Far-right firebrand Jair Bolsonaro will be given the keys to Brazil‘s presidential palace on January 1st.

The 63-year-old far-right former army captain, who vanquished rival Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers’ Party (PT) in a runoff vote on Sunday, has pledged to radically reform Latin America’s largest country.

An outspoken advocate of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship, Bolsonaro’s rise from a fringe Rio de Janeiro congressman to president-elect has stunned observers, many of whom until very recently had scoffed at his chances of winning Brazil’s highest office.

For years, he was mostly known, for making offensive comments about LGBT people, women and minorities.

But amid widespread anger over graft scandals, economic downturn and rising violence, the former army captain managed to position himself as the outsider candidate in an election defined by anti-establishment sentiment.

Bolsonaro’s victory is expected to make a profound shift for South America’s largest economy and the region. But it won’t be an easy task: economic recovery is fragile and opposition to his government is strong.

Critics say that his government plan, entitled “The Path to Prosperity” is vague and lacks concrete proposals.

“He has promised his voters a radical change that perhaps he won’t be capable to fulfil,” said Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist and professor of international relations at Rio de Janeiro State University.

With just weeks left until he assumes office, Al Jazeera looks at some of the main objectives Bolsonaro may pursue once inside the Palacio do Planalto.

Government

Bolsonaro plans to stuff his cabinet with military men. He has spoken of reducing the number of Brazil’s ministries and of nominating generals to briefs such as defence and transport. 

In legislative elections on October 7, Bolsonaro’s Social Liberty Party swelled from eight to 52 politicians in the lower house, making it the second largest after the PT.

The overall profile of congress is conservative, with powerful agricultural, Evangelical Christian and public security caucuses whose politicians backed Bolsonaro for president.

Bolsonaro has pledged to avoid the typical pork barrel patronage way of doing politics that has characterised Brazil’s congress, but experts remain unconvinced.

“It’s likely that he will have to govern like every other Brazilian president, making deals and negotiations,” said Santoro, the political scientist. “This may disappoint some of his voters.”

Brazil’s congress wields immense power, and since 2016 has decided the fate of two presidents: to impeach Dilma Rousseff for an accounting manoeuvre and to shield Michel Temer from corruption charges.

Anti-corruption drive

Bolsonaro has pledged to eradicate corruption from public life – a bold promise – after years of graft scandals that have enraged the electorate and tarnished large swaths of Brazil’s political class. 

Scores of Brazilian politicians and business leaders have been swept up in a major corruption probe known as Lava Jato, or Car Wash, and other interlocking investigations since 2014.

Among those implicated in the raking probe was former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, who is currently serving a 12-year term in jail.

Lula, the PT’s original candidate for the presidential election, was forced to give way to Haddad after being barred from running in the poll by Brazil’s top electoral court.

Bolsonaro, who said last week that Lula should “rot in jail”, has also promised to purge Brazil of left-wing “criminals” and poured scorn on the PT as the epicentre of Brazil’s corruption problems.

“Either they leave or go to jail … these red outlaws will be banished from our homeland,” Bolsonaro said on October 21.

“It will be a cleansing never seen in Brazilian society,” he added.

On Thursday, “Car Wash” leading judge Sergio Moro – who sentenced Lula to nearly 10 years in prison last year – accepted a position in the Bolsonaro government to be justice minister with an expansive role in fighting corruption.

The move was celebrated by Bolsonaro supporters but rebuked by PT politicians, who have long accused Moro of bias and judicial overreach, especially after Bolsonaro’s vice General Mourao revealed that Moro had been invited to the government while still in campaign. 

“It is of an astonishing gravity the revelation of Mourao. It’s testimonial evidence of the criminal and perverse relationship between Car Wash and Bolsonaro,” PT congressman Paulo Pimenta Tweeted.

But despite Bolsonaro’s forceful rhetoric, his strategy in office may amount to little more than “allowing the sprawling Car Wash investigation to run”, Richard Lapper, an associate fellow at the UK-based Chatham House institute of international affairs and independent analyst on Latin American politics, told Al Jazeera.

“Simply because of the result of the election a lot of the congressman and governors who have lost the immunity [from prosecution] they enjoyed as a result of holding elected office could now become victims of legal process with the federal police and judiciary pursuing them,” Lapper said.

“He [Bolsonaro] doesn’t actually have to do very much,” he added.

