Lessons from the South: How Brazil held onto its democracy
Brazil’s Jan. 6 came two years after the American one.
More precisely, on Jan. 8, 2023. This was barely a week after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s third inauguration as president of Brazil, when hundreds of supporters of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro invaded and vandalized the premises of the National Congress, the Planalto Palace (Brazil’s presidential palace), and the Federal Supreme Court in Brasília.
The self-styled patriots were dressed in national colors, wrapped in flags, and convinced they should interfere in the course of politics. They alleged fraud in the election results. They also broke windows, stole documents and hard drives and destroyed furniture, computers, and works of art, all while taking selfies and feeding their social media.
The similarities with the U.S. Capitol attack are unmistakable, but the afterlives of the two insurrections across the Americas could not be more different. They are, in fact, perfect opposites. In the United States, Donald Trump not only returned to power, but did so with fewer constraints than ever before, now intimidating much of the world through violations of national sovereignty, acts of war and genocidal rhetoric. “A whole civilization will die tonight,” he warned Iran.
In Brazil, by contrast, Bolsonaro not only lost his political rights, but he was convicted of a coup d’état, attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule-of-law, participation in an armed criminal organization, aggravated damage to federal property, and destruction of protected heritage property. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison. And he was not alone: Members of the military high command involved in the same crimes were also convicted, an unprecedented occurrence in a country that emerged from a military dictatorship 50 years earlier. After decades under a “blanket amnesty,” Brazil broke with a familiar global pattern: Attempted and successful coups and self-coups often faded without ever reaching the courts.
What explains this vanguard position? Lessons in politics are usually taught from North to South. Perhaps in this instance, it is time to reverse that direction. Does Brazil have anything to teach the United States and other countries when it comes to safeguarding democracy?
Like any political phenomenon, the constraints on Bolsonaro can be explained in multiple ways. First, the institutional design of Brazil’s judiciary and the concentration of power it enables: the Superior Electoral Court (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, or TSE) is a centralized judicial body closely connected to the Federal Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal, or STF), with overlapping membership (two justices from the STF also serve on TSE on a rotating basis). Because the TSE concentrates governance of elections, it was able to respond promptly and cohesively to the threats pushed by Bolsonaro, barring him from running for office again over his threats to the electorial system, even before his criminal liability.
However, concentration of power does not always serve democratic ends. The second lesson offered by Brazil lies in its multiparty system. Despite its excesses and complications for democratic governance, it allows for more nuance and tends to dilute the political strength of radical actors. With support dispersed across multiple parties, no cohesive far-right bloc formed around Bolsonaro to shield him politically. In the United States, the two-party system raises significantly the political cost of accountability. Even Republicans critical of Trump often choose party loyalty instead of pursuing actions that could harm their own side.
Finally, the third lesson lies in an institutional memory of state wrongdoing. After years of silence in the aftermath of the dictatorship, Brazil changed tracks and made it imperative to remember the crimes of the past so as not to repeat them. In the trial of the Brazilian insurgents, Luís Roberto Barroso, one of the justices of the STF, captured this shift: “Brazil has already experienced authoritarianism. There is no room for regression.”
Brazilian democracy has many flaws, and far-right sectors remain very much active. Yet Bolsonaro’s fate — and with it, the fate of democracy — was shaped by a distinct balance between the centralization and dispersion of judicial and legislative powers (a practical reversal of the U.S. model), and a touch of Niccolà Machiavelli: the capacity to learn from history.
Cristina Buarque de Hollanda is an adjunct associate professor of political science at New York University Abu Dhabi and a collaborating associate professor of political science at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of “Disputed Pasts: Forgetting and Remembering the Dictatorship in Brazil,” which comes out July 14.