FROM THE CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY TO THE WILL TO TRUTH: MEANINGS OF DEMOCRACY IN JAIR BOLSONARO'S DISCOURSE

With the advent of the internet, the ease of access to information and the immediacy of contact with the digital public have made politicians turn their attention to the potential that social networks could have for their objectives. Among this group, former President Jair Bolsonaro stands out, having built his electoral campaign for the presidency in 2018 through the social networks Facebook and Twitter (currently X) and, once elected, maintained his government communication through these platforms. Thus, this study aims to analyze the discourse on democracy present in Bolsonaro's statements on Twitter during the 2022 electoral period, aiming to understand the functioning of the will to truth and the conditions of possibility of this discourse. The theoretical contribution shares the contributions of Foucaultian Discourse Analysis (2012; 2019). Methodologically, this is a descriptive-interpretative study of a qualitative nature, with data collection carried out through a systematic survey of tweets published by Bolsonaro during the 2022 electoral period. The analysis procedures involved organizing the corpus into two enunciative series, followed by the analysis of the conditions of possibility and the wills for truth that constitute the discourses, according to Foucaultian theoretical-methodological assumptions. The results show that Bolsonaro's discourse on democracy is marked by a discursive regularity that operates in two main directions: attacks on the opposition, characterizing it as a threat to democratic values, and the defense of freedom as a fundamental pillar of democracy. This regularity evokes both the discursivities of the victorious 2018 election and the bases of the ideological formation of the so-called Bolsonarism. It is concluded that the meanings of democracy produced in the analyzed tweets are permeated by a desire for truth that seeks to legitimize a specific conception of democracy, aligned with the political-ideological interests of the then president/candidate, while at the same time disqualifying divergent views on the democratic regime.