Quando salvar empregos coloca em risco vidas: uma análise dos discursos presidenciais de Jair Bolsonaro sobre a pandemia de COVID-19

Abstract

This article aims to understand how Jair Messias Bolsonaro's presidential discourse about the covid-19 pandemic, broadcast on national radio and television, with distribution on social media, works at different times of the health crisis in Brazil. To achieve this proposal, nine presidential pronouncements made in the period from March 6, 2020 to June 2, 2021 were gathered on file. From this, following the criteria of discursive regularity, excess and strangeness, the clipping was performed of the set of discursive sequences that compose the corpus of this work. The four DSs selected have elements that are repeated throughout the statements that make up the file, including a relationship between health, marked by the phrase “save lives”, and economy, represented by “save jobs”. With the chosen corpus, a theoretical analytical discussion was carried out using the Materialist Discourse Analysis. Next, the strict and broad production conditions of the analyzed discourses were presented, and, in the last section, the description and interpretation of the corpus. From the interpretation gestures, it was observed that the bolsonarista discursive formation is affiliated with an ideological formation of neoliberalism, as in addition to establishing a relationship of equality between health and economy, the presidential discourse evidences the distancing of the government and the state of market and economic decisions. Given these observations and contradictions identified during the analysis, in Jair Bolsonaro's discourse, a cynical functioning of the Brazilian presidential discourse about the covid-19 pandemic is pointed out.