworthiness of safety measures in democratic countries has been gradually eroded by many
factors. A 2020 study carried out in the UK has shown the link between non-compliance of
safety measures and the spreading of misinformation and conspiracy theories (Allington &
Dhavan 2020); discourses advocating for the idea that the lockdown was too severe or

7
supporting conspiracy theories stand out. Other cross-country studies focused on democratic
governments have shown that public officials and individual politicians - especially in the UK,
the US and Spain - are responsible for their own untrustworthiness by spouting anti-science
discursive practices and polarising their niche audiences, thus spurring wariness and distrust
among the population (Nielsen et al 2020). The same study has also found out that political
leaning affects trust in official sources, in the US especially, and that the more a citizen is
politically engaged, the more they claim to “know” about the virus. Populations of backsliding
democracies like the US have been victims of ‘severe cases of governments intentionally
spreading misleading and incorrect information on COVID-19’ (V-Dem 2020, p.4). Alongside
misinformative discourses coming from elected officials, there is also the worrying
consumption of misleading information discourses from social media, which more often than
not - especially in the US and Brazil - intertwine with each other (V-Dem 2020). Therefore, the
literature supports the notion that discursive practices in democracies feed the knowledge of the
virus from the subjects of the discourse, despite it being erroneous or not.

2.3 The role of the infodemic

Consumers of social media selectively accept the veracity of information, regardless of it being
objectively true or false, in accordance with the trustworthiness of the source or if it aligns with
their political and social worldviews (Kahan 2013; Taber & Lodge 2006). Especially in
backsliding democracies, where political environments within the traditional media are
extremely polarised, there exists the perfect breeding ground for the spread of misinformation;
one illustrative example being Trump’s discursive practices during the COVID-19 outbreak
and lockdown and the 2020 election (Allcott et al. 2020; Motta, Stecula, and Farhart 2020).
However, social media plays the largest role in the spreading misinformation even in media
environments with less partisan tendencies (Owen et al. 2020). Indeed, the population’s
consumption of content in a media of choice has very much to do with their opinions of choice.
Despite that, regardless of users being nested or not in misinformation propagation networks,
they are more likely than not to be incidentally exposed to various sources of information
defending contrasting perspectives (Weeks et al. 2017; Fletcher and Nielsen 2018; Feezell
2018). The content of these discourses creates or reinforces an already existing individual
political identity (Freelon & Wells 2020), which has been found to motivate users in engaging
in the endorsement of conspiracy theories that challenge their political and ideological rivals
(Miller et al. 2016; Flynn et al., 2017).

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Misinformation of the aforementioned characteristics has played and still plays an influential
role in the public’s perception of the pandemic. There are instances in many countries of an
existing correlation between people’s political engagement and knowledge of the virus (Nielsen
et al. 2020). Arguably political discourses and biosecurity rhetoric alters the citizenry’s
perception - and therefore acting upon - the pandemic. There are past and recent instances of
political attacks from prominent figures against scientific experts and their credibility (Shao et
al. 2018; Vosoughi, Roy & Aral 2018; Zimmerman 2020) on the grounds of the right wing
conspiracy belief that experts wish to alter the given country’s agenda in favour of a “globalist
plan” to create a “new
world order” (Miller,
Saunders & Farhart 2016;
Flynn, Nyhan & Reifler
2017; Marwick & Lewis
2017; Hoffmann &
Barbossa 2020; Blaikie et
al. 2021). However, the
usage of this type of
discourses might harm the
credibility of politicians
instead of promoting it
(Nielsen et al. 2020).
Nielsen’s cross-country
survey found out that in
South Korea, Spain and
the US individual
politics generate large
volumes of ‘top-down’ misinformation in contrast with typical ‘bottom-up’ misinformation
coming from ordinary people and bots (Nielsen et al 2020). In the former, misinformation has
been found to come primarily from bots promoting all sorts of conspiracy theories regarding
the COVID-19 pandemic and its management (Assenmacher et al. 2020; Ferrara 2020;
Himelein-Wachowiak et al. 2021). Bots have already been studied as propagators of
misinformation in the last few years, as they played a great role in spouting derogative and
deceiving propaganda with the purpose of altering the 2016 US elections and Britain’s vote to

9
leave the EU (Flynn, Nyhan & Reifler 2017; Feezell 2018; Fletcher & Nielsen 2018) and they
certainly play a similar role in the current pandemic.

Ordinary human users end up deciding whether to believe and spread misinformation or not,
since ‘mere exposure to misinformation does not guarantee belief in that misinformation’
(Bridgman et al. 2020, p.1). But as the seventh of Goebbels’s principles of propaganda states:
‘credibility alone must determine whether propaganda output should be true or false’ (Doob
1950, p.428). Credibility affects the perceptions of the risks of the pandemic, and these, rather
than actual risks, determine the manner in which people respond to crises (Glik 2007).

