In the last few years, we have witnessed in Brazil the political rise of the ultra-right (Mudde, 2020), starred by the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. Through this research, we aimed to identify how, in the online electoral discourse of the then-candidate, the representation of social actors – related to land issues – was constituted, through its different social compositions, seeking to understand how ideology and the relations of domination constituted by it (Thompson, 2011) act with regard to agrarian conflicts in Brazil.
For the development of this research, we extracted all publications from the Twitter account @jairbolsonaro between January 1st and October 28th, 2018, the day of the second round of the last presidential elections. On the 1,384 tweets collected, a lexical programme consisting of 191 words – elaborated from the literature review and retrieved from secondary data analysis –, was applied to the database, filtering a total of 70 tweets, our initial corpus of analysis.
On this corpus of analysis, through a Content Analysis (Bardin, 1977), considering the dimension "rural social actors", the emerging categories were then mobilized: "landless people", "family farmer", "rural producer", "indigenous peoples and quilombolas", "cultural-geographic category", "politicians (institutional politics)" and "others (comprehensive expressions)". After coding the tweets, a stratified random sample from each group was then selected in order to develop a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (van Dijk, 1983).
The focus of CDA in this research falls, finally, on topics related to the "representation of social actors" (van Leeuwen, 2008), namely, the processes of: activation and passivation; individualization and assimilation; association; naming and categorization; functionalization and identification; and overdetermination of these actors.
From the research carried out so far, we identify in Jair Bolsonaro's discourse 1) the populist construction of two antagonistic political camps, marking an explicit opposition to the category "landless people"; 2) the inscription of heterogeneous social groups in a "chain of equivalance" (Laclau, 2005), seeking to integrate the categories "indigenous peoples and quilombolas" in his electoral campaign, submitting them to the hegemony of a neoliberal praxis; 3) the political articulation with key actors in the Brazilian legislative branch - representatives of agribusiness in Congress; and 4) the prioritization of the social actor "rural producer", whose emphasis on the economic functionalization of the category indicates the preference in his discourse, concerning land issues, for a neoliberal logic of land use.
Bardin, L. (2006). Análise de Conteúdo. Trad: Reto, L. e Pinheiro, A. Lisbon: Edições 70. (Original issue: 1977).
Laclau, E. (2010). La razón populista. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. (Original issue: 2005)
Mudde, C (2020). O Regresso da Ultradireita - Da Direita Radical à Direita Extremista. Lisbon: Editorial Presença.
Thompson, J. (2002). Ideologia e cultura moderna: teoria social crítica na era dos meios de comunicação de massa. Trad. (Coord.) Guareshi, P. Petrópolis: Vozes. (Original issue: 1990).
van Dijk, T.A. (1993). "Principles of critical discourse analysis". Discourse & Society, Sage, London. Newbury Park and New Delhi, vol. 4(2): 249-283.
van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. New York: Oxford Press.
