Brazilian Foreign Policy under Jair Bolsonaro

The paper focuses on the analysis of Brazilian foreign policy under Jair Bolsonaro since his inauguration as president in January 2019 up to the present moment. This study examines Jair Bolsonaro’s personality and the influence of Brazilian president’s certain character traits on foreign policy decisions. The author concludes that Jair Bolsonaro has won presidential election in autumn 2018 largely due to disenchantment of Brazilians with socially oriented public policy. Due to the fact that Jair Bolsonaro adheres to the right-wing radical views, thinks of himself as anti-globalist and advocates the development of bilateral relations at the expense of multilateral ones, even before he came to power researchers and political experts had predicted Brazil’s rapprochement with the USA, Italy and Israel, a cold snap in bilateral relations with China, a coming rupture in relations with Cuba and Venezuela and Brazil’s withdrawal from the UN, the OAS, Mercosur, UNASUR and the BRICS. Reality, however, turned out to be much more challenging and the forecasts of political experts came true only partially. Since from the very beginning J. Bolsonaro was supported by such various groups as the military, evangelicals, representatives of agribusiness, economists, they often suggested to him absolutely contradictory foreign policy decisions. As a result, almost any step in the international arena was replaced by a retreat: criticism of China's expansion was followed by the signing of economic agreements with him, after the announcement of the intention to move the embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, followed by visits to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE. Although J. Bolsonaro criticized multilateral diplomacy, he achieved the signing of agreements between Mercosur and the EU, Mercosur and EFTA. Nevertheless, the President of Brazil has invariably adhered to the course of automatic alignment with the United States and developed relations mainly with regimes close to him in ideology. It is difficult to judge how correct this strategy was, but in the future the Brazilian government must first of all be guided by the interests of the country, remember the need for its autonomy and economic prosperity.