2. METHODOLOGY

Post-structuralist approaches produce results that assert that the way in which power relations
are established is through the manipulation of discourse, and they provide a more in-depth
understanding of the actors’ and subjects’ perceptions, motivations and emotions. Therefore
this work will attempt to build a rigorous design based on the analysis of the language used by
public officials and in social media to give meaning to the pandemic.

3.1 Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

The design of this work will be centred around the theory of Foucauldian discourse analysis
(FDA), using the reasonings stemming from Foucauldian theory to interpret social events in a
qualitative manner. FDA is completely centred around the usage of language and therefore it
shall be the main object of analysis of this work. Firstly, we understand language as a form of
social action, which acts as an active agent that constructs the world (Parker 1992). Discourse
can be understood as ‘a group of statements which provides a language for talking about - a
way of representing the knowledge about - a particular topic at a particular historical moment’
(Hall 1992, p.191). The research question of this work explores the influence of discourse
giving meaning to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in relation with its explicit and implicit
impact on power and politics.

FDA is concerned with power, which investigates how a particular discourse systematically
constructs a certain version of the social world (Hodges et al. 2008; Talja 1999) Arguably,
studying discourses allows the researcher to establish a relation between knowledge and power.

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Foucauldian theory assures that knowledge is put to work via discursive practices to regulate
people’s conduct (Foucault 1991b). In other words, the adaptation of discourses by people is a
way in which they are controlled and regulated. However, power in itself should not be
understood as the mere constraining and repressing of people: in Foucault’s analytical
framework power also produces reality, rituals or “regimes of truth” (Reyna & Schiller 1998).
Power is not only a constraining notion, but an enabling one as well. Thus, discourse not only
constructs the object or event it refers to, it also allows and limits the possibilities of
understanding the object (Foucault 1991a)

FDA also takes into account that discourses do not exist in a sort of ephemeral way, but they
are embedded in actual institutions, bound up with institutional practices - ways of organising,
regulating and administering social life. Discourse ultimately facilitates and limits what can be
said, by whom, where and when. In that sense, some discourses are more dominant than others,
some being so entrenched in societal structures that they are difficult to challenge - socially
accepted truths of “common sense”. However, all discourses have a genealogy, meaning that
they change, develop or entirely disappear over time, and they belong to a specific moment in
history. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, the main premise is that the discourse around
the pandemic follows the genealogy of the populist discourse practices we have seen in recent
years in Brazil and the US. The disease has no real meaning outside the way subjects talk about
it. It surely exists in the physical world, but it only takes meaning and becomes institutionalised
through the language attached to it and the social practices that accompany it. According to
Foulcault, discourse not only encompasses how we talk about something, but what we do about
that talk as well, thus the term “discursive practices” comes about when defining actions and
policies derived from particular discourses (1991b).

Foucault encompasses the set of discursive practices as a ‘dispositif’, a heterogeneous ensemble

including ‘discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws,
administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic
propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid’ (Foucault 1980, p.194). We deem this
concept quite useful to encompass the different discourses around the response to the pandemic,
as a dispositif is formed at a precise historical moment, usually aiming to answer an urgent call
(Ferreira-Neto 2018).

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3.2 Operationalisation

Foucault defined his own theoretical work as something of a methodology in permanent change.
His wish was not to fix an established set of guidelines for researchers to use, forming a coherent
and finished system. However in 1968, Foucault pointed out three main principles for his kind
of discourse analysis. Firstly, there is the principle of formation, which refers to the necessary
rules that allow the apparition of various concepts that end up forming a discursive practice.
The second principle is of transformation, which points out where in the genealogy of a given
discourse a turning point occurred, ‘at what threshold of transformation new rules of formation
came into effect’ (Foucault 1991a, p.54). Lastly, the principle of correlation contrasts the
discourse with other discourses and analyses the ‘nondiscursive context in which it functions
(institutions, social relations, economic and political conjuncture)’ (ibid). Foucault put the
subject as the main object of interest of his research: ‘What are the process of subjectivation
and objectivation that make it possible for the subject to become an object of knowledge, as a
subject?’ (Foucault 1998, p.460). This stems from the notion that discursive practices are a
contribution to the creation of the subjective self, which mainly refers to the individual
acceptance of the practices/discourses and the ideas that go with them. (Foucault 1994).

