The events of recent weeks have dispelled the doubts of the most skeptical about the coup character of Bolsonaro’s campaign. To capture this exceptional situation, it has become common to draw parallels with other international cases.
A number of authors have already established the relationship between the strategy of Jair Bolsonaro and that of Donald Trump, while others choose to compare the situation of the Brazilian State with that of Venezuela.
Both exercises are persuasive and relevant. However, in comparisons, differences matter as much as similarities.
Virtually all analyzes of the relationship between Bolsonaro and Trump omit one difference: the role of the Republican Party in shaping, sustaining and transforming Trumpism. Trump’s main political achievement was not winning the presidency, for which he only had to win the electoral college, but winning the Republican Party primaries and, above all, colonizing it ideologically like no other leadership since Ronald Reagan. In the bipartisan game, whoever controls the party controls the political field as a whole.
However, party control may have been insufficient to ensure the survival of Trump and his political project. Today, for the first time since his defeat at the polls in 2020, the share of the Republican electorate that supports a new Trump candidacy has dropped below 50%. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, emerges as the heir to that ideological vote by betting on the growing distinction between Trump and Trumpism within the party.
Bolsonaro’s lack of a party base, who has always wandered between parties and failed miserably when he tried to create the Alliance for Brazil, must always be taken into account when assessing his post-election political resilience.
The parallel between Brazil and Venezuela is even more difficult to sustain because of the role of oil. It is characterized in political science that in petro-states, where the absolute majority of income derives from a resource controlled by the state, the ruler has a capacity to accumulate and distribute power and prebends.
This feature made the militarization of regimes fundamentally different. In Brazil, the military occupied strategic sectors of the State without, however, taking over considerable parts of the productive sector.
In Venezuela, the military took over the productive sector thanks to state intervention. It has become common to see generals creating private companies or sitting on the boards of directors of companies that work directly with the public power.
The accumulation of wealth made possible by the petro-state served as an incentive for the military to stand by Maduro even in the most critical moments.
It is clear that Bolsonaro was unable to institutionalize his authoritarian project with the same tools as Trump or Maduro. That doesn’t make him any less dangerous or hostile. But it remains to be determined to what extent he was able to appropriate the state apparatus by other means. Because one thing is certain: no authoritarian lives only on ideology and the internet.
