With Sunday's election of Jair Bolsonaro to be the next president of Brazil the world's increasingly battered liberal order has suffered another blow. Once again public fury at an aloof and self-serving political class during a time of economic hardship has helped propel a demagogue into power.
From being a staunch advocate of the multilateral approach to global governance, Brazil under Bolsonaro now looks set to drift into the camp of the right-wing populists who are reshaping the politics of the transatlantic world. He disparages the UN, calling it a communist racket and threatens to quit the organisation. He has floated pulling the country out of the Paris Agreement on climate change and re-opening the Amazon for pillage by miners, loggers and ranchers. And like the professed admirer of Donald Trump that he is, he rails against the country's trade relationship with China and has called refugees "the scum of the earth".
Outsiders can only lament that a majority of Brazilians have chosen someone viscerally opposed to liberal democracy, civic comity and equal rights for women and minorities to solve their country’s various crises. They might also wonder at the wisdom of turning to a man who throughout the campaign betrayed a worryingly shallow understanding of the challenges he will face in his new job.
The first reaction to the result should be for other democracies to move quickly and upgrade their safeguards against the pernicious impact of social media on free elections. Various causes explain Bolsonaro's rise from the political fringe but it has been facilitated by his clever manipulation of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp through which he and his supporters poured out a torrent of hatred and fake news that polluted the entire electoral process. Waiting for Facebook and its peers to properly police their own networks is too risky an abdication of responsibility. Upgraded regulation with robust real-time enforcement is urgently required.
In relation to the incoming Bolsonaro administration, Ireland should now work within the EU to ensure that any further deepening of ties between the Union and Brazil only takes place if the new president respects his country’s constitution and its guarantees on the separation of powers. He must also honour previous international commitments, especially those on the environment.
Europe should make clear that it will not open its prized consumer markets to more Brazilian produce if Bolsonaro lets into the world’s largest rainforest, the planet’s green lung, those who would tear it down. In doing so it would reinforce the campaign of those environmentalists in Brazil, supported by progressive elements in the agribusiness sector, who argue that failure to protect the Amazon would not only invite global environmental disaster but be commercially self-defeating.