Therefore to successfully conduct FDA the researcher must be concerned about the way
regimes of truth play out in a given sociopolitical context (Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine 2008).
However, given the resistance of the author to establish fixed methodological principles, the
‘researchers' attention should not only be on reproducing Foucault’s concepts but also on
following his form of theorization and his problematization analytics’ (Ferreira-Neto 2018,
p.15)

Therefore the process of analysing discursive practices about COVID-19 will focus on the
method of ‘critical analysis in which one tries to see how the different solutions to a problem
have been constructed; but also how these different solutions result from a specific form of
problematization’ (Foucault 1997: 118-9). In that sense, this work will be an inductive research
expecting to find certain trends within the discourse that arguably lead to autocratisation. FDA
in itself will be operationalised by allocating the dispositif of public discourse into trends. The
process of analysing these trends will be done using the following guidelines, based on Ian
Parker’s (1992) own take on creating a method for FDA:

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 Clues for analysing trends:

● Identification of discursive resources, topics and themes. Identification of subjects

and objects.
● Identification of relationships between discourses. Are there any contradictions
between the construction of objects? What do they have in common?
● Situating the discourse historically and culturally. How did the discourse arise? What
institutions are associated with the discourse?
● Identifying and categorising the usage of different constructions of discourse. Which
actors gain or lose? What is the reasoning behind it? Is the discourse used to attribute
or disclaim responsibility, highlight a contribution, exaggerate a feat, securitising the
object…
● Identifying what kinds of subject positions offered by the discourses. What kinds of
actions do the discourses enable or forbid?
● Identifying the manner in which discourses support institutions and reproduce power
relationships. What are the gains and losses from attaining a particular political
stance?

What to look for:

● The actors that are exercising power through the production of knowledge.
● The ideal subject, the intended audience of the discourse.
● The implicit, unspecified or unsaid.
● Descriptive - colourful or alarming - language to convey a strong discourse.

What to ask:
● Would alternative wording of the same information have resulted in a different
discourse being more prevalent?
● How are events presented and people characterised?
● What message is intended by the author(s)?
● What repetition exists across different discourses of the same topic?
● What kinds of professional media practices assist with the presentation of these
discourses?

3.3 Case selection

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Brazil and the US serve to exemplify discursive practices that have had an impact in the way
the pandemic is perceived, in which their respective leaders have used discourse to give
meaning to a natural phenomenon.

Since they were elected, both of these leaders have been characterised as perfect examples of
charismatic, conservative, nationalist populists who have polarised their countries’ political
thinking, and have created a mystified image of themselves which is revered by their supporters
and despised by their opponents. Arguably these two countries have experienced democratic
backsliding as a result of discourses against health security measures, rather than making use
of the “authoritarian advantage” mentioned in the literature, which consist of imposing
authoritarian measures that remain long after the crisis has been stemmed. These rulers instead
downplayed the pandemic advocated for scepticism and denialism, causing polarisation among
their citizenry.

3. CASE STUDY

4.1 Discursive Practices in Brazil

Despite frantically rising to the top positions of the globe’s coronavirus death tolls, currently
maintaining the second position behind the US, Brazilian president Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s
discourse has centred around the trivialisation of the virus and the threat it poses to Brazil, as
well as continuously demonstrating a prideful stance against the health recommendations
coming from both the WHO and from members his own administration. Bolsonaro’s discursive
practices have framed the issue as an ‘economy vs. health’ dichotomy.

On 23 March, General Eduardo Pazuello was appointed health minister to coordinate policies
against COVID-19, after the dismissal of former health minister Luis Henrique Mendetta and
the stepping down of Nelson Teich - both expert health consultants who advocated for social
distancing and harsher measures against COVID-19 - after they both colluded against
Bolsonaro’s denialist stance (Catraca Livre 2020). This was a manner of exerting some degree
of securitisation of COVID-19 by putting loyal army leaders without any medical education or
background in charge of centralising and coordinating health policies, which ‘led defense

14
authorities to be in charge of handling the pandemic instead of public health authorities’
(Hoffmann & Barbossa 2020, p.2).

Finally, Bolsonaro’s discursive practices have antagonised the legislative power of his country
as well as local authorities. Despite a continuous rising of criticism against his management of
the pandemic, the administration launched on 25th of March 2020 a campaign stating that
"Brazil cannot stop" (#BrasilNãoPodeParar) on social media, which blatantly contradicted
those recommendations from health authorities - national and worldwide - as well as federal
state and city authorities to combat the spread of COVID-19. A federal court ruled a ban on
Bolsonaro’s government to push for policies that would contradict the WHO's
recommendations. Joao Doria, president of the federal state of Sao Paulo, stated that president
Bolsonaro was ‘acting as an army captain who has no knowledge, no scientific experience in
health or public health, who works according to what he thinks, on assumptions, and personal
desires on a subject very serious because it has to do with people's lives’ (The Guardian 2020).
The animosity between Bolsonaro and local authorities manifested in a leaked video of April
22 2020, showcasing a cabinet meeting where Bolsonaro demanded the population to be armed,
and called the governors of the states Rio and Sao Paolo ‘pieces of shit’ (Times of India 2020).
These types of discourses mocking local policies against the spread of the virus had a powerful
impact, particularly to Bolsonaro’s supporters, who felt motivated not to obey the restrictions.
Bolsonaro’s popular anti-corruption justice Minister Sergio Moro also resigned after the
president had dismissed the federal police chief that was leading investigations into his son
Carlos, for organising hate campaigns against Supreme Court judges among other
misinformation campaigns in social media (The Times 2020).

