The Supreme Court of Brazil found former President Jair Bolsonaro guilty of conspiracies related to his failed re -election offer of 2022. The court determined that Bolsonaro tried to instigate a military coup and poison his opponent, the current President Luiz Inacio 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 is excluded to seek a public office again.
Bolsonaro is one of the two dozen elected presidents and prime ministers in the recent history of the whole world who used their time in office for undermine the democratic of their countries institutions. In addition to undermining confidence in the elections, the Brazilian leader weakened the public and scientist institutions by discouraging them. Bolsonaro's family and political associates faced repeated scandals. As a consequence, the President constantly ruled fear of the accusation, a destination that had ended the careers of two previous Brazilian presidents since the country's return to democracy in 1998. To avoid this result, Bolsonaro forged alliances with a variety of legislative parties and strange Pfels. Brazilian politicians Describe the implicit agreement: “The agreement is simple: it protects me and lets you direct the country and extract rents as you want.”
Interestingly, the decision is also a setback for President Trump here in the United States. Trump sees Bolsonaro as an ally who, like him, has been persecuted by the leftists and subjected to compensation for the courts. The US president tried to prevent the Brazilian court from failing Bolsonaro. In August, Trump sent a letter to Lula, Bolsonaro's nemesis. Trump threatened to increase most tariffs on Brazilian exports to the United States to 50% if his friend remains in legal danger.
Trump's empathy reflects the parallel paths of the two presidents. Bolsonaro, like Trump, used his time in office to prove democratic norms, weaken independent public institutions and vilify their opponents. Both men express a taste for political violence. Where Trump has often reflected on hitting the offenders and shooting the protesters on his knees, Bolsonaro was nostalgic for the military government in his country. In the campaign campaign in 2018, Affirmed That Brazil would only change for the better “the day we explode in the civil war here and do the work that the military regime did not do: kill 30,000”.
Both Trump and Bolsonaro tried to hold on to power after losing their re -election offers. Tyling the claims of their presidents of electoral fraud, Trump supporters mutinied in Washington on January 6, 2021, Like Bolsonaro in BrasiliaThe Brazilian capital, on January 8, 2023. The participation of Bolsonaro in these post -election acts was the basis of the legal danger that has consumed it.
Trump represents the Brazilian judge most responsible for the prosecution of Bolsonaro, the president of Justice 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 leftist.”
In fact, there is little lost love between Lula and Moraes. Lula is the leader of the Social Democratic Party; De Moraes is closely associated with the central-right PSDB and is known for its difficult positions of crimes. De Moraes' activism dates back to Bolsonaro's presidency, when the Brazilian attorney general, designated by Bolsonaro, was less than energetic to defend the rule of law. To transpose the Brazilian situation and the activism of De Moraes to the context of the United States, imagine that, seeing the lack of vigor of the Department of Justice in Trump's prosecution, the President of the Justice Court John G. Roberts Jr. had woken up to encourage legal actions against the President.
Many Americans will see Brazil and the history of Bolsonaro with some envy. Here is a president who dealt with electoral loss by claiming fraud and instigating his military and civil supporters to violence, and who has been decisively retained for accounts.
The responsibility of public servants is in the heart of democracy. Voters can hold the headlines in the elections, political scientists call this “vertical responsibility”, like the branches of the government, which we call “horizontal responsibility.” The possible autocratic leaders such as Bolsonaro try to escape both types of responsibility, remain in office even when they lose (the end of vertical responsibility) and undermine the courts, agencies, central banks and complainants of the complainants (there goes the horizontal version). In the end, Bolsonaro was considered for voters and courts.
Trump's self -assertion in Bolsonaro's prosecution calls attention to another form of responsibility, or at least the presidential restriction, which has disappeared from our own government administration. That is the restriction that the presidents experience when the advisors prevent them from acting in instincts that are not prudent.
If such advisors were in today's White House, they could have advised the president not to threaten Brazil with high rates. Doing this runs the risk of exacerbating the prices of key consumer goods (coffee, orange juice), something that is politically dangerous because controlling inflation was a problem in the heart of the Trump 2024 re -election campaign. The use of tariff threats such as Cudgel to try to save an ally of the legal danger also gives lies to the supposed justification behind the tariff Americans or correct commercial imbalances.
Gone are the days when Americans could have served as a democratic governance model. In spite of all its own problems, of which there are many, the second largest country in our hemisphere is studying us in how democratic responsibility is seen.
Susan Stokes is a professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Faculty Director of the Chicago Democracy Center. She is the author, more recently, from “the Backsliders: why leaders undermine their own democracies.”
