Contributor: how the conviction of the former president of Brazil echoes in the United States
The Supreme Court of Brazil acknowledged on Thursday the former president Jair Bolsonaro guilty of conspiracies linked to his failed candidacy of re -election in 2022. The court concluded that Bolsonaro had attempted to provoke a military coup and to poison his opponent, the current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro, the former president of the largest democracy in Latin America and his richest country, was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison and it is prohibited to seek the public service again.
Bolsonaro is one between two dozen elected presidents and prime ministers in recent world history Democratic underpervining their country Institutions. In addition to undermining confidence in the elections, the Brazilian chief has weakened the public and scientist Institutions in funding. Bolsonaro’s family and political partners were faced with repeated scandals. Consequently, the president reigned a constant fear of dismissal – a fate that had ended the career of two previous Brazilian presidents since the country’s return to democracy in 1998. To avoid this result, Bolsonaro forged alliances with a range of legislative parties and strange beds. Brazilian political scientists Describe the implicit agreement: “The agreement is simple: you protect me and I let you manage the country and extract rents as you wish.”
Curiously, the decision is also a setback for President Trump here in the United States. Trump considers Bolsonaro as an ally who, like him, was persecuted by the leftists and subject to reprisals by the courts. The American president tried to prevent the Brazilian court from ruling against Bolsonaro. In August, Trump sent a letter to Lula, Nemesis de Bolsonaro. Trump threatened to hike on most prices on Brazilian exports to the United States at 50% if his friend remains in legal danger.
Trump empathy reflects the parallel paths of the two presidents. Bolsonaro, like Trump, used his time in power to test democratic standards, weaken independent public institutions and disseminate his opponents. The two men express a taste for political violence. Where Trump has often thought about bearing heckling and shooting the demonstrators in the knees, Bolsonaro was nostalgic for the military regime in his country. On the campaign campaign in 2018, He said This Brazil would only change for the best “the day we broke into the civil war here and will do the work that the military regime has not done: kill 30,000”.
Trump and Bolsonaro tried to hang on to power after losing their re -election offers. Strengthening the allegations of their presidents’ electoral fraud, Trump supporters moved to Washington on January 6, 2021, Just like Bolsonaro in BrasiliaThe Brazilian capital, January 8, 2023. Bolsonaro’s involvement in these post-electoral laws was the basis of the legal danger that consumed it.
Trump depicts the most responsible Brazilian judge of Bolsonaro prosecution, chief judge Alexandre de Moraes, with disdain. Trump describes the case against Bolsonaro as a “witch hunt” in support of a Lula government, describing the current president as a “radical left”.
In fact, there is little lost love between Lula and Moraes. Lula is the leader of the Party of Social Democratic workers; De Moraes is closely associated with the central-right PSDB and is known for its difficult positions on crime. The activism of Moraes dates back to the presidency of Bolsonaro, when the Attorney General of Brazil, appointed by Bolsonaro, was far from being energetic in the maintenance of the rule of law. To transpose the Brazilian situation and the activism of Moraes to the American context, imagine that, seeing the lack of vigor of the Ministry of Justice in the pursuit of Trump, the chief judge John G. Roberts Jr. woke up to encourage legal action against the president.
Many Americans will see Brazil and the story of Bolsonaro with a certain desire. Here is a president who dealt with electoral loss by claiming fraud and encouraging his military and civilian supporters to violence, and who has been decisively to account.
The responsibility of civil servants is at the heart of democracy. Voters can hold the holders responsible for the elections – political scientists call this “vertical responsibility” – just like the coequal branches of the government, which we call “horizontal responsibility”. Potential autocratic leaders such as Bolsonaro are trying to escape the two types of responsibility, to remain in office even when they lose (the end of vertical responsibility) and to undermine the independent courts, agencies, central banks and denunciators (there is the horizontal version). In the end, Bolsonaro was taken into account both by voters and by the courts.
Trump’s self-integration in the pursuit of Bolsonaro draws attention to another form of responsibility, or at least the presidential constraint, which has disappeared from our own governing administration. It is the constraint that the presidents experience when the advisers prevent them from acting on reckless instincts.
If these advisers were at the White House today, they could have advised the president not to threaten Brazil with high prices. This risks enlarging the inflation of the prices of key consumer goods (coffee, orange juice), which is politically dangerous because the control of inflation was a problem at the heart of Trump’s re -election campaign in 2024. The use of pricing threats as a cake to try to save an ally of legal peril also gives lies to the alleged justification behind the prices: protecting the American manufacturers or commercial.
As much, then, the days when Americans could have served as a model of democratic governance. For all its own problems, of which there are many, the second largest country in our hemisphere to school in what democratic responsibility looks like.
Susan Stokes is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the faculty of the Chicago Center on Democracy. She is the author, more recently, of “The Backsliders: why leaders undermine their own democracies”.
