After Insurrections, the U.S. and Brazil Went Down Different Paths
After Insurrections, the U.S. and Brazil Went Down Different Paths
"We will see pressure from Trump on Brazil's Supreme Court (...) to allow Bolsonaro to run in 2026," said AS/COA's Brian Winter to The Washington Post.
In one country, a return to power and the promise of pardons. In the other, political marginalization and mounting criminal investigations.
Four years after supporters of President-elect Donald Trump stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an insurrection that shocked the world, he is about to start a second term. He was impeached by the House for his alleged role in inciting the riot and to this day remains the only U.S. president not to accept an electoral defeat.
The picture in Brazil is rather different. On Jan. 8, 2023, supporters of defeated right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro stormed through the heart of the federal capital in Brasília in a spasm of rage marked by their refusal to accept his narrow loss to leftist rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, damaging government buildings. Some rioters called for a military coup to keep Bolsonaro in power — a demand he did little to discourage, declining to concede, departing for a strange sojourn in Orlando and skipping his successor’s inauguration. [...]
With Trump returning, Bolsonaro and his allies could have a path forward. Trump and Bolsonaro sympathizers in his orbit may see in the former Brazilian president’s situation a reflection of their own battles. “We will see public pressure from Trump on Brazil’s Supreme Court, via the threat of sanctions against specific judges, to allow Bolsonaro to run in 2026,” Brian Winter, editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, suggested to me. “It will get loud and contentious, and it may backfire against Bolsonaro because I don’t think Brazil will react well to this kind of pressure.”
Nevertheless, “Bolsonaro’s supporters remain, and they now have even less faith in the system than before, possibly radicalizing some of them even more,” Winter said. “We’ve seen this in Latin American history before — the most famous case possibly being when Juan Perón and his supporters were banned from politics in Argentina in the 1950s and 1960s, and he took on almost a mystical importance, the popular clamor growing until he was finally allowed to return in 1973. It’s an open question whether these bans backfire or not over time.”
