Acceso usuarios
Daniel N. Silva
This article argues that Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of Covid-19 in Brazil was consistent with his ‘different kind of branding.’ Contrary to the expectations of marketing experts and place branding scholars, Bolsonaro’s branding tactics were predicated not on por-traying Brazil positively to commoditize it to (trans)national audiences but on produc-ing the image of Brazil as a white conservative Christian country through maintaining epistemic and informational crises, delegitimizing expert systems, and engaging in nec-ropolitical calculation. Methodologically, to describe the ‘brand-new’ Brazil projected in Bolsonaro’s presidency (2019–2022), I build three case studies centering on the boycott of Covid-19 vaccines, his strategy of letting the virus spread freely in favor of a supposed herd immunity, and the ‘shadow board’ that helped him build a necropolitical strategy. I suggest that Bolsonaro’s ‘chaotic’ branding project harnessed features of currently exist-ing neoliberalism, including informational entropy, the digital production of ‘alternative facts’, entrepreneurial ethos, the delegitimization of expert systems, and the association between free market and political conservatism