Incumbent politicians have immunity from prosecution for most criminal offences but the biggest shake-up of Brazil’s 594-member Congress for more than three decades during this election has left a number of politicians out of office and exposed to possible graft charges.

Centralisation of security

Brazil saw more than 63,000 murders last year accordingto the Brazilian Forum of Public Security, and Bolsonaro’s vows to crackdown on rising crime and a record homicide rate were at the front and centre of his campaign for office. 

He has pledged to alleviate the crisis by relaxing laws on gun ownership, giving police officers “carte blanche” to kill criminal suspect and lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 16.

He will also look to centralise responsibility for public security, shifting power away from Brazil’s 27 separate state-level legislatures towards central government, Thiago de Aragao, director at the Brasilia-based political consultancy Arko Advice, told Al Jazeera.

“The administration of the police forces is very local, [but] Bolsonaro wants to bring more power for the union [federal government] to interfere in public security,” Aragao said.

“It definitely represents a major shift in relation to what we have seen in public security until now,” he added.

All the same, experts acknowledge that Bolsonaro’s hardline discourse of defending police violence will likely lead to more killings.

In 2017, police were responsible for more than 5000 killings nationwide.

“This vision of the enemy to be exterminated, no one paid much attention before because he was so irrelevant in the lower house,” said Bruno Paes Manso, a researcher at the Nucleus of Violence Studies at the University of Sao Paulo.

“Now he’s emerged as a national leader. It’s a discourse of war.”

Pivot to Washington

On the foreign policy front, Brazil’s relationship with China, its largest trade partner, appears likely to be in Bolsonaro’s crosshairs after his repeated warnings about aspects of Beijing’s investment in the country. 

Bolsonaro has been very critical of China, whom he has accused in the past of trying to “buy” Brazil. Earlier this year, while still a candidate, he also visited Taiwan while on a trip to Asia, ruffling feathers in Beijing.

Luiz Philippe de Orleans e Braganca, a heir to the Portuguese Imperial crown and an adviser to Bolsonaro, also tipped to possibly lead the ministry of foreign affairs, meanwhile, has warned the new administration will reevaluate the terms of Brazil’s membership of Mercosur, a regional economic and political bloc also comprised of Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

“Today, Mercosur is a hindrance to free trade,” Braganca told Bloomberg on October 17, three days before Bolsonaro said he was in favour of “bilateralism where possible”.

Proposed finance minister Paulo Guedes also told reporters Sunday night that the South American trading block Mercosul “would not be a priority”.

While seemingly cautious about Beijing and Brazil’s regional relationships, Bolsonaro has expressed a strong interest in working closely with Washington, DC and US President Donald Trump.

Mirroring a pivot made by the US in May, Bolsonaro has said he will shift the Brazilian embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, according to Brazilian newspaper Globo.

He also saidhe will close a Palestinian embassy in the capital, Brasilia, on the grounds that “Palestine is not a country”. 

Following a congratulatory call from Trump on Sunday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said the two men had “expressed a strong commitment to work side by side to improve the lives of the people of the United States and Brazil, and as regional leaders of the Americas”.

According to Lapper, this is likely to be the “most pro-American administration in Latin America” for decades.

“But the question is what Brazil gets out of that … because the big problem with being pro-American and following Trump’s line on everything is that it potentially brings Brazil into conflict with China,” Lapper said.

“[And] given the fact that they are in a bit of a bind economically, they don’t want to be provoking instability,” he added, referring to Brazil’s stagnant economy, in which millions of people are without work.

Bolsonaro’s first three trips abroad will be to Chile, United States and Israel his chosen chief of staff Onyx Lorenzoni confirmed on Monday.

Economic liberalisation

Brazil is barely crawling out of its worst economic recession on record. While unemployment has fallen slightly in recent months, it still remains stubbornly high at more than 12 percent with economists seeing no quick fix for a recovery. 

Bolsonaro has vowed to kick-start Brazil’s ailing economy by privatising state enterprises, reforming the country’s bloated pension system and amending the national tax system.

To that end he said he will appoint Paulo Guedes, an ultra-liberal economist and banker, trained at the University of Chicago, to head his planned economic ministry.

Guedes hopes to enact a sweeping privatisation programme of state owned assets. Brazil stocks jumped to a record high Monday and the currency, the real, also saw gains.

It is not yet clear, however, what form the privatisation element of the pair’s economic plans may take.

Fearing a Chinese buy-up of Brazilian assets, Bolsonaro has recently rowed back on Guedes’s calls for a full privatisation of state-run oil company Petrobras and the electric utilities company Eletrobras.

