A Little Flu? - Populist Ideas in the Official Discourses of Mexico and Brazil during the initial phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has led governments all over the world to implement strict public health measures to prevent contamination of the virus. However, not all countries have chosen the same strategy. The ideological outlook of the government in charge provides one possible explanatory variable as to why. Recently published research has noted how governments classified as populist have chosen idiosyncratic ways of countering the virus. However, less investigation has been made into the ‘inner workings’ of populist thought that may have contributed to the particular responses. This master ́s thesis analyses the official discourses of two countries that handled the pandemic differently: Mexico and Brazil. Both countries have presidents that are considered to be populist leaders: Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and Jair Messias Bolsonaro. In this thesis, I trace the presence of populist ideas in the official discourses of these countries. Drawing on key contributions to populist theory, I analyse how they have employed four populist ideas in their COVID-19 related discourses: the People, the Other, the Leader, and the Crisis. These are all identified as key populist ideas in the literature, both classical and more recent populist theories. I find that populist ideas are present in the two discourses, showing how a Crisis allows fortifying the opposition between the Other and the People and strengthening the Leader's role. Even though populism cannot explain the whole picture of why specific measures were implemented and others not, populist ideas justified and arguably enabled some of the policies in Mexico and Brazil during COVID-19