Brazil’s democracy now facing its most crucial test: Will military intervene?

Once again, observers of Brazilian politics have a sense of déjà vu. Since the election of Jair Bolsonaro two years after the election of Donald Trump, Brazilians have been living in a kind of U.S. political multiverse with a two-year delay.

First came the candidate who broke every rule of civic decorum in politics, who, once elected, did not become any more “presidential” and kept saying (and tweeting) things that were once unimaginable coming from a president. Then, Brazilians witnessed everything — from China bashing to the villainization of the media — that Americans had been witnessing two years earlier.

When it came the time for reelection, Brazilians heard everything Americans had heard two years before — that any result other than reelection would be fraudulent and thus not acceptable.

And now, exactly two years and two days later, a mob of Bolsonaro supporters stormed not only the Brazilian Congress but also the Supreme Court and the Brazilian Presidential Palace, the equivalent of the U.S. White House.

Dressed in green and yellow, the colors of the Brazilian flag, the rioters appear to have left behind far more destruction than the spear-carrying, horned-hat-wearing D.C. rioters of 2020.

The level and the scope of the destruction is thus one difference between the U.S. Jan. 6 Capitol assault and its Brazilian copycat, but it is far from being the most important one.

The major distinction here is the fact that Bolsonaro, unlike Trump on Jan. 6, is no longer the president. In fact, he is not even in Brazil, having flown to Orlando one day before the inauguration of his adversary, Lula da Silva.

While Trump supporters in 2020 invaded the Capitol during a joint session to stop Congress from formalizing the victory of Joe Biden as president, the invasion by Bolsonaro supporters happened on a Sunday when the buildings in Brazil’s capital were mostly empty — and with Bolsonaro himself nowhere near to be seen. Indeed, unlike Trump, who doubled down on his election denialism rhetoric after it became clear that he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Bolsonaro remained largely silent after being declared the loser of the 2022 election and — perhaps afraid of the legal consequences — avoided talking openly about election fraud.

Thus, the obvious question is why the mob invaded the Brazilian Congress now.

Their goal seems to have been to create enough chaos to instigate Brazil’s military to intervene and reinstall Bolsonaro as president. Indeed, it is in the army’s role that we should look for the fundamental distinction between the U.S. and Brazilian contexts. While Trump was a former real estate tycoon and reality show personality leading one of the oldest modern democracies in the world, Bolsonaro is a former army captain who presided over a country with a little over three decades of democracy and a history of military coups.

As is the case in much of Latin America, the behavior of the armed forces is the primary variable to understand what will happen from now on.

It is well known that certain factions within Brazil’s armed forces are more sympathetic to Bolsonaro — a notorious supporter of Brazil’s last military dictatorship — than to the leftist Lula. While this is concerning, the question now is how the army as an institution will respond.

One crucial difference in contrast to the previous military coup in 1964 is that the army would not have the support of the United States but would instead face strong opposition from the White House.

In any case, now Brazil’s democracy faces its most crucial test of the last three decades. 

Carlos Gustavo Poggio Teixeira is a professor of Political Science at Berea College in Kentucky. He received a Ph.D. in International Studies from Old Dominion University in Virginia as a Fulbright Scholar. He is the author of “Brazil, the United States, and the South American Subsystem: Regional Politics and the Absent Empire,” chosen by Foreign Affairs Magazine as one of the best International Relations books of 2012.