As the sun rose over Rio’s breathtaking granite and quartz landscape, José Leonardo da Silva set off from home dressed as a 6ft 2in box of Viagra.
His destination: a beach-sidestreet party called the Cosmic Trumpets where hundreds of half-clothed revellers had gathered to celebrate their first carnival since Covid. His message: that the scandal involving the purchase of tens of thousands of erectile dysfunction tablets by President Jair Bolsonaro’s defense ministry was an intolerable affront.
“Carnival is politics too,” said Silva, a 43-year-old psychologist for Brazil’s health service, as he prepared to spend the day denouncing Bolsonaro’s “completely fascist” government by disguising himself as a packet of 50mg impotence pills.
Silva was not the only one with politics on his mind this week as bacchanalia gripped Rio’s streets for the first time since February 2020.
With a bruising electoral battle for Brazil’s soul less than six months away, many saw carnival as a chance to vent their spleen at Brazil’s far-right president, who retains a ferociously loyal support base but is repudiated by more than half of voters.
Loud cries of “Bolsonaro out!” erupted at Rio’s Sambadrome on Friday night as the city’s top samba schools held their first processions since the coronavirus pandemic began. The president’s son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, was stalked and taunted by angry revellers while trying to watch the parades while a banner demanding his father’s removal was unfurled from one of the stands.
Spectators in one of the Sambadrome’s exclusive “luxury boxes” shouted insults about Bolsonaro’s main presidential rival, the former leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But on the working-class terraces and at the roaming street parties known as blocos there was support for Lula.
“I feel hopeful because I believe democracy must prevail over authoritarianism – and there’s only one candidate who can achieve this and it’s Lula,” said Angelo Morse, 43, who woke up at 4.30am on Thursday to join a bloco called What a Lovely Wetland.
Morse, an educator who claimed to be a distant relative of the North American inventor Samuel FB Morse, came to carnival wearing an alligator costume designed to protest at Bolsonaro’s handling of a Covid outbreak, which has left more than 660,000 Brazilians dead.
“President Bolsonaro is a moron and said that if you got vaccinated you’d turn into an alligator,” he said by way of explanation as the square around him filled with inebriated partygoers dressed as pirates, devils, nuns, superheroes, sea creatures and, in one case, a bottle of Heinz Yellow Mustard. One carried a portrait showing Bolsonaro spewing a river of green sewage.
On a nearby lawn, the art director Maria Estephania spoke despondently about the social, cultural and economic decline she believed had played out since Bolsonaro’s shock 2018 election victory.
“We fucked ourselves” by electing Bolsonaro, Estephania, 34, said with a sigh, as she took a break from partying at Liquid Loves, a bloco inspired by the work of the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.
Estephania’s outfit – a scarlet cape plastered with stickers promoting Lula and Marcelo Freixo, a leftist ally she hopes will be elected Rio’s next governor – identified an alternative future. “It’s an election year and we need to reaffirm our values, which bear no relation to those of the political group which currently holds power,” Estephania said. “Our values have absolutely nothing to do with Bolsonaro.”
Not everybody wanted to talk politics as carnival returned after a two-year Covid hiatus.
At a bloco outside Rio’s Museum of Tomorrow, Eduardo Faria, a portly motorbike courier in a turquoise tutu, busied himself filling a penis-shaped water-pistol with mineral water. “I’m just here to have fun! No politics please!” the 39-year-old giggled. “It’s carnival!”
Farther west in Vila Mimosa, Rio’s red light district, another raucous procession was about to begin, led by sex workers and samba musicians. The most modestly dressed partygoer was Everson Almeida, a former seminarist wearing the black cassock he used before ditching plans to join the priesthood. A sticker beneath his clerical collar declared: “Bolsonaro out!”
“He’s a sore on our society,” said Almeida, 29, who balked at Bolsonaro’s portrayal of himself as a God-fearing Christian. “Christ came to deliver a message of shelter and inclusion, not segregation, selfishness and conflict.”
As the drummers warmed up, Almeida voiced confidence that the Bolsonaro era was entering its final chapter, with Lula leading in the polls.
“God willing [he’s finished],” he said, pointing heavenwards. “And this must be what He wants.”