“We know that privatisation is a general desire of the political members of his [Bolsonaro’s] team, mainly of the economic members,” Aragao said.

“[But] the execution of this desire is something more complicated,” he added.

Bolsanaro has also vowed to shrink the size of the federal government by cutting the number of ministries in Brasilia from 29 to 15.

Environmental deregulation

Environmentalists have expressed great concern for the preservation of the Amazon during Bolsonaro’s term in office.

Bolsonaro had previously promised to take Brazil out of the Paris Climate Agreement – following the example of United States President Donald Trump – but apparently backtracked last week. 

Another feature of his presidential programme may be deregulation of existing environmental policy.

He has spoken out in favour of the removal of restrictions on mining and other commercial activities on lands currently demarcated as indigenous reserves, many of which are located in Brazilian sections of the Amazon.

The president-elect is hostile to indigenous interests and said at an event in Rio de Janeiro last year that he would not give “one centimetre” of demarcated land.

“He foments hatred and violence against indigenous peoples with a discourse claiming that we are an obstacle for development, ignoring our contributions to environmental balance,” said Dinama Tuxa, Coordinator of Brazil’s Association of Indigenous Peoples (APIB).

About 13 percent of Brazil’s national territory is Indigenous lands, 98 percent of which is in the Amazon, considered a crucial buffer against the impacts of climate change.

A close ally of the powerful congressional farming lobby, Bolsonaro will also combine the environment ministry with the agriculture ministry, his chosen chief of staff Onyx Lorenzoni said on Monday.

“This is [going to be] a very pro Agro-business administration,” Aragao said.

“Bolsonaro wants to create a new federal structure for agriculture and cattle production,” he added.

But the proposed move has left members of Brazil’s agricultural caucus worried, including leader of the Agricultural Parliamentary Front congresswoman Tereza Cristina, who pointed out that foreign markets are increasingly concerned with environmental standards.

white house

The White House is weighing options to limit asylum seekers’ entry into the U.S.

President Donald Trump is planning to deliver remarks about immigration on Thursday afternoon before leaving for a rally in Missouri, the White House said, in his latest attempt to stoke fear about migrants entering the United States ahead of the midterm election.

The Trump administration is weighing a series of policy options to limit asylum seekers’ ability to enter the United States. It’s unclear whether the president will unveil a new proposal on Thursday, though a person closely following the issue said the speech is expected to focus on asylum.

Story Continued Below

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump will address the “illegal immigration crisis and give an update on border security,” during “brief remarks” at 4:15 p.m. from the White house.

White House officials had initially been planning a high-profile immigration-focused speech this week, but the mass shooting in Pittsburgh upended those plans. Still, Trump has pounced on a caravan of Central American migrants that is slowly making its way to the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to rally his base ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. In recent days, he has floated the idea of issuing an executive order to end birthright citizenship, a proposal that experts say wouldn’t survive legal challenges.

Additionally, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security are considering an executive action and a regulatory change that would restrict certain migrants’ ability to seek asylum.

One former government official said there were “lots of rumblings from the White House” that Trump would use his remarks to unveil such an action, but it remained unknown as of midday Thursday whether that was actually the case.

Trump has come under criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for his unsubstantiated claims about the migrant caravan, casting the group of people as an “invasion” and warning without evidence that the group contains gang members and “unknown Middle Easterners.”

He has also deployed more than 5,200 troops to the border, and told reporters Wednesday that he may increase that number to 15,000.

Gabby Orr contribtued to this report.

Riace, Italy – The cobbled street leading to an arched passage known as the “water gate”, one of the entrances to the hilltop hamlet of Riace, is as quiet as the valley it overlooks. 

Inside the ancient walls, shops are shut and homes are up for sale. 

“Normality clashes with a world intoxicated with hatred and prejudice,” said Riace’s former mayor, Domenico Lucano, speaking to Al Jazeera by phone from Caulonia, another small town on southern Italy’s Ionic coast.

Accused of aiding undocumented migration, Lucano has found refuge there since he was banned from living in his native village in mid-October. 

“Riace has been destroyed,” he said in his typically emotional manner.

Lucano became Riace’s mayor in 2004 and was re-elected in 2009 and 2014. 

His idea of reviving the dying village’s economy by hosting refugees in homes left empty by Italians who had migrated abroad attracted international spotlight.

