Trudy Rubin: Brazil does what the US failed to do -- Convict an ex-president for attempting to overthrow an election

When President Donald Trump mustered a military parade in Washington in June, my mind flashed back to a video I once watched in a Rio de Janeiro museum. It featured a 1950s Brazilian dictator waving from an open automobile in his military procession.

Trump mercifully stayed on the reviewing stand. And Brazil’s current democracy has remained free of military coups for 40 years. In fact, on Sept. 11, the Brazilian Supreme Court voted to convict former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump pal, of attempting a coup to overturn his defeat in the 2022 election.

In other words, Brazil’s institutions succeeded where U.S. institutions have failed in holding to account a leader who tried to undermine the most basic principles of democracy. They stood strong even though Trump imposed 50% tariffs on all Brazilian goods last July to pressure the country’s courts to drop charges against Bolsonaro, who, he claimed, was the victim of a “witch hunt.” (Brazil’s courts ignored Trump.)

Of course, despite being Latin America’s largest and richest country, Brazil has a different political system from ours. Yet, the similarities between Bolsonaro and Trump as politicians are amazing, as are the parallels between Jan. 6, 2021, and Brazil’s Jan. 8, 2023 — the day Bolsonaro supporters stormed their Congress to reject election results.

So why has Brazil been able to defend its democracy while our Jan. 6 rioters were pardoned, and Trump still insists he won the 2020 election? What lessons does Brazil have to offer those worried about democracy’s future here?

I put that question to Filipe Campante, professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University, who was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro. “One thing democracy can’t withstand is people not accepting election losses,” he told me. “The lesson that Brazil is providing is that violators must pay.”

As Campante also pointed out, “Institutions that are written into constitutions are just parchment unless people try to actualize them.”

What helped in Brazil, he said, “is that leaders of institutions have historical memories of living under dictatorship. They have been exposed to coup attacks, exposed to the pathogens, and our Jan. 8 activated those defenses. In the United States, that immunity was not there.”

Those activated institutional defenses are all the more admirable given the parallels between Bolsonaro’s political history and Trump’s.

The Brazilian built up a media persona via TV talk shows and social media, where he regularly denounced democracy and political corruption. As far back as 1999, he promised that, as president, he would stage a coup on his first day and establish a dictatorship. Lacking his own political party, he billed himself as an outsider and won the presidency in 2018 with a populist appeal to conservative evangelicals, segments of the police and military, and ordinary Brazilians who just wanted change.

He and Trump showered praise on each other as Bolsonaro cut environmental protections and resisted vaccine distribution during the pandemic, touting hydroxychloroquine.

But his concentration of power in presidential hands prodded resistance inside Brazil from centrist politicians and from the Supreme Court, notably a judge named Alexandre de Moraes — who was not a “far-left radical,” but a career public prosecutor appointed by a previous center-right president. Justice Moraes insisted he “didn’t want to be [Neville] Chamberlain,” Campante told me, a reference to the appeasing British prime minister who bowed to Adolf Hitler.

The Brazilian justices led a “Fake News Inquiry” investigating social media misinformation by the Bolsonaro campaign during the 2018 election. And Moraes went on to become the lead judge in a five-member Supreme Court Electoral Tribunal that led the inquiry in the Bolsonaro case, and which convicted the former president by a vote of 4-1.

So, lesson one for America: A pro-democracy Supreme Court is essential. And the leadership of a centrist conservative justice did for Brazil what U.S. justices have failed to do so far. It’s unclear whether Chief Justice John Roberts will check Trump’s drive for authoritarian power.

A second Brazilian lesson is that other democratic institutions also need to stand up under pressure. “The Brazilian military had a long history of military rule,” I was told by Shannon K. O’Neil, the Council on Foreign Relations’ well-known Latin American expert. “But over the last 50 years, they have institutionalized and adopted a professional military role. The vast majority of the higher ranks do not want to play a civilian role.”

In Brazil, key military commanders, along with police, refused to take part in the plot by Bolsonaro and key supporters. The Brazilian police had no U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents or National Guard units to call up. Moreover, under the Biden administration, the U.S. military made clear it opposed a coup.

A third lesson: Conservatives must break from populists to save democracy. Brazil has a multiparty system; while Bolsonaro supporters had the largest single party, other moderate conservative parties failed to support his coup efforts and have accepted the tribunal’s ruling.

“The two-party system is the problem,” Campante contended. “Trump was able to take over the Republican Party, which affects the Supreme Court and puts him in a special position where he can banish conservative opposition. Bolsonaro never had that power.”

Still, Trump may be the guarantor of Brazilian democracy in the short term (even though there is a chance Bolsonaro could be amnestied by Brazil’s Congress and try to run again).

“Brazil cares very much about its sovereignty, and Trump’s tariffs got Brazilians’ backs up,” O’Neil said. “Brazilians will stand strong against U.S. coercion” to free Bolsonaro and fire Supreme Court members.

So here is a last lesson that U.S. democrats (with a small “d”) should take to heart. The courage of Brazil’s justices, along with the antiauthoritarianism of its centrist politicians, should remind Americans that democracy can still triumph against terrible odds — if leaders from key institutions find the guts to defend it.

Even if right now, Brazil is doing that better than the United States.

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