The Brazilian government’s presentation of perception of risk has consistently been centred on
the allocation of the threat outside of the virus itself. Whilst using an alarming rhetoric to convey
concern-raising about the economy, Bolsonaro ultimately portrayed the pandemic as an almost
innocuous disease that represents no risk whatsoever outside of harming the economy:

‘Obviously we have a moment of crisis, a small crisis. In my opinion

much more a fantasy, the coronavirus issue, which is not all that the
mainstream media propagates throughout the world. Some of the press
managed to make oil prices fall, but this is not a crisis, obviously a stock
market problem, it happens sporadically.’ (Catraca Livre 2020)

15
Bolsonaro recognised the crisis, yet always refused to refer to it as a pandemic; he prefers the
terms ‘virus’ or ‘disease’ to convey familiarity in the threat itself. He certainly recognised the
need of protecting the elderly and those under delicate health conditions, yet such remarks are
always followed by a ‘but’ and a comment cynically downplaying the pandemic:

‘We have to confront our problems, obviously respecting the elderly and
those who have diseases, but what would Brazil become if we just stop
everything?’ (Guardian News 2021)

‘I am sorry for the dead, I am. But we are all going to die someday.’
(elDiarioes 2020)

Discursive practices related to risk perception are mainly focused on keeping the economy
running, and implicitly maintaining his rule. This sort of discourse aids in the construction of a
particular object which represents a threat to a fruitful economy: the media, which is used to
divert attention from the mismanagement of the administration. Bolsonaro attributed
responsibility for the “social chaos” to the media that according to him were exaggerating the
effects of the pandemic on the UN 7th General Debate of September 2020:

‘As was the case in much of the world, segments of Brazilian media
have also politicised the virus by spreading panic among the population.
(...) they almost brought about social chaos to our country.’ (United
Nations 2020)

Both social media platforms Facebook and Twitter erased content - on the grounds of it being
intentional misinformation - from official Bolsonaro accounts, particularly a couple of videos
of the president disregarding and mocking social isolation measures promoted by federal and
city authorities.

For a further downplaying of the virus, Bolsonaro utilised himself in the discourse as an
institution with the power and legitimacy to deem the threat of the virus itself as unharmful
towards the healthy ordinary citizen. The terminology ‘little flu’ implicitly downturns and
subverses the international community’s discourse of a ‘pandemic’.

16
 ‘In my particular case, because of my background as an athlete, I
wouldn’t need to worry if I was infected by the virus. I wouldn’t feel
anything or at the very worst it would be like a little flu or a bit of a
cold.’ (March 2020)

The ideal subject’s belief of the discourse comes from Bolsonaro’s reassurance portraying
extremely low risk perception, which stems from the mystification and personality cult of the
leader, whose reasoning should be heeded by his followers despite him not being an authority
in health issues. Even after himself contracting the disease on July 7 2020, he strived to appear
as a self-display of resilience which adds up to the discourse that the pandemic was
overestimated. When he contracted the disease, he remained entrenched in feeding a false claim
regarding the miracle cure of Hydroxychloroquine, by allegedly treating himself with it and
previously stepping up its production (Guardian News 2020).

Further displays of self-reassurance include never admitting a mishandling of the pandemic,

never displaying a glimpse of doubt. According to the discourse, the Brazilian government’s
response to the pandemic was admirable if anything less:

‘I think Brazil has responded to the pandemic very well. Some

politicians wanted to destroy our economy, but we came up with the
right response.’ (TVBrasilGov 2020)

Here is once again an attribution of responsibility to the local governors who wanted to impose
restrictions on the freedoms of Brazilian citizens, destroying the economy in the process.
Bolsonaro not only portrays his mistakes as successes, he does so by diverting the subject once
again to the preservation of the economy for the greater good and attributing erroneous
discursive practices to his oppositors.

Furthermore, when Brazil had finally acquired access to the then recently released vaccines,
Bolsonaro repeatedly showed adamancy in taking it, arguably fostering existing conspiracy
beliefs in social media that the vaccine had ulterior purposes beyond protection from the
disease, as well as legitimising denialism among his supporters with anti-vaccination discourse:

17
‘I will not take it [the vaccine]. It is my right. I am sure the parliament won't get in the way of
anybody who does not want to vaccinate themselves.’ (November 2020)

However, in June 2021, his stance on the vaccines - and to some extent, on the virus - turned
around completely, after the number of deaths in a single day peaked to more than 3000 in
March. The discourse shifted from a prideful denialist stance to a more concerned one. In his
initial statement in June’s monthly address to the nation, Bolsonaro for the first time mourned
the deaths resulting from COVID-19:

‘I am profoundly sorry for every lost life in our country.’

After that, he immediately proceeded to showcase a discourse of victory explicitly related to

the application of vaccines:

‘Brazil is the fourth country that most vaccinates in the planet.’

