“I have three alternatives for my future: to be in prison, to be dead or victory,” Bolsonaro said in August 2021. There remained more than a year before the elections in which the re-election would be played out and a few months before , the Supreme Court had ordered the annulment of the convictions against Lula da Silva, who already appeared as a possible candidate and who, in fact, was leading in all the polls.
With victory ruled out, Sunday’s assault by thousands of radicals against Congress, the Supreme Court and the Planalto Palace – seat of the executive – was the culmination of a long path of polarization and institutional delegitimization encouraged largely by Bolsonarism which, according to experts. , a political recovery will be very difficult. “He made a very serious mistake,” said Anna Ayuso, a senior researcher at the think tank CIDOB of Barcelona.
“He has a clear political responsibility,” says Ayuso. “He called for resistance and encouraged the theory of electoral fraud, which strengthened this most radical sector. Although he criticized the vandalism, he did not respond forcefully to the acts. Even during the elections, he encouraged movements aimed at preventing the sectors most favorable to Lula from voting by using the traffic police,” he adds.
Emir Sader, a Brazilian sociologist and political scientist close to Lula, told elDiario.es that “Bolsonaro is very demoralized and isolated, but he maintains his position of not clearly recognizing the election result and this is what encourages [a los asaltantes]”. “Only one of the parties that supported him remains with him. There is a sector that insists on not recognizing the elections, but this does not represent great polarization in the country. Bolsonaro is disappearing from the political scene while Lula has become stronger,” he adds.
Bolsonaro intensified his rhetoric in March 2021, when the Supreme Court ordered the annulment of the convictions against Lula because it considered that the federal justice of Paraná was not competent to try the former president and determined that he had acted partially. In April 2022, the United Nations Human Rights Committee supported the decision. The UN said the legal proceedings violated his “right to be tried by an impartial tribunal, his right to privacy and his political rights”.
The judge responsible for these three corruption convictions against Lula was Sergio Moro who, a few months after pronouncing the judgment, became Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice and the hero of Bolsonarism. Meanwhile, Lula attempted to run from prison in 2018, but was prevented from doing so by the electoral court. Four years later and after spending 580 days in detention in Curitiba, Justice restored his political rights to the former progressive president and Lula quickly announced his candidacy. The elections began with the greatest polarization in recent years.
The strategy of “electoral fraud”
Bolsonaro knew the importance of Lula’s reinstatement and intensified his campaign against possible electoral fraud – a tool he had used for years. “Is it fair that the person who took Lula out of prison, who rehabilitated him, is the same person who counts the votes in a secret room of the Superior Electoral Court? Where is the public vote count? » Bolsonaro wondered a month before this statement about his three alternatives for the future.
The president has spread his lies and doubts for months. He even summoned 40 international ambassadors to his residence three months before the elections to foment the plot. As in the United States with Trump, the strategy spread among Bolsonaro’s deputies and their supporters, to the point that by the time of the elections, three out of four Bolsonaro supporters said they had little or no confidence in voting machines. vote Brazilians.
“Bolsonaro wants to create chaos, like Trump did in the United States. He wants to create suspicion where there is none. He tries to deceive people to justify any nonsense. He is not afraid of electronic ballot boxes, he is afraid of the Brazilian people,” Lula wrote in a tweet in July 2022.
With his campaign, Bolsonaro managed to narrow the gap with Lula, who ultimately won the elections by a narrow margin with 51% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 49%. The far right then doubled down on its disinformation campaign about Trump-style election fraud and even asked the Superior Election Court to suspend the results. However, the organization not only rejected the far-right former president’s proposal, but also fined his party $4.2 million. Some of Sunday’s attackers carried signs with the slogan: “We want the source code”, suggesting that the counting programs had been manipulated.
The similarities with the American process are obvious, but Sader believes that “Bolsonaro is very weakened”. “He doesn’t have Trump’s charisma, and neither does his media. Even if Sunday’s act was more serious than the assault on the Capitol in Washington, Trump has a better chance of surviving than Bolsonaro,” he believes.
Ayuso agrees. “Bolsonaro’s political strength is much lower than that of the Republican Party in the United States. Power in Brazil is much more distributed and fractionalized and it does not have a large support network, but it has achieved this over the years by using power, negotiating and buying that support,” he says. “His ability to recover is much lower than Trump’s and Americans are not having the best of times.”
“Sunday’s violence is the culmination of a sustained distortion of facts with incitement to hatred and violence by political, social and economic actors who have created an atmosphere of distrust, division and destruction by rejecting the election results. » The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, said this Monday.
Silence, blockades and radical camps
Immediately after his defeat, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters took to the streets to protest and call for a military coup. After a noisy two-day silence, Bolsonaro limited himself to saying he would respect the mandates of the Constitution, but did not congratulate or mention the election winner. The far-right leader has also justified the protests of his supporters. “The current movements are the result of indignation and the feeling of injustice of the electoral procedure,” he said during his first press conference after the defeat.
Bolsonaro then declared that “any peaceful demonstration” was “welcome”, even if the most radical demonstrators had blocked the roads of the country’s main cities, even causing the cancellation of flights. The Supreme Court even ordered the police to intervene urgently to free the roads blocked by the Bolsonaristas. The president himself asked his supporters to lift the blockades. “Closing roads in Brazil infringes on people’s right to come and go, it’s in our Constitution and we have always been in the four lines [de la Carta Magna]”, said.
Very quickly, radical colonies were also organized in front of military barracks in several cities to demand military intervention. After Sunday’s attacks, authorities evacuated the Brasilia camp, from where the protesters had departed, and arrested 1,200 Bolsonaro supporters. “The serious events that occurred in Brasilia prove that the so-called ‘patriotic’ camps have become incubators for terrorists,” declared the Minister of Justice after the arrest, on December 24, of a man who had attempted to blow up a truck loaded with fuel in an area near the capital’s international airport.
Finally, on his last day as president, Bolsonaro left Brazil for the United States and was not present at Lula’s inauguration, during which traditionally the outgoing president passes the presidential sash to the new president. This has only happened twice in history: once in 1985 with soldier Joao Figueiredo and again in 1894 with another soldier, Floriano Peixoto.
“Bolsonaro will have to assess the situation based on his support. Damage control to decide if he comes back or stays out, but it’s going to be difficult,” concludes Ayuso. “There has been a very clear response, which is good for institution building, but it is difficult to completely remove polarization. Even if it changes form, it persists because it is deeply rooted in the population. “This goes back to the time of the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff.”
