Sometimes it reminds me of a remake. After four years of a turbulent government, the president does not clearly recognize that he lost re-election. It happened in 2020 in the United States, with Donald Trump, and it happens in 2022 in Brazil, with Jair Bolsonaro (PL).
The “Trump of the tropics”, as the international press sometimes calls the Brazilian, repeats the republican’s primer since his election in 2018 and keeps the bet now. In both cases, supporters also took to the streets carrying flags in coup acts that reject the results of the polls.
The sequence of similarities indicates possible paths for the coming years in Brazil. Spoiler: Trump is still one of the most relevant figures on the American political scene, society remains polarized, radicalized nuclei have spread and domestic terrorism has become an imminent threat.
In the US, the transition of government began chaotic, with difficult access to the team of President-elect Joe Biden, and had its most memorable moment on January 6, 2021. To prevent Congress from certifying the result, a crowd of Trumpists invaded the Capitol Hill, in the most serious recent attack on the country’s democracy, which ended with five deaths – the action was defined by the legislative commission that investigates it as an attempted coup d’état.
“The American experience shows that polarization will continue in Brazil, as it did in the US. Bolsonaro had a very large vote and will not disappear, as well as Trump”, evaluates James Green, a professor at Brown University.
Just as the republican consolidated himself in 2020, Bolsonaro is the second most voted person in the history of Brazil, with 58.2 million votes received last Sunday – behind only Lula, who had 60.3 million in this election and 58.3 million. million in 2006.
Green argues that it is necessary to target the investigations that the US government has promoted in different instances in relation to the previous administration, such as the invasion of the Capitol or the secret documents that Trump took without authorization from the White House.
“Even if that doesn’t convince any Trump voters [a mudar de opinião], it is essential to clarify what happened”, he says. “Lula’s victory speech was conciliatory, as was Biden’s when he won. But there can be no brake on investigations in the name of unity of the nation or governance in Congress.”
In the US, the resistance to the 6th of January involved an orchestrated action, according to organizers involved with the process at the time. Businessmen and executives of large companies began to send messages to Trump that they would not support him if he carried out a coup attempt, he told in a recent interview with Sheet political organizer Michael Podhorzer.
Unions and civil society bodies also decided not to convene street protests so as not to turn the defense of democracy into a dispute between right and left and not to run the risk of the president mobilizing security forces against the protesters to “pacify” the country. Finally, Trump also failed to gain the support of the military command in his contestation of the polls.
“It’s normal for there to be protests. But acts like the ones that happened in the US, fueled by public figures who appropriate the emotions of the people and encourage violence, are a real threat in our times. That’s what I saw in the US and what I see in Brazil today”, says Melvyn Levitsky, the US ambassador to Brazil between 1994 and 1998. “These are mobilizations carried out by irresponsible political leaders.”
The current professor of international politics at the University of Michigan points out that the contestation of the results is “disturbing, after all the efforts that Brazil made at the end of the military dictatorship to bring democracy back”.
After it became clear that electoral defeat could not be avoided, Trump did not attend Biden’s inauguration, the first time a president has not honored his successor since Andrew Johnson in 1869 — excluding Richard Nixon, who resigned. On January 20, 2021, the Republican took a helicopter from the White House hours before the ceremony and went straight to his home in Florida. It fell to the deputy, Mike Pence, to represent the government.
In Brazil, it is speculated that Bolsonaro would also not pass the presidential sash to Lula in a public ceremony, assigning the mission to vice-president Hamilton Mourão. It was Mourão, by the way, who first conceded defeat, by congratulating Geraldo Alckmin (PSB) on his election to vice-president on Monday (31).
Two years after taking that helicopter to Mar-a-Lago, however, Trump remains an immense force in American politics. The most recent proof is in the midterms, legislative elections that will take place next Tuesday (8). Of the six Republican deputies who voted for his impeachment and sought reelection, four did not even make it past the primaries.
The most concrete example was that of Liz Cheney, who participates in the 6 de Janeiro investigative commission. Daughter Dick Cheney, vice president in the George W. Bush administration, she lost the definition for the candidacy in Wyoming after intense campaign against Trump.
In this bombing, the former president even recovered a word that had been forgotten in the country’s politics: “rino”, an acronym in English for “republicans in name only”, which became a kind of seal to identify “impure” – that is, that do not agree with the former president.
Two years after the false allegations that the election was stolen, 64% of Republicans still believe there was fraud, according to a recent poll by The Washington Post newspaper – a significant portion of them will run in the midterms.
In a speech on Wednesday (2), Biden warned that there are candidates “running at all levels of office in the US who are not committed to accepting the results of the elections” in which they participate. “This is the path to chaos. It’s unprecedented. It’s illegal and un-American. You can’t just love your country when you win.”
Many of Trump’s supporters have become radicalized, and domestic terrorism has become one of the biggest security threats, according to the US government itself.
The most recent episode took place last Friday (28), when a man broke into the house of Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, at dawn, and assaulted the Democrat’s husband. David DePape, arrested on a charge of attempted murder, spread conspiracy theories on a personal blog.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
