Two Capitol riots. Two very different results.
Monday marks one year since thousands of right-wing protesters, draped in the colors of Brazil’s flag, stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices in violent anger with the aim of overturning an election.
Saturday marked three years since thousands of Americans did much the same thing.
They were two shocking attacks on the Western Hemisphere’s two largest democracies, both broadcast around the world and both prompted by presidents who had questioned their legitimate election losses. Each of them presented an extraordinary test for the country’s democracy, and each raised the question of how a deeply polarized society would evolve in the aftermath of such an attack.
Over time, the answer to that question becomes clear: the parallel attacks have had nearly opposite consequences.
In the United States, support for Donald J. Trump’s campaign to retake the White House is rising as he sees his 2020 election loss as the real uprising and January 6 as “a beautiful day.”
At the same time, his counterpart in Brazil, far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, has quickly faded into political irrelevance. Six months after he left office last year, election officials barred him from running for another election until 2030, and many right-wing leaders have shunned him.
Opinions among citizens about the double riots – on January 6, 2021 and January 8, 2023 – also differ. Recent opinion polls have shown this 22 percent of Americans now say they support the January 6 attack while in Brazil only 6 percent support the January 8 rioters.
Why then are there such conflicting responses to similar threats? Researchers and analysts point to a host of reasons, including the countries’ different political systems, media landscapes, national histories, and judicial responses, but one difference stands out in particular.
Leaders on Brazil’s right “publicly, clearly and unequivocally accepted the results of the elections and did exactly what democratic politicians should do,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard government professor and co-author of the book “How Democracies Die.” who studies both American and Brazilian democracy. “That is strikingly different from how Republicans responded.”
On the night after the January 8 riots, Brazil’s left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called marched arm in arm across the central square of the federal government with governors, congressional leaders and judges from both left and right in a show of unity against the attack.
In the hours after the January 6 riot, some Republican members of Congress voted against certifying President Biden’s election victory, and since then Republicans have increasingly sought to recast the insurrection as a patriotic act — or even as an inside job by left.
Ciro Nogueira, a right-wing politician who was Bolsonaro’s outgoing chief of staff and is now the minority leader in Brazil’s Senate, said the reaction in the United States surprised him.
“There is a consensus in our country, among the political class, to condemn these acts,” he said. “I really think it’s a shame that some American politicians welcome this kind of protest.”
He speculated that Brazil strongly reprimanded the rioters because many Brazilians are old enough to remember the violent military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. “The United States has not experienced a dictatorship, a period of authoritarianism,” he said. “We never want this to return to our country.”
Analysts also pointed out that Brazil’s political fragmentation – there are 20 different parties represented in Congress – makes politicians more willing to confront each other and express a wider range of positions, while American conservatives largely limit themselves to the Republican Party.
At the same time, they noted that Brazil’s mainstream media is less fragmented, which they say has helped more of the public agree on a common set of facts. One generally centrist news network, Globo, has a large viewership, with ratings often higher than those of the next four networks combined.
But there is another reason why Brazil has so decisively rejected the Jan. 8 riot — a factor that some fear could pose its own unintended threat to the country’s institutions. Brazil’s Supreme Court has expanded its power to investigate and prosecute people it considers a threat to democracy.
This approach helped quell claims of fraud surrounding Brazil’s 2022 elections, when one Supreme Court judge, Alexandre de Moraes, notably ordered tech companies to remove posts spreading such falsehoods. Mr Moraes has said he has seen online disinformation erode democracy in other countries and that he intends not to let that happen in Brazil.
As a result, Brazilian courts recently ordered tech companies to delete accounts at some of the highest rates in the world, according to revelations from Google and Instagram owner Meta.
Mr Moraes also oversaw the investigation into January 8. (In some cases in Brazil, the role of Supreme Court justices can resemble that of both prosecutors and judges.)
A year after the riots in Brazil, 1,350 people have been charged and 30 people have been convicted, with sentences ranging from 3 to 17 years. After three years, approximately 1,240 January 6 rioters have been charged and 880 convicted or found guilty. The sentences range from a few days to 22 years.
Last week Mr. Moraes gave a series of interviews in which he lashed out at rioters who were defendants in cases he helped adjudicate, calling them “cowards” and “sick people” who had threatened him and his family. He also said the actions taken by the Supreme Court – a bipartisan group of 11 justices – were crucial.
“Without the strong response from the institutions, we wouldn’t be talking here today. The High Court would be closed and I would not be here as the investigation revealed,” he said one job interviewnoting that some rioters had tried to kill him.
Thirty conservative senators in Brazil released a letter on Friday condemning the January 8 attacks but questioning the growing power of the Supreme Court. Legal experts across Brazil have debated whether the court’s moves are justified given the threat — or whether they pose their own new problem.
“I think there are problems with the Supreme Court’s actions,” said Emilio Peluso, a professor of constitutional law at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. “But I think the Supreme Court had to give a strong response to what happened on January 8.”
Mr. Moraes also led the electoral court that voted in June to ban Mr. Bolsonaro from running for the next presidential election. Five of the court’s seven judges ruled that Bolsonaro had abused his power when he attacked Brazil’s voting systems in a speech broadcast on state television ahead of the 2022 elections.
Mr. Levitsky, a Harvard professor, said Brazil’s approach resembles the doctrine of “militant democracy” developed in Germany after World War II to fight fascism, under which the government can ban politicians seen as a threat considered.
The United States has preferred to leave this up to voters, although courts across the country are now weighing in on Trump’s eligibility, with the U.S. Supreme Court expected to ultimately decide the matter.
Now that Bolsonaro’s political support has ebbed — and he faces a series of criminal investigations, including one linked to Jan. 8 — he claims he has largely ceased to be a victim of voter fraud.
At the same time, Trump, with support from his fellow Republicans, has escalated his lies. At a campaign rally on Friday, he called those captured on Jan. 6 “hostages” and falsely claimed that the far-left antifa movement and the FBI were “hostages.”directing the load‘At the riot. “You saw the same people as me,” he told the supporters.
This was evident from a poll last month a quarter of Americans now believe FBI agents “organized and encouraged” the Jan. 6 attack.
For Mr. Levitsky, this statistic illustrates what the United States can learn from Brazil in this case: “What leaders say and what leaders do matter.”
Paulo Motoryn contributed reporting from Brasilia.