Bayram, a 52-year-old from a Kurdish village in southeastern Turkey, was one of 200 kurds who arrived to Riace’s shores in 1998, an event seen by residents as a watershed moment. Of those refugees, he’s the only one who stayed.

“I was escaping war, but I realised here there was a different type of war: it was hunger. My friends said I was crazy to stay,” Bayram recounts. “Riace was very different when I arrived. None of this was here,” he says pointing at the terraces he helped build for an animal park that, it was hoped, would bring visitors. 

But animal shacks now lie empty. 

In the town, the Pakistani kite maker, Afghan embroidery shop and glass blower have been shut since last August after workers stopped receiving salaries when, a year ago, an investigation was opened into the use of public funds for refugees in the town. 

The inquiry involved Lucano and 32 others. 

The only charges still standing against the mayor concern a phone call that allegedly shows him facilitating a “marriage of convenience”, and irregularities in assigning contracts for a door-to-door recycling service to a local cooperative without a public tender.

Bayram, who was a carpenter in his native village, was head of the woodworking workshop, but lost that job alongside two young people from the town. 

At Riace’s peak, the various organisations that operated in the town had created 80 jobs for both locals and refugees, and an additional 14 at the multi-ethnic nursery school, now closed.

The atmosphere has changed, in Riace as in the rest of Italy. We have to go back to our beginnings.

Giuseppe Gervasi, Riace deputy mayor

When the tap was closed on public funds – about two million euro a year – Riace’s ecosystem collapsed. 

As refugee arrivals peaked in Italy in 2015-16, a third of the town’s inhabitants had been asylum seekers. That number had gone down to about 200 in recent months, as people started leaving, looking to make a living elsewhere.

“When we started, for the first three to four years, we didn’t receive any funding. [Lucano’s] organisation, Citta Futura (City of the Future) was born that way. Some tourists would come, but it wasn’t enough to pay the bills,” says Bayram, who at the time worked in construction and volunteered for the organisation.

He now works as a driver and handyman for those refugees left behind, but he has no idea if he’ll ever be paid for it. And for the first time in 20 years, he is thinking seriously about leaving.

A town in limbo

Riace’s two local bars are always open. 

One is known as being for and the other against the mayor’s politics. From the old men who hang out there all day, to the refugees in the nearby square, everyone is waiting to see what comes next.

Earlier in October, Italy’s far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini caused an uproar when he said all refugees living in Riace would be transferred. 

“Some people panicked and left, they thought they’d be deported,” says Rosa, a Cameroonian single mother whose five-year-old is playing in the town’s main square. She like others, has no idea what will happen.

“She loves this town like her own,” says Rosa of her daughter, who has now spent more of her life in Italy than in Cameroon. 

According to locals, three or four families left of their own accord after the announcement. The rest are in a limbo, waiting to see when and where they’ll have to go.

Salvini’s statements were picked up by enough media outlets to have an effect on public opinion. The interior minister, who adopted a hardline on migration as a whole, retracted shortly afterwards, explaining that the transfer to other reception centres would be voluntary – but that those deciding to stay would lose state help. 

The reality is that no one can afford to stay in a place with no income or work opportunities.

Even the local football team, AC Riace, faces an uncertain future. A lot of the players are part of a project for unaccompanied minors. On the pitch, French is the preferred language.

Daniel Yaboah is originally from Ghana, but speaks Italian with the sighing and soft consonants typical of the local dialect. He’s been living in Riace for a decade. His two children, five and nine years old, grew up here. 

The 36-year-old used to be part of the cooperative that ran the rubbish collection service Lucano is accused of assigning without a public tender. He’s now scratching a living as a day labourer.

“Here there wasn’t something like work for Italians, and work for foreigners. We were in it together,” Daniel said. “There has never been a problem between locals and foreigners, like elsewhere in Italy. Things worked, until this mess with funds,” he added.

Lucano’s idea became a model for other hamlets in the region and throughout Italy, which form the Network of Solidarity Towns (ReCoSol). 

The organisation has started a fundraising campaign for Riace. 

“We can create jobs in the workshops, 15 to 20 workshops that can give work to youth from Riace and refugees,” Giuseppe Gervasi, the deputy mayor, told Al Jazeera in the mayor’s deserted office. 

Posters behind him speak of multiculturalism and anti-mafia culture.

“The atmosphere has changed, in Riace as in the rest of Italy,” said Gervasi. “We have to go back to our beginnings.”