Soon after saying that he has a trip to Russia scheduled for the end of February, President Jair Bolsonaro heard a question from a supporter who, with his voice marked by years of life, consults the Brazilian leader about something he heard about the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
– That’s true… that he’s a real conservative. That he is our people? I think that…
Bolsonaro fired, interrupting his interlocutor.
Not long ago, this column told how the Russians were moving around Brasilia. How the current ambassador knocked on the right doors and with the right speech. Russia is the alternative to China. “We are a Christian country and our leader is conservative.” Bolsonaro, it seems, believed.
Not only did he believe, but he accepted to land in Moscow in the midst of the fog. The thick fog of war. The Brazilian president hopes to find in Russia a strong leader with conservative affinities and values – so dear to him and his base. The architects of this meeting ignore the fact that at this moment Vladimir Putin, who awaits Bolsonaro with open arms, can push Europe into political, security and energy crises, dragging the United States and China to the center of the crisis, in a tangle like that.
These same architects and advisers ignore another fact. By the end of February, when Bolsonaro says he is thinking about going to Russia, the situation may have deteriorated to such an extent that the trip will not only be geopolitical suicide, but simply unfeasible.
But the central question is the following. What does the “conservative” Putin want to “conserve”?
Putin is an autocrat. In his fourth term, he sends a message to his people and to the world that what he wants to preserve is his power, the neo-tsarism he founded and is the basis for building a project of power.
Putin’s conservatism is a far cry from the fundamental concepts of conservatism itself, of which many conservatives have no idea. They go by instinct thinking they are synonyms of some anachronisms.
Putin looks into Mother Russia. Its conservative references are local and culturally designed to feed the project of a grandiose empire. “Putinian conservatism” is a political, strategic and expansionist instrument. I suspect that President Jair Bolsonaro did not receive the complete information. In addition, he was not told that Putin’s project (the same Putin who sets fire to Venezuela and possibly helped Lula out of jail) not only does not match Bolsonarism, but wants its end.
“Putinesque conservatism” has familiar ingredients. 1) Talks about national sovereignty versus globalism: “Only sovereign states can effectively respond to the challenges of the times and the demands of citizens. Thus, any effective international order must consider the interests and capabilities of the State and proceed on that basis, and not try to prove that they should not exist.” 2) Criticizes revolutions: “The cost of ill-conceived social experiments is sometimes , beyond all estimation. Such an action can destroy not only the material foundations, but also the spiritual foundations of human existence, leaving behind moral wreckage where nothing can be built to replace it for long. No revolution was worth the damage it took. caused to human potential.” 3) Christian Values versus Secularism: “We believe that we must trust our own spiritual values, our historical tradition and the culture of our multiethnic nation”.
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4) Fighting abortion: “Do you know what the trick is?” asked Putin. “The trick is that of course there is a lot of diversity in every nation and around the world. After all, all people want to live.” He added: “The idea of giving absolute priority to the value of free choice and of rejecting the priority of moral norms has become a bomb that slowly explodes for Western civilization, if we could cut the number of abortions in half, there would be a population growth. constant and powerful”.
5) Defense of the family: “In my opinion,” Putin said, “the same [respeito pela vida] applies to the family as a value
[universal], why what can be more important than procreation? Do we want to be or not to be? If we don’t want to be, fine. See, adoption is also a good and important thing, but to adopt a child, someone has to give birth to that child. This is the second universal value that cannot be disputed.”
So how is Putin not a conservative if he says exactly what conservatives stand for?
Here’s the key to understanding and avoiding the trap. Putin is a politician who knows the soul of his people better than anyone. For him, what assumes the guise of “conservatism” is nothing more than the ingredients of a strategy of maintaining power through Russian nationalism, which is the core of his main expansionist and geopolitical actions.
What Putin wants to keep is power.
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