The Anti-Leader: From presidential discursive leadership to federative incoordination to combat COVID-19

The objective of this paper is to critically analyze lair Bolsonaro's political leadership in relation to the coordination of actions of other federative entities during the Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), based on the directions of Van Dijk's critical discourse analysis. We used the notes of the audiovisual materiality method to work with 15 videos published on the YouTube platform in the official President's channel. Data were analyzed following the guidelines developed by Van Dijk. The results suggest that the presidential leadership in coordinating subnational federative entities was an antithesis of what is prescribed in the literature on public leadership. Bolsonaro positioned himself aggressively, constituting a discursive scenario of war against other political leaders of the nation. His posture can be associated with the figure of an anti-leader, an agent who seeks the disaggregation and lack of coordination of actors in favor of his own conceptions.