Never losing a colourful touch in the application of his policies, Bolsonaro uses the quantity of
vaccinations needed for the sheer amount of Brazilians in need for one as a feat for his
administration. Nevertheless, he later goes on celebrating that:

‘Our government never forced anyone to remain home, never closed

businesses, churches or schools’

Showcasing the good side of the mismanagement, that people did not lose their freedoms. As
stated before, doubting his own discourse is out of the question when addressing the nation. He
continues with a repeatedly stated mantra that altered the initial one-sided stance for the
economy and against health:

‘I always said that we had two problems to face: the virus and
unemployment, that should be treated with equal responsibility and
simultaneously.’ (TVBrasilGov 2021)

In the previous statement there is a contradiction between the construction of the object of the
virus compared with the discourse in the beginning of the pandemic. He says it was given equal

18
importance alongside the economy, when in truth it was first regarded as nothing more than a
small flu. Despite the rampant rise in deaths, is this very same speech he persisted in
emphasising the safeguarding of the economy stating that:

‘Just in this year's first trimester, the economy showcased its vigor’

Just before concluding, he delivers an arguably powerful statement:

‘All of our 22 ministers consider liberty as a great good for our people.’
(June 2021)

He adds on the discourse that the policies implemented up to that point were not only for the
protection of the economy, but also for safeguarding the liberty of Brazilians in front of
tyrannical governors that wanted to isolate them. Moreover, he includes all ministers to convey
the idea that all of his government concords with his policies; this adds relevance to the
discourse especially with eight appointed ministers being military personnel in civilian
positions and three of them being evangelist pastors. In that sense is where Bolsonaro’s
adamancy most coincides with his arguably explicit bid for autocratic leadership. By appointing
fellow military commanders he intended to acquire loyalty from high ranking officers of the
Armed Forces. Pressure for the involvement of the military in the government caused the
resignation of former defence minister Azevedo e Silva, and on March 30 he was followed by
the commanders of the three branches of the Armed Forces, who decided that they:

‘would not take any step that could violate the Constitution or
characterize interference in measures taken by state governments
during the COVID-19 pandemic’ (Estadão 2021)

This statement from the military reveals their own adamancy at adapting to Bolsonaro’s
discursive practices, and the animosity between a fraction of the military and the president.
All three positions were immediately replaced with members of the military more aligned
with Bolsonaro’s political project, and the leader reinforced his discourse of protecting the
people with an autocratic allusion to power over the armed forces:

19
 ‘My Army will not go into the street and force the people to stay at
home.’ (Correio Braziliense 2021)

By using the possessive pronoun ‘my’ to refer to the army, he constructs an absolute
institutional power relationship between himself and the armed forces as an extension of
himself. Aside from trying to get support from the army for autocratising his government,
Bolsonaro has attempted to politicise the crisis by demanding a military step in since as early
as April 2020; when he rallied his supporters in front of the Brazilian army HQ in Brazilia.
Such discursive practice represents an ideological battle against the handling of COVID-19,
politicising the crisis to strengthen his grip over the armed forces. In November 2020
Bolsonaro victimises himself for not being able to strengthen his power:

‘As Head of State I had to take measures I was not allowed to.’
(Guardian News)

According to news reports about the political crisis, the high-ranking personnel of the
Brazilian armed forces are divided in their political stance regarding Bolsonaro’s political
project. The governmental cabinet at April 2020 already included one third of military
officials, who adhered to a nationalist militaristic discourse in regards to the fight against
COVID-19 where they stated that Brazil is at ‘war’ and must ‘combat’ an ‘invisible enemy’
(TVBrasilGov 2020), which makes use of a securitising discursive practice to portray the
crisis as an “us versus them” situation.

Nationalism alongside religion play an extremely important role in the arousal of supporters,
either by referring to Brazil as a whole in front of the world as a ‘a Christian and conservative
country, which has family at its foundation’ (United Nations 2020) or by mocking the
recommendations of the WHO stating that ‘we do not need any people from outside to give us
tips about health here.’ (elDiarioes 2020)

Finally, it could be added that the nationalism embedded in Bolsonaro’s discourse was at
times complemented by a certain “laddish strong male” attitude, discrediting all complains
against the mismanagement of the pandemic as weak, soft and unmanly/unpatriotic:

20
 ‘We cannot escape reality. We have to stop being a country of
pussies.’ (elDiario 2020)

‘You did not stay at home, you did not cower. We have to face our
problems, enough fussing and whining. How much longer will the
crying go on?’ (Guardian News 2021)

These last quotes summarise the main intentions behind the discourse: rallying and
legitimising those who support Bolsonaro and mocking and degrading those who stand
against him, which caused an extreme polarisation and circulation of misinformation online,
directly related with a politicised, ideological stance to the pandemic.

