You do not have to be a member of Alejandro Trelles’ (POL) Latin American Politics class (which is worth taking for all those politics majors out there) or even an avid reader of global news to know trouble is brewing in Brazil. Brazil, South America’s largest democracy, had its capital in Brasilia stormed by pro-Bolsonaro supporters in an effort to stage a full on coup on Jan. 8. Sounds incredibly familiar, does it not? If you are unsure as to why I am asking that question then allow me to give you a little rundown of the recent happenings in Brazil.
Brazilian presidential elections, in the same manner as the United States presidential elections, occur every four years. This past year, 2022, was a presidential election year in Brazil throughout the entire month of October. While a number of people ran for the presidency there were two major contenders: the incumbent candidate, now former president Jair Bolsonaro, and his challenger, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, as he is commonly known, was president of Brazil from 2002 to 2010 and was widely regarded as one of the most accomplished progressive presidents in Brazil’s democratic history. Brazil’s constitution allows for individuals to run only for two consecutive terms as President after which they can run again for the presidency, but cannot have more than two terms in a row. Thus, at the call of progressive voters in Brazil, Lula entered the race to challenge Bolsonaro in 2022.
However, back in 2018, following the wave of right wing extremism in the democratic world, Jair Bolsonaro was elected into office as Brazil’s president. He was a fiery candidate, a former military officer and was able to connect to the grassroot conservative people of Brazil. Throughout his presidency there were comparisons drawn between him and former United States president Donald Trump, both being regarded as highly conservative populists with selfish intentions in mind when designing national policy. But where the similarities became frighteningly close was during both of their re-election cycles.
2022 was going to be Bolsonaro’s second consecutive term as president of Brazil, a term in which he would have been able to cement policies furthering the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and continuing to marginalize the lowest earners in Brazil’s economy, which collectively make up a vast majority of the Brazilian people. But the early polling in Brazil did not favor Bolsonaro; they all predicted a loss to his liberal opponent Lula.
Just as Trump responded to unfavorable polls in 2020, Bolsonaro began a widespread campaign of misinformation with one target in mind: voter fraud.
Bolsonaro began propagating unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud all throughout the country and campaign trail, insisting that they would cost him the election. His claims were so well received by his supporters that three out of every four of them had little or no trust in the voting process, as the New York Times’ Brazil bureau chief Jack Nicas discovered. Bolsonaro’s claims were not targeted specifically at people voting against him, but rather at the institution of voting in Brazil. Contrary to many voting operations around the world, Brazil is one of the few nations to utilize electronic voting methods.
Electronic machines were first used in Brazil in 1996 and the first nationwide, electronic-only vote took place four years later in 2000. Brazilian authorities adopted these electronic voting machines and measures to tackle long-standing fraud occurring in Brazilian elections. In prior years, ballot boxes arrived at voting stations already stuffed with votes. Others were stolen and individual votes were routinely falsified, according to Brazil’s electoral authority. The electronic system was implemented to reduce these fraudulent phenomena and increase security and trust in the election process.
But Bolsonaro’s claims were designed with the intention of taking all of the hard earned trust the Brazilian public has in voting and cast it all into an incinerator. Bolsonaro railed against electronic voting, claiming that the machines were too old to be trustworthy since they had not been replaced since their installment in the country’s electoral process, and that their age would be their greatest weakness since it would allow for hackers both from within and outside of Brazil to easily hack into their software and rig the election in favor of Lula da Silva.
These claims, as mentioned earlier, had serious impacts on the perception of election security and validity among Bolsonaro supporters, while those who supported his liberal opponent and onlookers from the rest of the world held their breath in waiting to see how his masses would react. In an effort to try and quell Bolsonaro’s far reaching and highly unfounded claims of voter fraud, the Brazilian election authorities released a report on election safety prior to the public’s period of voting. They reported that the system has been tested rigorously and been made as secure as possible to prevent fraud.
More specifically they mentioned that the voting machines are checked for reliability before, during and after balloting and that the votes recorded by each machine can be cross-checked with the overall tallies after the vote. Election officials acknowledged that hacking is always a risk, but said no one has ever managed to alter the machines’ source code or election results. They even went so far as to explain that risks are further minimized because the machines are not even connected to the internet and information is sent only through internal systems, segments of which shut down if alterations are detected. Specifically, for this year’s elections, over a dozen institutions (including police, the military, prosecutors and universities) accepted the electoral court’s invitation to test the machines. During a three-day hackathon in May, roughly 20 hired experts sought to penetrate the system. None succeeded.
It is similarly important to note that after the introduction of the electronic voting systems into Brazil’s electoral process there have been zero signs of fraud or successful hacking into the voting machines. However, undeterred by the facts, Bolsonaro supporters continued to feed off of Bolasonaro’s claims, believing that the election was going to be stolen by Lula and that any outcome which did not favor Bolsonaro was a falsified one. As directly reported by Jack Nicas, “in interviews with more than 40 of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters in recent months, nearly all said they were worried about election rigging and were prepared to protest if he loses.”
