Post-bolsonarism: the backfire?

Fabian Echegaray*

@Latinoamérica21

Could the terrorist attack by the Bolsonaro hordes against the pillars of the Brazilian institutional system have been an unexpected gift that favors the consolidation of democracy in that country?

Self-convened by social networks, inspired by four years of anti-political and anti-democratic preaching by former President Bolsonaro during his tenure, and encouraged by bloggers and digital influencers cultivating fake news Against judges, progressive leaders and political pluralism, between four and six thousand radicals rose up with sticks, stones and machetes (and surely some hidden weapon) to invade and destroy the infrastructure of Congress, the Judiciary and a part of the Executive in Brasilia .

This episode – the culminating point of a series of increasingly violent and anti-civic demonstrations by supporters of the ex-president – ​​occurred on Sunday, January 8, 2023, a week after Lula’s inauguration as president. Therefore, it was not intended to prevent the transfer of command, but basically was an act as purely expressive as chaotic of repudiation against the powers and institutional protagonists of Brazilian democracy.

Lula da Silva removes from their duties 40 soldiers who guarded the presidential palace on the day of the assault in Brasilia

Sponsored by military and police allies, accomplices of the sector agribusinesslogger and illegal miner, plus some other business leaders and radicalized evangelical sects associated with the losing candidate in the 2022 elections, the subversive movement was created —initially— in order to keep Bolsonaro in the center of the public scene.

In this way, the extremists planned to perpetuate the representational monopoly of the right and extreme right, concentrating the opposition to the new PT government on the former president. Thus, the imbalance caused almost a decade ago would be consolidated when the PSDB (former base of national leaders, such as former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso and governors José Serra, Gerardo Alckmin, Franco Montoro and Mario Covas), which brought together the representation of the center and center-right, and counterbalancing the PT in the electoral competition ordering and organizing the Brazilian political system for 30 years, abdicated his managerial abilities and political ambitions.

Brasília, a carbon copy of Washington

Under the control of minor figures, the PSDB ceased to be a force anchored in programmatic proposals to settle exclusively on a hollow and hypocritical moralistic denunciation, where the opponents of the center-left and left were denounced as desecrating the sacred. This paved the ground for the rise of Bolsonaro fundamentalism.

However, with Bolsonaro out of the country in a covert self-exile and with the surprising autonomy demonstrated in his invasion and depredation of the symbols of republican democracy last Sunday, this movement of radicalized people ended up starring in the founding act of Bolsonaroism without Bolsonaro. Brazil is a country accustomed to negotiating its most substantive systemic and institutional changes among a few elites., from its independence from Portugal to the end of slavery, passing through the transition from the monarchy to the republic, and even during the different metamorphoses between supervised democracy and dictatorship. However, this movement could only generate —even among the leaders more to the right— a feeling that was at least uncomfortable but openly reactive when seeing a hysterical crowd transfer their supposed leaders and commanders.

Some 600 suspects of participating in an assault on official headquarters in Brazil were released on Sunday

The destructive anomie and apocalyptic fanaticism staged by the attackers, together with their circus-like choreographies of military rituals, hysterical riots and war cries, are reminiscent not only of the Trumpists who invaded the US Congress two years ago, but also of the violent rebellion of the Kirchnerist and radicalized leftist groups that attacked the Argentine Congress in 2017 with more than fourteen tons of stones and rubble at the time when a pension reform was being legislated.

They remember even more the delicious stories of Vargas Llosa in his book The War of the End of the World about the romantic and ultramontane monarchist madness of the followers of Father Antonio Conselheiro in Canudos, in reaction to the rise of the republic. Stories plagued by dogmatic delusions, beliefs in medieval trickery and embraced by a thought as magical as violent. Undoubtedly, Canudos constituted an episode as hallucinating and portraying the famous literary magical realism as a tragic phenomenon in northeastern Brazil during the late 19th century.

“I intend to bring my return forward”, Jair Bolsonaro anticipates that he will return to Brazil

The establishment of post-Bolsonarism, consecrated by the recent attacks and which generated some intoxicated celebrations on social networks, should fulfill very few of its hopes.. It is probably more like a cathartic and chaotic lapse than a pressure factor with its own weight and long life. All the evidence on the majority of its participants warns that it is an almost psychiatric phenomenon: they are the torn apart of the lonely crowd that David Riesman already told us about in the last century. Individuals looking for a meaning and community mission at any cost, embraced by a maximalist, fanatical identity, full of certainties, uncritical, zero reflective and without fissures or ambiguities. In short, the same breeding ground that fed fascism and Nazism.

Despite the tacit passive support aroused among some police forces, the violent and anarchic post-Bolsonarism should accelerate the disenchantment of the conservative middle class with the extreme right, make it easier for the new government to clean up the colonization of state entities implemented by Bolsonaro. It must also galvanize the political class and mainly the Legislative Power around democracy and the reconstruction project led by Lula and Alckmin, and liquidate the sources of financing for the coup and other anti-system expressions.

The birth of Bolsonarismo without Bolsonaro, wrapped in his yellow-green outfits and the national team shirt, may have been —paradoxically— a gift for the consolidation of Brazilian democracy. (EITHER)

* Fabián Echegaray has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Connecticut and director of Market Analysis, a public opinion consultancy based in Brazil. Echegaray is vice president of WAPOR Latin America, the regional chapter of the world association for public opinion studies that will hold its next congress this April in the city of Oaxaca, Mexico.