Lula’s government has taken firm action against the incidents in Brasilia and the military has ruled out a military coup. In addition, the president has received the support of key international political leaders
We have witnessed what many have described as a repeat of the capture of the US Capitol two years ago. Certainly, the images evoke how the neopatriotic far right reacts when it loses the election and sows conspiracy theories to harass reactionary zealots.
However, what we have seen in Brazil also has “purely Brazilian” features that make comparison difficult:
– In the Planalto there was already a president in the full exercise of his functions (in the case of the US, the aspiration of the crowd was precisely to avoid the official proclamation of the elected president).
– In Brasilia, the elected institutions include the highest representatives of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary; This is relevant because some of the biggest setbacks for the Bolsonaro administration have come precisely from the judiciary and in particular the Supreme Court (we’ll see if the Bolsonaro majority in Congress and Senate enacts its particular vendetta through impeachment proceedings in the coming months, for example against judge Alexandre de Moraes).
– The crowd explicitly clamored for a military intervention, that is, a coup without any legal cover (as was the case in the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff), acknowledging “without masks” that the ultimate motivation was not to blame to electoral imperfections, but, plain and simple, to gain power by a hook or by a crook.
Besides the obvious ties between Steve Bannon and Eduardo Bolsonaro, as well as the international projection of the ultras of the so-called Alt-Right, there are two pertinent facts that do coincide:
– The ambivalence of the previous president was respectively defeated democratically in the polls.
– The confirmation of the functioning of the institutions and the impossibility of legitimately taking power by force. In Bolsonaro’s case, he has, as Trump once did, played discursively between inciting his hosts by calling them patriots while making sure not to explicitly harass them to commit crimes. It is no coincidence that the former Brazilian president is out of the country in case he comes under investigation for these or other irregularities, including his disastrous management of the pandemic. In any case, this discursive ambivalence, clashing with the resounding and stilted pronouncements on other issues, is part of a calculated game in which the supposed champions of the homeland are actually the most virulent anti-system.
As already mentioned in these pages, the Lula government emerged in a context of structural and cyclical weaknesses. Despite the scale of the challenge we face just a week after the president’s inauguration, we can conclude that the balance sheet for Brazilian democracy is very positive.
First of all, it has been confirmed that the military (those who are truly decisive and have the power to command, not the pensioners or a few low-ranking ones) have categorically ruled out the path of a military coup despite the lingering sirens of a few .
Secondly, Lula’s government, initially hesitant about how to deal with the ultra-cinders it inherited from the previous administration, knows conclusively that action must be taken and the president himself has proclaimed it with “federal intervention” and ratified it by the Supreme Court to suspend the government. the suspicious actions of the Bolsonaro Governor of the Federal District of Brasilia, Ibaneis Rocha, who first sinned through negligence by not guaranteeing public order and later tried to disengage from Bolsonaro by the head of his Security Minister, Anderson Torres , who was justice minister in the Bolsonaro administration and who curiously traveled the United States.
And third, the rapid unanimous support of the international community (apart from certain domestic outbursts such as those in Madrid) for Lula’s democratic government strengthens its international position and general consensus (from the United States and the EU to China and Russia, for example). ) in light of happily exiled militaristic adventures in the region.
So, scare and suspense aside, the tough chess game that Lula will have to play throughout this semester to unfold the pieces and dominate the center of the board is, for now, fought with an advantage against the aggressive opening shown by his opponent from Florida. The legality, legitimacy, and narrative are clearly on the president’s side, while the reactionary, victimizing, and anti-system ultras are entrenched on the other side. Lula 1, Bolsonaro 0.
This article was published in ‘The Conversation’.
Source: La Verdad
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