“Esses marginais vermelhos serão banidos de nossa pátria”: discursos antipetistas mobilizados em publicações de perfis bolsonaristas no Facebook (2014-2018)

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the discourses mobilized by pro-Bolsonaro profiles on Facebook between 2014 and 2018, with an emphasis on the centrality of antipetismo (anti-Workers’ Party sentiment) in the constitution of the political identity of Bolsonarism. The study is situated within the broader context of the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy, understood as a global process of destabilization of democratic regimes, and manifested in Brazil through a polarizing, violent, and authoritarian political discourse, amplified by the dynamics of digital society. The research adopts a qualitative approach, grounded in political discourse analysis, which conceives discourse as a provisional fixation of meaning. This theoretical framework is articulated with Ernesto Laclau’s theory (as cited in Pinto, 2019) on chains of equivalence and empty signifiers, enabling the identification of how antipetismo operates as a symbolic articulator of Bolsonarist discourse. The research corpus comprises 41 public statements by Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters, along with 40 posts and 126 comments collected from anti-PT Facebook profiles. The temporal scope is limited to the period between 2016 and 2018, which is justified by its correspondence with the peak of Bolsonarism’s rise on social media, especially Facebook. The analysis is organized into three main semantic fields, each examined in a dedicated chapter: anti-corruption, moral conservatism, and public insecurity. The first chapter explores the resignification of corruption as an emptied sign exclusively attributed to the Workers’ Party (PT), in a process of political criminalization that traces back to the June 2013 protests. The second field, moral conservatism, investigates the sacralization of Bolsonaro as a messianic figure and the demonization of political enemies. The third field, public (in)security, examines how Bolsonarist discourse legitimizes violence and criminalizes political opponents. It analyzes the rhetoric of “a good criminal is a dead criminal,” the defense of civilian armament, the role of the so-called “bullet caucus,” as well as systematic attacks on human rights and the discrediting of social movements such as the MST and CUT. The findings suggest that antipetismo functions as an empty signifier that condenses multiple symbolic threats — corruption, immorality, criminality — and articulates heterogeneous discourses into an exclusionary political identity. This identity is amplified by digital media through the strategic use of memes, hashtags, and viral content, in line with Byung-Chul Han’s (2018) notions of “digital swarm” and homo digitalis.