Clad in canary yellow football shirts or draped in the colours of the Brazilian flag, pro-Bolsonaro activists applauded a line of heavily armed police as it marched into their midst in Brasília on Sunday.
Hundreds of extreme rightwing followers had been gathering in Brazil’s modernist capital since late on Friday. On Sunday afternoon they breezed past security cordons and trashed the elegant buildings that host the country’s most important democratic institutions – the presidential palace, the supreme court and the two houses of congress. Now, surely, they seem to have thought, these police were moving in to help them secure control, overturn the alleged fraud that had deprived Jair Bolsonaro of a second term in office, and oust what they described as a leftwing dictatorship now in office.
Just a few minutes later though, the same officers, units of the federal government’s national force, were bundling them on to buses and whisking them off to police cells. With more than 1,000 people detained, the first phase of a promised pro-Bolsonaro insurrection had ended not in the crash of a military coup, but a whimper.
For the radical fringes of the movement, the outcome marked a disappointing end to what has been a sad time. Their leader, Bolsonaro himself, is hardly a source of inspiration. Moody and largely silent since his narrow second-round election defeat at the end of October, the former army captain has quit the country. Deprived of the political immunity he once enjoyed, the former president reportedly fears being a target of legal action and has gone to ground in Florida, a US state much favoured by other anti-communist conservatives from Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America.
Nor have the much-lauded soldiers been much use. For more than two months thousands of activists have been squatting in informal camps set up outside barracks from where they have fruitlessly urged intervention. Many of the campers have drifted away. Many of those who remain are conspiracist fantasists. Some harbour the illusion, for instance, that Gen Augusto Heleno, perhaps the most hardline of Bolsonaro’s military allies, is already exercising power from behind the scenes and that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the winner in October, has already been deposed.
In the real world, meanwhile, Lula has steadily begun to organise a new government. At a cost, he has struck an alliance with the self-seeking centre and centre-right politicians of the Centrão, or big centre, in a bid to ensure congressional support. Workers’ party loyalists occupy key cabinet posts, but jobs have been found for leaders from a range of more conservative allied parties, including some with very dubious credentials. Lula has taken action to reverse some of the most damaging measures of the Bolsonaro era by, for instance, tightening controls on the use of weapons.
On Sunday, at the end of his first week in office, the president acted quickly to secure the Brazilian capital, seizing control of policing from the state government of Brasília (which, like Washington DC, is a federal district and enjoys the status of a state). Police initially assigned by the local authority to protect government installations had done little to deter the attackers; within hours both the governor and his security secretary, a politician who had served as a minister under Bolsonaro, had been suspended.
Much remains to play out. It’s possible that the radical rightwing campaign could enjoy a second wind this week, if notoriously pro-Bolsonaro lorry drivers carry out their threats to block roads and surround oil refineries, potentially cutting off fuel supplies to Brazilian cities. Following the election, lines of stationary trucks choked traffic for several weeks, although with the backing of court orders these barricades were eventually cleared. On Sunday night, there were reports that motorways were blocked in several states. Pro-Bolsonaro websites warn of a third phase too, with a military intervention required simply to restore order.
This though, judging by what on Sunday was intended to be a fully fledged occupation of government buildings, may well turn out to be bluster. For all the damage caused – smashed glass windows, slashed modernist art works and broken up furniture and electronic equipment – these attacks hardly amounted to the first stage of an insurrection.
What are the consequences? In the short term, Lula has probably been strengthened. Moderate conservative allies were quick to condemn the violence on Sunday. But so too were opposition leaders. In fact, the more far-sighted leaders of Brazil’s far-right such as Hamilton Mourão, the former deputy president, and Tarcisio de Freitas, Bolsonaro’s former infrastructure minister and recently elected governor of São Paulo, are pursuing a much longer game.
They are determined to build on the increased popularity of social conservatism within Brazilian society in recent years, which is reflected in the growth, for instance, of the evangelical Protestant church. In last October’s election, the right made gains in congress, increasing its representation compared to 2018, a year that had been thought to be a high-water mark of conservative advance. It will now seek to build on this political capital and won’t think twice, if necessary, about dispensing with the man nursing his wounds in Florida.
Richard Lapper is author of Beef, Bible and Bullets: Brazil in the Age of Bolsonaro
