Imagine a country where a hard-right populist president loses an election, urges followers on social media to rise up and storm government buildings, and is eventually handed a 27-year sentence for staging a coup d’état.
“It sounds like a fantasy of the American left,” says The Economist. In the region’s other giant democracy, “it is reality”.
This month, 70-year-old Jair Bolsonaro became the first president in Brazil’s history to be convicted for plotting a coup – a victory for the defenders of the youthful democracy. Still, anyone hoping Brazilians can now “move past this polarising period and get on with the business of improving their country” is in for a wait.
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Bolsonaro is appealing. He has little chance of reversing the verdict, given that his failed power grab in January 2023 included a plan to assassinate Brazil’s left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, his vice-president and a supreme court judge, says The Guardian. Nonetheless, allies in congress are pushing for an amnesty bill that could result in a reduced sentence or one being served entirely under house arrest – prompting mass protests on the streets of Brazil.
Bolsonaro’s supporters “see him as a martyr” (some evangelical leaders have held vigils and encouraged their flocks to pray for him) and “believe they are being politically persecuted” – a view also taken by the White House, where president Donald Trump has railed against the “witch-hunt” conducted against his “friend”, once dubbed “the Trump of the Tropics”.
Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo, who moved to Texas to lobby for his father’s cause, has been a vocal supporter of the 50% tariffs imposed on Brazil in July, suggesting that sanctions against the supreme court judges who tried his father may be imminent.
When Brazilians elected Bolsonaro as their president in 2018, he borrowed heavily from the Trump playbook, adopting a straight-talking, nationalistic approach that won wide support in a country riven by crime and the “Lava Jato” (Car Wash) political corruption scandals, for which Lula, among many other politicians, was eventually jailed.
Bolsonaro – a former army captain who spent three decades as an obscure congressman – exploited the fury brilliantly, with a mix of economic liberalism and social conservatism.
Jair Bolsonaro's nostalgia for military rule
Born in Glicerio in the state of São Paulo in 1955, to working-class parents of Italian descent, Bolsonaro claims to have been inspired to join the army by witnessing a shoot-out between police and a prominent leftist guerrilla in 1970, says the Financial Times. But back then – when Brazil was in the grip of a brutal military dictatorship that ran from 1964-85 – the army was the place to get on.
By all accounts an undistinguished soldier, Bolsonaro later made no secret of his “nostalgia” for military rule. In a 1999 interview, notes the BBC, he said that as president, he would stage a coup on his first day and “finish the work” of the dictatorship by killing 30,000 people.
When Bolsonaro was eventually propelled into power – his campaign boosted by an assassination attempt – he refrained from that bloodbath, but succeeded in plunging Brazil into crisis through a series of ruinous policies that “eroded trust in democratic institutions and caused potentially terminal damage to the Amazon rainforest”, says The Economist.
The influence of Bolsonaro will hang over Brazil for some time, particularly if a supporter steps forward to assume his mantle – much depends on the outcome of next year’s presidential election. But his conviction has sent “a powerful signal” across the world, says The Guardian. “Brazil has successfully upheld the will of the people against the scheming of a populist would-be autocrat… It shows others what is possible.”
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