Why Brazil's 'young' democracy is proving more robust than its US counterpart: professor

17 January 2023

On Sunday, January 8 in Brazil, supporters of far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro violently attacked three government buildings in the Brazilian capitol: the Congressional Building, the Presidential Palace and the Brazilian Supreme Court Building. The riot brought back memories of the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., and there are certainly parallels between the two.

Bolsonaro’s supporters believe the election was stolen from him, not unlike the Donald Trump supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol. And Trump ally Steve Bannon has defended both the pro-Bolsonaro Brazilian rioters and the pro-Trump U.S. rioters, falsely claiming that both elections were stolen through widespread voter fraud.

But Omar G. Encarnación, a professor of politics at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, believes that there is a major difference between the two. In an article published by The Nation on January 17, Encarnación argues that Brazilian democracy is showing itself to be more resilient than U.S. democracy.

“From the angry mob’s chants about a stolen election to the physical desecration of edifices of democracy to a shaken national political class trying to make sense of how things descended into mayhem, seeming parallels between the violent attack on the Brazilian Presidential Palace and the Supreme Court and Congress Buildings by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro this January 8 and the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, abound,” Encarnación writes. “But appearances can be deceiving. Unlike January 6 — which delayed the peaceful transfer of power in the United States for the first time in the country’s history — nothing of substance was interrupted in Brazil.”

Encarnación adds that the January 8, 2023 attack in Brasília occurred a week after President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had already been inaugurated, whereas the January 6, 2021 insurrection took place 14 days before U.S. President Joe Biden was inaugurated.

“More important, there is no Brazilian equivalent to ‘Stop the Steal,’ the movement that powered January 6,” Encarnación argues. “Devoted to undermining the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election, the movement enjoys widespread support within the Republican Party and among conservative media outlets. At least 150 election deniers were elected to the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms, an increase over the 139 Republicans who voted against the certification of electoral votes on January 6, 2021. By contrast, election deniers in Brazil appear to lack political patrons.”

Encarnación continues, “No major Brazilian politician is on record as denying that Lula won fair and square, and a reported 92 percent of Brazilians rejected the attacks. Indeed, the most prominent voices questioning the Brazilian elections are in the United States, including former Trump adviser Steven Bannon. Even though political violence driven by conspiracy theories and mass delusion about a stolen election will forever unite the Trump and Bolsonaro Administrations, Brazilian democracy fared better than American democracy under a president who was hell-bent on undermining the institutions and norms that he was elected to protect. There’s much irony in this turn of events, since Brazilian democracy only dates to 1988.”

January 6, 2021 and the events leading up to it were an attempted coup d’état. Some of Trump’s allies even proposed a military dictatorship, but the United States’ checks and balances held up. Brazil, meanwhile, suffered a full-fledged military coup in 1964, followed by years under a military dictatorship. A democratic constitution was adopted in Brazil in 1988, and it remains in effect 35 years later.

According to Encarnación, “A mix of factors explains why Bolsonaro was much less effective than Trump in undermining democracy. Bolsonaro, who won in 2018 by capitalizing on the excesses of the Workers’ Party, had no institutional support akin to the Republican Party…. Less apparent is that Brazilian democracy is engineered to withstand antidemocratic threats like Bolsonaro’s. Brazil’s 1988 Constitution did away with its electoral college. The significance of this reform is that Brazilian presidential election results are made official without the cumbersome process of certifying state electors. In 1996, Brazil introduced an electronic voting system to replace a paper ballot system that was notorious for its corruption. Today, voting experts recognize Brazil’s electoral system as among the world’s safest and most efficient…. Ironically, the youth of this democracy was its hidden strength.”

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