The violence promised by Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right Rio de Janeiro congressman who is within a mortars range of the Brazilian presidency, was visited upon him during a campaign rally Thursday.

In the Minas Gerais state, Adlio Bispo de Oliveira, who later told police he was on a mission from God, allegedly plunged a knife into the candidates body. Bolsonaro was rushed to a hospital and into surgery to treat internal injuries and a large loss of blood, Brazilian news outlets reported.

You bandidos that tried to ruin the life of a guy who is the father of a family and the hope of all Brazilians, Flvio Bolsonaro the congressmans son who is a Rio state representative said in a statement. You just elected the president, and it will be in the first round.

The stabbing threw into further mayhem a tense, chaotic and unpredictable presidential election. Bolsonaro, a former army officer who has in the past called for the return of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, has sat near the top of presidential polls since last summer. As of Friday, with just a month to go before the first round of voting on Oct. 7, he led all polls that did not include former President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, the popular leftist leader who was ruled ineligible last week thanks to his July 2017 conviction on corruption charges.

In normal times, Bolsonaros radical right-wing views would have kept him relegated to the fringes of Brazilian politics, with little influence beyond his ability to capture a headline or a charging document thanks to his racist, sexist and homophobic statements. Bolsonaro once told a fellow lawmaker that she was too ugly to rape . He has called immigrants scum and has proposed selling off lands settled by indigenous Brazilians and the descendants of enslaved Africans . He wants to give the countrys already deadly police forces, which killed more than 4,000 people last year , even more power to shoot and kill with impunity. And in 2016, he dedicated his vote to impeach the countrys then-President Dilma Rousseff to the army colonel who oversaw the dictatorship-era program that tortured her.

But as his stabbing in the streets of Juiz de Fora on Thursday might suggest, these are not normal times. For the past four years, Brazil has been embroiled in a series of crises it cannot escape: a grueling economic recession that has cost three million jobs and returned millions of people to poverty; an expansive political corruption crisis that has ensnared hundreds of politicians, including da Silva and leading members of the countrys biggest centrist political parties; and a record outbreak of violent crime that has resulted in more than 60,000 homicides in each of the last two years. The crises and the establishments failure to address them have left Brazilians with little faith in their democracy or their country.

Bolsonaro has seized on the discontent, the despair and the anger, fomenting a backlash against a corrupt establishment with a noisy fake populism. If this sounds familiar, it should. Bolsonaro has become known as Brazils Trump, and he has benefited from many of the same conditions that produced President Donald Trump and gave rise to rise to xenophobic, anti-immigrant, quasi-authoritarian politics around the world.

The attack is expected to boost Bolsonaros candidacy: His membership in a small party granted him little television time under Brazilian election law, but the stabbing will put him front and center even as he takes a break from campaigning. Brazilian markets rallied Thursday afternoon on the expectation that the attack would help the right-winger who, beneath his rhetorical populist postures, has adopted more traditional market-based economic policies in an effort to appeal to financial elites. And experts said the assault could push the issue of violent crime further to the forefront of voters minds and increase support for Bolsonaro, who has cultivated a law and order image that, like all such appeals, is really a promise of lawlessness and disorder in service of the ruling classes.

A very violent episode against a candidate that wants to change everything generates a narrative that benefits him strongly, said Thiago de Arago, the director of Latin American political risk at Arko Advice, a consulting firm based in Brazil. It strengthens even more his narrative, because everything he was saying that people could suffer, he actually suffered himself.

Bolsonaros fellow candidates widely condemned the attack as yet another assault on democracy in a country where political violence isnt a novelty: In 2016, there were 28 killings of political candidates, including 15 that occurred during the official period of campaigning. The incident led to widespread calls from candidates and human rights groups to put an end to such violence.

While Bolsonaro no longer calls for the return of military dictatorship, he nonetheless has promised to stock his cabinet with military officers, further militarize Brazilian society and bring even more violence to Brazil. His rise poses one of the toughest tests Brazils democratic institutions has faced since the end of the dictatorship three decades ago.

This is the most important election in Brazilian history, James Green, the director of Brown Universitys Brazil Initiative program, said before Thursdays attack. Brazil is really at a crossroads.

The implications of the election which will unfold over two rounds of voting in October will stretch beyond the countrys borders. Brazil may be a young democracy, but it is also an influential one : It is the largest of Latin Americas democratic nations and the fourth-largest democracy in the world. What happens in October will offer a referendum of sorts on the state of global, multicultural democracy itself.

I tend not to buy into this idea that weve entered into a global democratic recession, Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, who as recently as 2015 called the idea a myth, said in an interview this summer. Those claims have been overstated so far. But if [Brazil] suffers a democratic erosion, I would change my tune a lot.

If Brazil falls, if Brazil goes authoritarian, I would worry a lot about the rest of the region, Levitsky said. People in Latin America militaries in Latin America, demagogues and democrats in Latin America will be paying close attention to Brazil. It would have devastating regional consequences.