PAlmost two years to the day after the assault on the Capitol in Washington, the symbols of Brazilian democracy were in turn damaged by hordes refusing the verdict of the ballot box. As in the United States, it was indeed an attempted coup d’etat that took place in the Brazilian capital, delivered to chaos until the police forces restored order. A worrying state of affairs for the young democracy, born thirty-eight years ago on the rubble of a military dictatorship.
This attack was, alas, predictable. The claim of populists to arrogate to themselves the exclusive right to speak in the name of a largely fantasized people renders them incapable of respecting the rules which guarantee the proper functioning of a democracy, starting with the peaceful transfer of power within the framework of ‘an alternation.
This populism of ventriloquists is doubly a contempt for the people since it is based on the cynical manipulation of militants white-hot by complacent social networks. Nurturing the latter in the alternative truths of conspiracy, and in the hatred of elites deemed guilty of all evils, knowingly led to the assault on Brasilia, only a week after the swearing in of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
As in the United States on January 6, 2021, what happened in Brazil on January 8 is therefore not accidental or fortuitous. The proven links between the most radical advisers of Donald Trump and the entourage of the deposed president, Jair Bolsonaro, reinforce suspicions, even if this grotesque embryo of an International of the insurrection, resolutely anchored on the far right, accumulates fortunately for now setbacks.
No half measures
This January 8, the sack of Congress, the Supreme Court and the Brazilian presidential palace – an enumeration that gives as much vertigo as an idea of the scale of this attack – therefore responded to a project. Its instigators must be discovered, prosecuted and punished. The role of the governor of Brasilia, Ibaneis Rocha, suspended from office, must also be clarified, as must the passivity of certain police forces, suspected of possible affinities with the insurgents.
The responsibility of the former Brazilian president, who left to maintain his resentment in Florida with his American mentor, before his successor took power, is engaged. His inability to clearly recognize defeat, his temptation to sort through the electoral results, between those, many, who were favorable to his movement and the one who put an end to his personal ambitions, prepared the ground for this attempted coup. of state. He was even more disqualified by the mediocrity of his reaction after the events in Brasilia.
If there is one lesson to be learned from the American precedent, it is that such affronts to democracy cannot be met with half measures. In the general interest. In the United States, the inability of the Republican Party to distance itself from a Trumpism prisoner of its denial of defeat thus deprived it of the hoped-for victory in the mid-term elections.
The task of President Lula, forced to deal with the resilience of a majority Bolsonarism in Parliament and at the helm of many Brazilian states, already promised to be difficult. Now he is forced to lead the counter-offensive in the name of the values of democracy.