4.2 Discursive practices in the US

The US was already a polarised political environment long before the COVID-19 pandemic.
US President Donald Trump's usage of his Twitter social media account has aroused and
angered his supporter base on various issues since his victory in the 2016 election; his particular
notion of ‘fake news’ became entrenched in the psyche of the average American voter (Bovet
& Makse 2019). During the last remaining months of his Presidency Trump has reached to his
followers in the usual manner, arguably politicising the administration’s handling of the
pandemic alongside several other issues, such as the protests caused by the murder of George
Floyd or the 2020 presidential election.

Throughout the pandemic, Trump’s discourse has focused on reducing the widespread panic.
A composed, calm body language and voice tone, alongside a flat expression and the frequent
usage of colloquial words, conveys a discourse that everything is under control - a phrase
frequently used - and transmits confidence and reassurance of his policies. He typically uses
over-emphasising language, constructing his policies as a:

‘most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus’.

(NBC News 2020)

The utilisation of the adjective “foreign” constitutes one of many expressions to construct the
object as a menace coming from an external source. Over the course of the pandemic, his

21
referral to COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus” implied that the US was defending itself against
a threat coming from a particular enemy. He remained the only international leader to use this
definition to give a particular political meaning to the virus. Instead of giving it a neutral
meaning like any other natural disaster, Trump’s discourse portrayed the virus as an intended
catastrophe from the US’s top geopolitical competitor:

‘It’s something that nobody expected. It came out of China, and it’s one
of those things that happened.’ (14 March)

Arguably this discursive practice was used once the pandemic started having a more serious
domestic impact, as Trump praised his decision of having closed borders with China as a
successful strategy that was downplayed by the media. But before the outbreak had reached the
US, Trump even praised President Xi Jinping for handling the pandemic in his country:

His declarations at the UN General Assembly referred to COVID-19 as ‘the invisible enemy’
and the ‘China Virus’, and accused China for being ‘the nation that unleashed this plague upon
the world.’ Such remarks construct China as the main culprit for the mismanagement of the
pandemic and attempt to divert attention and criticism away from the failure of domestic
policies. The discourse attributing responsibility to China went on for months:

22
Another constructed subject used for the attributing blame and responsibility is the domestic
enemy: the leftist, socialist, marxist democrats who own the mainstream media. In every public
rally prior to the election, Trump bashed against his opponents, usually grouping them under
the term “radical left”. Specifically related to COVID-19, he blamed the previous democrat
administration for the lack of infrastructural capabilities to face the pandemic:

‘And you remember, we inherited a broken system.’ (Robertson 2020)

Furthermore, Trump also used the previous’ administration handling of the Swine Flu to
position his approach as much more adequate:

The discourses around risk perception were centred around the notion that the virus was not as
dangerous as portrayed by the international community. In an Oval Office address on March 11
he assured the American public that:

‘For the vast majority of Americans, the risk is very, very low (...) the
elderly population must be very, very careful.’ (New York Times 2020)

23
While on a rally on September 21 Trump continued using the very same discourse conveying
extremely low risk perception:

‘In some states thousands of people, nobody young, below the age of
18, like nobody, they have a strong immune system, who knows? (...)
Take your hat off to the young because they have a hell of an immune
system. It affects virtually nobody.’ (Washington Post 2020)

These discursive practices colluded with that of his cabinet’s own lead immunologist Anthony
Fauci, who continuously warned about the dangers of the disease. He stuck to this discourse
throughout the remainder of his term. On April 3 Trump added to his discourse the politisation
of mask usage to prevent the infection; by publicly appearing without one:

‘So with the masks, it’s going to be, really, a voluntary thing. You can do it. You don’t have to
do it. I’m choosing not to do it, but some people may want to do it, and that’s okay. It may be
good. Probably will. They’re making a recommendation. It’s only a recommendation. It’s
voluntary.’

Such a discourse serves in delegitimising the recommendations of the WHO and legitimising
himself as an authority in the matter. Furthermore, his promise on July 7 to back down from the
organisation reinforced his nationalist stance by attributing responsibility for the
mismanagement of the pandemic to the international community. However, his stance on
wearing the mask changed completely on July, when the act of wearing protective masks
became “patriotic” in the discourse:

24
After that tweet, more Trump supporters attending his rallies could be seen wearing masks. As
for discourses displaying adamancy, Trump managed to distort the fact that the number of cases
were rising with a discourse that constructs a continuous, unyielding success in dealing with
the pandemic:

‘When we have a lot of cases, I don't look at that as a bad thing, I look
at that in a certain respect as being a good thing, because it means our
testing is much better. So, if we were testing a million people instead of
14 million people, we would have far fewer cases, right? (...) So, I view
it as a badge of honor. Really, it's a badge of honor.’ (TIME 2020)

Moreover, Trump outrightly downplayed the mortality rate in his own country in a moment in
which it was soaring up to 200000:

