Seven days after the inauguration of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, thousands of far-right rioters staged an invasion of the country’s federal representative institutions. In acts reminiscent of the attack on the U.S. Capitol two years prior, the assailants claimed that Brazil’s 2022 elections were “stolen” and “rigged.” Entering buildings that were empty—it was a Sunday—assailants tore through the halls of Brazil’s Congress, rampaged inside the presidential palace, and ransacked the country’s Supreme Court. They fought with police officers guarding the buildings and attacked journalists covering the event. They vandalized millions of dollars’ worth of art, some of it dating back centuries. It is still unclear who organized the attack, or how it was planned. But they were clearly inspired by the man Lula defeated: former president, Jair Bolsonaro.
The riot should not have come as a surprise. Bolsonaro, who had smeared the 2022 election as fraudulent, has a long track record of denigrating Brazilian democracy. As a candidate in 2018, he threatened to arrest and execute leftists. As president, he pledged to not follow Supreme Court decisions from a justice he disliked. And yet throughout his presidency, many commentators insisted that Bolsonaro did not pose a serious risk because the country’s political institutions—the same ones that his supporters physically trashed on Sunday—were strong enough to withstand his attacks. When Bolsonaro was first elected, U.S. political commentator Ian Bremmer wrote in Time that the president posed little threat to democracy, arguing that Brazil “is a country with strong political institutions.” In 2019, Brazilian political scientist Fernando Schüler said in an interview that “no institution was threatened and there was no risk to fundamental rights” under Bolsonaro. After all, Bolsonaro was elected as a self-styled political outsider who aimed to clean up what many Brazilians saw as the rotten corruption produced by 13 years of rule under the center-left Worker’s Party, known by its Portuguese initials, PT. Whatever the excesses the Bolsonaro administration, the institutions of Brazil’s young democracy would hold firm.