With all of this set in place it was clear that Bolsonaro had prepared his supporters for action once the results began to come in and just as the polls had predicted; Lula for his third term had won the position of president of Brazil. From the similar setup to Trump, with false allegations of voter fraud laying a foundation for an angry wave of Bolsonaro supporters to take to the streets, the world waited and watched to see how the now former president of Brazil was going to handle the loss.
Would he admit defeat and step away from his office in a peaceful and respectful manner, separating himself from Trump and acting out of civil service to his country and restoring faith in the electoral process? Would he immediately call for a recount and protest the vote in as many legal ways as possible until he found a way to win, further falling in line with Trump and his allies as a populist politician greedy for power? Or would he put his own spin on the situation and try to weasel his way out without admitting to all the damage he had caused the very same democratic institution which worked to elect him four years ago?
If you guessed the first option then you may need to study a little more into the selfish tendencies of populist leaders. If you guessed the second option then you were nearly there but still missed the mark by a few degrees of crazy. But if you guessed the third option then congratulations! You either already know what has been happening in Brazil, you have some sort of sixth sense when it comes to multiple choice questions or you just had some correct gut feeling about how Bolsonaro responded.
After the Brazilian Election Commission determined that Jair Bolsonaro had lost the election to his opponent, Lula de Silva, Bolsonaro spent two days in silence. It was only after 48 hours that he finally announced to the Brazilian public that a transition of power would occur but he did not explicitly admit to losing the election. While this was not the exact route Trump had taken, seeing as he immediately criticized the election for being false and stolen from him, it was not all too far off from Bolsonaro, who protected his image while attempting to allow faith in democracy to return to Brazil.
But Bolsonaro’s supporters had made up their mind whether Bolsonaro’s attempt to transition power was convincing enough or not. They began to protest in cities all across the country, such as Sao Paolo. While not yet violent, these election protests were strong enough for the Brazilian military to intervene and begin an independant investigation into the validity of the election.
With Bolsonaro’s close ties to the military it was worried by many around the world that the Brazilian military was not going to operate their investigation with any sort of unbiased tool or approach. But, to the shock and relief of many, the report clearly stated to the Brazilian public that the military after going through the election protocol and voting machines had found no cases of voter fraud in that year’s election. A huge win for democratic and Lula supporters throughout Brazil, the report seemed to solidify that Bolsonaro had no further means of holding onto power as president.
But for those thinking that this is where the buck stops, do not be so naive as to think that this rose does not also come with its thorn. Because, even though the military report clearly stated that no fraud was discovered it did play on one crucial nuance: that no fraud was found. The report did not find fraud but, as the military made clear, it did not mean that fraud did not exist in the election—simply that the military could not find any instances of it.
Further feeding into the false reality Bolsonaro supporters had created; they took this report to mean that fraud was still out there and still responsible for the “loss” of Bolsonaro. That is when the first instance of violence erupted in Brazil. This time on Dec. 13 in the capital city of Brasilia, Bolsonaro supporters attempted to invade the federal police headquarters in a flash of post-election violence on the day the president’s electoral defeat was certified. In this instance the violence was minimal, with large scale protests overshadowing much of the riot at the police headquarters. Truckers used their trucks to block highways and protestors stood outside Bolsonaro’s home calling for military intervention to prevent Lula from being certified as the victor.
But this still paled in comparison to what occurred only a handful of days ago on Jan. 8 at the capitol building in Brasilia. Hundreds of supporters of Jair Bolsonaro stormed the seats of power where they trashed offices and drew condemnation from the government and the international community. Brazilian Justice Minister Flavio Dino told CNN reporters that there had been “about 1500” arrests in Brasilia since Jan. 8. Protesters lit carpets on fire, stole gifts from foreign nations and even ripped up artwork. Brazil’s Presidential Communications Minister Paulo Pimenta described how there was blood, feces and urine found in the palace rooms. “Onlookers said they seemed beside themselves with hate, like a horde of zombies. They were running down hallways, smashing things, urinating, defecating in the corridors and in the rooms on one destruction spree.”
The riot has striking similarities to the Jan. 6 riot in Washington D.C. under former President Trump; Both caused great humiliation upon both nations from the world. Now Jair Bolsonaro is in Orlando where he was being treated for “abdominal discomfort” in an American hospital and is currently hiding in a private residence he owns there. Calls for him to be extradited to Brazil for trials and calls for him to be expelled from Brazil are coming from all over.
But one thing is clear from Brazil’s 2022 presidential election: voter fraud allegations are destroying democracy. It is no longer something that can be relied on that losers in elections will take their loss with grace. No, rather the United States and Brazil have set unsettling precedents in the international community that losses are something which can be “corrected” through violence. But this is not something which the democratic project can withstand if we as people do not come to recognize our losses and learn to move on from them. We are the ones now who are called to break this cycle and stant not for the candidate we wanted to win but for democracy. Election denying needs to end here and it ends with us.