25
Stating counterfactual information and still getting endorsement from the supporter base shows
how deep runs the personality cult of the leader in the psyche of his followers. Trump has been
attributed to be a main fueler of misinformation in the course of his term, which had severe
political polarisation effects in the course of his term. He used the pandemic to construct a
discourse around the idea of a “rigged election”, claiming that his opponents were politicising
COVID-19 to forbid him to carry out campaign rallies and that the voting would be sabotaged
due to COVID-19:

26
This discourse prevailed during the pandemic, as Trump’s discursive practices have been linked
to the rise of several conspiracy theories that serve to construct the notion that his legitimacy
and authority was being undermined by domestic forces. In the early stages of the pandemic,
declarations of Trump’s son Eric fueled the conspiracy that lockdown policies were deliberately
put in place to coincide with the President’s impeachment trial, claiming that the coronavirus
would:

‘magically all of a sudden go away and disappear and everybody will be

able to reopen’ (Fox News 2020)

This served to propel rejection towards the initial lockdowns and fueled protests against the
local authorities who adopted preventive measures. Another widespread conspiracy theory
circulating on Trumpist social media had to do with the dangers of COVID-19 vaccinations and
the role of Bill Gates in equipping the doses with microchips to track and control people’s
actions. Though never explicitly mentioned by Trump, it added up to the denialist anti-science
discursive practices of the president.

These are mostly exemplified in the clashing between Trump’s discourse and that of Anthony
Fauci. Conservative Trump supporters on Twitter promoted the circulation of rumors involving
the lead immunologist being part of the “deep state” or a secret government that lied about the
pandemic. The hashtag #FireFauci was retweeted on Donald Trump’s Twitter account. “Deep
State Department” was the terminology used to refer to the US State Department on a COVID-
19 related press conference, constructing the idea that there is a domestic enemy sabotaging his
own vision for the country, not allowing him to perform as well as he would like to.

A more prominent conspiracy theory propagated and fueled by Trump himself is that the
COVID-19 virus was deliberately manufactured and unleashed to the world from a laboratory
in Wuhan, which served to reinforce the discourse attributing responsibility to the Chinese
government (Hindustan Times 2020). However, it also caused a surge in anti-Asian sentiment
among Trump supporters.

In summary, Trump secured his bid for autocracy by confirming and fueling already existing
unsupported convictions among his supporters, who revered him as saviour of the American

27
people in front of a foreign enemy. In his case, it served to promote himself as the right
candidate for the November 3 election, among partisan speeches, tweets and news coverage
that further fueled the polarisation of the electorate on the matter of the pandemic.

4. ANALYSIS

In the discursive practices of both countries, we have identified many common trends. Firstly,
the resources utilised are always some form of modern media. In the case of the US, Trump
incited a most controversial misinformative and polarising discourse through social media,
while also addressing the nation through official media in a more rationalised tone.
Contrastingly, Bolsonaro does not primarily use social media but lacks any sort of moderation
in his speech, using obscene language and informal expressions to convey a strong discourse.
They both share the same themes and topics in their discursive practices, which revolve around
blaming domestic and international entities for the mismanagement of the pandemic, and a
constant self-appraisal of their own policies, while never admitting any sort of mistake in their
own handling of the virus. They portray themselves as rational patriotic passionate defenders
of their country, whose decisions always work for the better- they wish to assert themselves of
always being right and their opponents being wrong. Alongside the actors themselves, we have
identified two more constructed subjects: their supporters and their opponents. The supportive
base are constructed as the real citizens, ordinary, decent and patriotic who know who to trust
and who to distrust, and are smart enough to discern truth from deceit and right from wrong,
and value freedom and the nation’s economic success as the highest goods in politics.
Meanwhile, the opposition as a group of citizens has been constructed as opportunistic traitors
whose agenda is benefitted by the pandemic, as they want to exploit it and use it to subvert the
rightful rule of the leader to promote far left policies that would restrict freedoms and harm the
economy. The opposition has “mainstream media” on their side, whose sole purpose is to spread
lies about the success of the leaders’ discursive practices and undermine their authority. As for
the objects, the leaders’ discourse constructed meaning for health policies (restricted freedoms,
lockdowns, vaccines, social distancing), the economy, and the virus itself.

The discourses are interrelated in the manner in which they give meaning to the virus and how
it should be perceived as a threat. They both concord that the effects of the virus have been
exaggerated by the international community and that lockdowns and health prevention
measures are not strictly necessary, and that the real menace lies in the effects of the pandemic

28
in the economy. However, the discourse around health measures contradicts itself when both
Bolsonaro and Trump praise their own vaccination policies - therefore attributing more
seriousness to the virus - or more specifically when Trump changed his stance on masks.

