Jair Bolsonaro Fast Facts
Jair Bolsonaro is Brazilian conservative politician who was elected president on October 7, 2018, defeating incumbent President Dilma Rousseff. The 39th Brazilian president, he has been in office since January 1, 2019. Bolsonaro is a member of the Brazilian Social Democracy party and was nominated as the party’s presidential candidate for the 2018 election. Bolsonaro was born in the city of Suzano in Rio de Janeiro on July 31, 1948. He became a politician in 1994 and became mayor of the city of Suzano in 2003. He became president in 2018. Bolsonaro was a vocal supporter of former U.S. President George H.W. Bush and was part of the team that launched the 2002 military coup that ousted Brazil’s democratically-elected government. He has been known for his homophobic statements, such as declaring AIDS a “gay disease” in 2007. He has also declared himself a socialist to the extent that he considered the poor to be lazy people who need to be helped by government welfare programs and believes in social justice for all. He took office on January 1, 2019, the first to be Brazil’s president since the 1973 military coup when a civilian government was restored. [1]
Jair Bolsonaro is from the city of Suzano in Rio de Janeiro.
In 2011, he ran as a presidential candidate with the Social Democrat Party (PSD) and was the party’s candidate for the Rio de Janeiro governorship, receiving a few hundred votes. In October 2014, he was the running mate of then-Senator Eduardo Campos in the 2014 presidential election. He later was replaced with Fernando Collor de Mello, and the party’s candidate for presidential election in 2018. [2] He had some controversies during the election, especially when he said that if he were the president of Brazil, he would legalize abortion in three months. [3] He later said that he would not do that because the party’s platform did not include abortion or the legalization of same-sex unions.
In his election campaign, Bolsonaro called for the expulsion of all illegal immigrants from Brazil. He also called for a ban on abortion and same-sex marriage.
He was widely expected by many to be able to defeat incumbent President Dilma Rousseff in the