RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – To bring down far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Andre Janones had to fight fire with fire.
The little-known 38-year-old lawmaker was running a longshot presidential campaign until he joined forces in August with President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, adding bite to the leftist’s campaign with his raw, no-holds-barred approach to online politics.
Janones acknowledged in an interview that his use of ad hominem attacks, exaggerations and even physical confrontations with opponents had not been constructive for public discourse. But he said that, in order to win and prevent the president from consolidating his conservative agenda, Brazil’s left needed to steal a page from Bolsonaro’s playbook.
“This debate impoverishes democracy. It’s a scrappy debate, in which you provoke, you use debauchery, you joke around,”…
