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| Rioters loyal to then-president Donald Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. (Jose Luis Magana/AP) |
| 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.
But the U.S. system allowed him to run for election again. The Supreme Court, stacked with a right-wing majority, issued a landmark ruling last year arguing he was immune from prosecution for “official acts” while in office. A string of legal investigations into Trump and his attempts to subvert the 2020 election are petering out. Emboldened, Trump has vowed to issue pardons after he takes office for dozens of Jan. 6 rioters who rampaged through the U.S. Capitol — much to the indignation of his political opponents, constitutional rights groups and the security personnel injured by those who acted in Trump’s name. “We’ve been seeking accountability for years,” a former Capitol Police officer told my colleagues. “It doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen.” | ||||||
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| Demonstrators protest amnesty for Brazil's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, in São Paulo, Brazil, on Dec. 10. (Felipe Iruata/Reuters) |
| 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. The Brazilian insurrection — a remarkable echo of what happened in the United States two years prior — elicited a more decisive reaction: Authorities swiftly rounded up pro-Bolsonaro rioters and opened legal proceedings that implicated a host of senior politicians and officials in plotting a coup and fomenting violence. Six months later, Bolsonaro was barred from seeking public office until 2030 by the country’s top electoral court, even as separate police investigations continued. In November, Brazil’s federal police recommended charges against Bolsonaro, as well as dozens of his associates, for allegedly leading a plot to subvert the will of voters, assassinate political rivals and stay in power by military edict following his 2022 electoral defeat. The police report was submitted to Brazil’s Supreme Court, and the country’s top prosecutorial authorities are weighing what to do next. Bolsonaro has denied wrongdoing in this case and numerous others rumbling through Brazil’s legal system, casting himself as a victim of a witch hunt by political opponents and an overzealous Supreme Court. But his political star has fallen, and the hard-right firebrand may sooner find a home in a jail cell than the presidential office. Brazil is arguably as politically polarized as the United States, but both its experience of military dictatorships and its modern constitutional protections against a possible return to authoritarianism gave it “antidotes” — as a senior Brazilian official told me — to overcome a glaring challenge to its democracy. “History explains the difference between the two countries,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment on the matter. “Military interventions and political authoritarianism have haunted us throughout the 20th century.” |
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| President Joe Biden and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the White House on Feb. 10. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post) |
| While many Republican politicians backed Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud and later offered support for the Jan. 6 participants facing prosecution and sentencing, there was less sympathy in Brazil’s more fragmented multiparty political landscape for the Jan. 8 offenders. “There is a consensus in our country, among the political class, to condemn these acts,” Ciro Nogueira, a prominent lawmaker who served for a stint as Bolsonaro’s chief of staff when he was president, told the New York Times last year. “I think it’s really unfortunate that a portion of American politicians applaud this type of protest.” As the Harvard political scholars Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt observed last year, Brazilian civil society, big business groups and even the Catholic Church came out strongly against the possibility of a subversion of the country’s democratic order. New investigations have revealed that top Brazilian military officials balked at Bolsonaro’s alleged coup plot, much to the former president’s chagrin. Andre Pagliarini, a professor of Brazilian history at Louisiana State University, pointed to virtues of Brazil’s “postdictatorial institutional design.” The country’s 1988 constitution empowered the judiciary to take a strong line in defending civic and democratic institutions, especially the integrity of elections. Alexandre de Moraes, a top justice appointed by a right-leaning president in 2017, has been “focused on the Jan. 8 insurrection in Brasília in a way that no single legal actor in the U.S. — [Attorney General] Merrick Garland, lower courts, or the Supreme Court — has been,” Pagliarini told me. For his efforts, Moraes has engendered the fury of Bolsonaro and his allies, and locked horns with tech titan Elon Musk over Brazil’s moves to curb online disinformation on social media criticized as harmful to the country’s democracy. In 2022, with polls pointing to a looming defeat, Bolsonaro spent weeks spreading conspiracy theories about Brazil’s electronic voting machines and warning without meaningful evidence over possible fraud should he lose. Those efforts contributed to the June 2023 decision of Brazil’s top electoral court — another institution that has no parallel in the United States — to bar Bolsonaro from seeking office for the rest of the decade. Bolsonaro and his allies used “freedom of speech” as a “shield for crimes against democracy and a military conspiracy to overthrow it,” the senior Brazilian official told me. “The Supreme Court was empowered and ready to avert it.” The effect of that ruling barring Bolsonaro was “to scramble the Brazilian far right rather than allowing it to regain organizational cohesion as it did in the U.S. in the years after January 6,” Pagliarini said. “With Bolsonaro legally out of the running, the right is in disarray over who to back against Lula in 2026.” To be sure, Lula’s supporters have had their own doubts and fears about Brazil’s judicial system: Lula, who has been president twice, only returned to power in a grand comeback after serving part of a prison sentence for corruption — a ruling that made space for Bolsonaro’s rise, handed down by a judge who would go on to serve as Bolsonaro’s justice minister, and who an investigation by the Intercept later revealed had colluded with prosecutors to target Lula. 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.” |