At daybreak on Wednesday, Sgt Alexandre Martins will pull a yellow Brazil shirt on to his bullet-pocked body and set off from his suburban home for a date with destiny on Copacabana beach.
“It’s going to go down in history. It’ll be a unique moment – a watershed … It will astonish the world,” promised the 44-year-old police veteran who has spent half his life battling drug gangs in the city’s favelas and carries lead in his flesh as proof.
The seaside extravaganza to which Martins is heading has been marshalled by Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, in an attempt to show strength before the country’s most important election since the return of democracy in 1985.
“It’ll be just like New Year’s Eve,” the Bolsonarista police officer said of the event – ostensibly a celebration of 200 years of Brazilian independence – which will feature a 21-gun salute, an aerobatic flypast and a paratrooper parachute display, as well as an appearance from the president.
Bolsonaro and his backers hope their bicentennial beach party will draw huge crowds that puncture pollsters’ predictions that he will lose October’s election to his rival, the former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
“Let me tell you, there won’t be room to move in Copacabana,” said Martins, a newborn Christian who claimed a million “upstanding Brazilian citizens” would attend.
Rightwing excitement over Bolsonaro’s jamboree contrasts with progressive dread and anger that a day of national celebration has been hijacked by the Bolsonarian right. Some fear the gathering could spark scenes of turmoil reminiscent of last year’s storming of the US Capitol by followers of Donald Trump.
“I’m not saying everyone who votes [Bolsonaro] or supported him is a far-right fanatic … but the risk is precisely the fanatics. Just look at what happened in the US,” said Consuelo Dieguez, the author of a new book on Bolsonarismo and Brazil’s far-right called The Serpent’s Egg.
Dieguez played down doomsday predictions that the independence day demos – which will also be held in Brasília and São Paulo – might be used to stage a military coup in favour of Bolsonaro, an authoritarian-minded former soldier who has said only God will remove him from the presidency.
“I don’t believe the army high command would submit itself to this kind of adventure. It would make an international disgrace of Brazil and wouldn’t receive support from overseas,” she said.
But Dieguez did believe Bolsonaro was purposefully “inciting” radical supporters, whom he has encouraged to take to the streets on Wednesday “for the last time”.
Billboards erected in Brasília by the president’s supporters proclaim: “It’s now or never”. Pro-Bolsonaro Telegram and WhatsApp groups have been flooded with messages urging members to “prepare for war”.
“I can’t tell you what the result of this will be but clearly this causes fear and unease,” Dieguez said. “I’m afraid of violence, of violence in the streets.”
Martins, who is running for a place in Rio’s parliament for Bolsonaro’s conservative Liberal party, dismissed such concerns as exaggerated.
“We want order and progress, not violence,” the police officer said during a recent canvassing event in Anchieta, the dilapidated northern neighbourhood where he grew up in a favela named after the jackfruit tree.
Martins, who said he would not take his semi-automatic pistol to the seaside rally, also rejected the idea that Bolsonaro could use military force to cling to power if he lost to Lula. “He’s had sufficient reason to do this and he hasn’t,” the officer said, calling Bolsonaro “the most democratic guy in the world”.
Quite what Brazil’s mercurial president intends with his independence day demonstrations remains an enigma, even for allies.
Bolsonaro reportedly plans to attend a military parade in Brasília before flying to Rio, where he built his political career, to address supporters on Copacabana beach.
Celso Rocha de Barros, the author of a recent history of Lula’s Worker’s party, said he suspected the leftist’s large – but not necessarily insurmountable – lead in the polls meant Bolsonaro was torn over his plan of action.
He said: “If Lula had a 20-point lead and the situation looked completely irreversible and Bolsonaro had no chance of winning, he’d bet all his chips on a coup,” and use Wednesday’s rally to fire up his radical base with an all-out verbal attack on the supreme court.
If Bolsonaro was the frontrunner, his best bet would be to ditch any plans for a coup and focus on winning the election by moderating his behaviour to attract centre-right voters.
As things stood, Bolsonaro appeared trapped in a strategic limbo, unsure of whether he was best served by radicalism or restraint.
“It’s a mystery what will happen … [and] personally I think this election remains a mystery too,” said Dieguez. “Deep down, I think Bolsonaro believes he still has a shot. I don’t think he’s thrown in the towel.”
As Martins prepared to go to the beach, he said he felt no such uncertainty and believed Bolsonaro was cruising towards victory, over Lula and the “communist” threat Bolsonaro fans claim he represents.
“The polls don’t reflect reality … Out of every 10 people I approach, nine are Bolsonaro and one is Lula,” the officer claimed, although polls indicate Lula was leading the race, even in Rio, the cradle of Bolsonarismo.
For Martins, who retired from the frontline of Rio’s drug conflict in 2019 after being shot for the sixth time, that was cause for celebration.
“Being [Bolsonaro] means representing God, patriotism, the family and freedom. Being [Lula] means supporting abortion, the legalisation of drugs, gender ideology and narco-trafficking,” declared the budding politician whose candidate number in this year’s election – 762 – is a reference to the calibre of cartridge his rifle once fired.
“We’re fighting for a better country,” Martins said. “There’s nothing extremist about that.”
