MOST WESTERN NEWS CONSUMERS are aware that, in Brazil, a far-right presidential candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, came close in Sunday’s national election to winning the 50% of the vote needed to win without a run-off (he received 46.2%), and is now highly likely to prevail on October 28 against his opponent, the liberal Workers’ Party’s Fernando Haddad, who finished a distant second with 29%. That result, by itself, is stunning, given that Bolsonaro is an undiluted, explicit authoritarian in the model of Duterte and Sisi — one could easily say “fascist” even using the narrowest and most most rigorous sense of that term — who had been a fringe figure in politics for decades but is now poised to assume the presidency.