In situating the discourses historically, we must take into account the right wing populist surge
occurring in various democratic countries during the last decade to understand how it is possible
to politicise a pandemic to push for autocratisation. Both leaders act through populist
discourses, because both face an upcoming election. Instead of creating a common basis to
approve measures to face a neutral threat - as with other natural catastrophes - they rally up
their supporters, whose political beliefs were linked to favour opposition to health policies, and
those were legitimised and encouraged by the leaders’ discursive practices. The discourse arose
from a mixture of skepticist conspiracy theories from the supportive base and a nationalist,
isolatiolationist stance from the leaders, whose sole focus on the economy clashed with federal
state governments and members of their own cabinet who wanted to enforce lockdown
restrictions.

Both leaders’ discourses exaggerated their own feats and portrayed the unfolding events as
positive, in total contrast with reality. There never was a sense of responsibility nor an
appreciation of the delicacy of the situation in their rhetoric, they simply maintained fixed
positions supported by the sole reasoning that they were right and their opposition was wrong.
These discursive practices allowed both leaders to gain popularity among those who already
supported them, but generated an unforeseen backlash from those who adhered their reasoning
to factual events and not the leaders’ discourse. Already existing polarisation experienced a
greater schism, between denialists and health measures supporters. For Trump, this ultimately
meant his defeat in the November 3 elections, amidst other political crises which developed
alongside the pandemic. Bolsonaro achieved the presidency with ca. 50% of approval. Since
the pandemic took off, as of August 1st 2021 his disapproval reached a height of around 52%
of respondents with constant support of 25.5% of the population. This hints at the extent of the
polarisation in the country resulting from the pandemic. Whether that polarisation is of use to
him in the upcoming 2022 election remains to be seen.

The discourses enabled any form of anti-lockdown dissent mixed with support for the leaders,
and demonised support for health practices and the opposition. The gap between the two
positions is so deep in both countries that it remains impossible for the subjects to attain a

29
middle ground. The discourses were successful in discrediting the opinions of the opposition
forces, but enabled them to elaborate on their counterdiscourse on how the leaders’ were a
menace for their country, with empirical evidence of the mismanagement of the pandemic on
their side.

Finally, both discourses differ on the institutions used to reproduce power relations. Bolsonaro
attempted to politicise Brazilian Armed Forces (‘my army’) to secure his authority and
legitimise his discourse around the pandemic. Despite his efforts, he failed in doing so, as
loyalty among many high-ranking members aligned with the health authorities instead. As for
Trump, his skeptical anti-establishment political stance allowed him to gain legitimacy among
his support base, especially those who were most engaged in conspiracy beliefs. He managed
to construct a powerful personality cult that enabled him to retain legitimacy even after losing
the 2020 elections, when his most extreme supporters violently attacked the US Capitol on
January 6 2021 after Trump rallied them on the grounds of the elections being “rigged”.
Arguably, polarisation as a result from COVID-19 discursive practices certainly contributed as
one of the causes that led up to that event.

5. CONCLUSIONS

By comparing the communication of political/constitutional leaders in Brazil and the US, we

have found how the discourses constructed around the solutions to the problems caused by the
COVID-19 pandemic are strongly constituted on partisan narratives, which have constructed
regimes of truth around the concept of “us vs. them”. These policies put the “other” and their
discourse as the problem causing the delegitimisation of the leaders promoting democratic
backsliding. Each and every landscape of interaction, founded in discourses present in
contemporary media having consequences in the material world, target the very foundations of
democracy by undermining the institutions that constitute the rule of law and allow for
narcissistic power-hungry leaders to inefficiently respond to a grave crisis, causing severe
damage to the physical and psychological health of the population. The analysed speeches
showcase the relationship between power dynamics as depicted by Foucault, with the
manipulation of thought being used as a manner to have far-reaching effects on human
existence.

30
The communication tools at the hands of autocratic heads of state in democratic regimes
certainly enable them to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in any manner they see fit, without
losing credit in the views of their supporters. While the North-American case clearly showcased
how the autocratising attempts can backlash in hindering Trump’s efforts in getting reelected,
it also manifests the relationship between his discursive practices and the further radicalisation
of his support base, which is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. As for Brazil, we have
seen that despite Bolsonaro’s discursive practices increasing mystification among his
supporters, the resulting ideological schism has also pervaded among high-ranking members of
the military, who would otherwise assist him in his bid for fully autocratising the country. This
puts into question the unsettling connection between a megalomaniac’s discursive practice and
its institutionalisation, which could lead to autocratisation. By causing extreme polarisation,
these leaders unwittingly create counter-discourses which are backed up by the disastrous
legacy of managing the crisis, and have a chance at thwarting their autocratising schemes. Both
leaders have faced democratic opposition which was arguably reinforced by their negligence in
handing the pandemic. Polarising discourses during the crisis would have had a major impact
in autocratising these countries if it had not been for the opposition rallied as a result of these
very same discourses. Despite gaining support from an already polarised conservative, the
leaders have made enemies among the populace and among their own administration. Thus,
pandemic backsliding happens only if it musters almost full support from the voting populace.

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