As you’ve probably heard, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro was last week found guilty of plotting a coup to retain power after his defeat in the 2022 election and sentenced to 27 years in prison. He is currently under house arrest, but he will appeal against the sentence and there are also attempts by his supporters to legislate for an amnesty.
We had a bit of a look at the Bolsonaro case earlier this year, when I cited Omar Encarnación’s study comparing him with Donald Trump. Encarnación argued that the threat to democracy was taken more seriously in Brazil because of its recent experience with dictatorship; as he put it, “in Brazil there is a keen sense of what it means for a country to lose its democracy.”
No doubt there are other factors involved as well. One that I had pointed to earlier is the entrenched nature of the two-party system in the United States. It meant that for an autocrat to take power he first had to take control of a major party, and once he had done that, its whole infrastructure and support base, including partisan officials across the country, were at his disposal.
With a more flexible party system, as in Brazil (and most other places), it was easier for established centre-right politicians to keep a certain distance from Bolsonaro and to cut him loose if need be. In the US, however, the Republicans have found themselves bound hand and foot to Trump – unless they are willing to make the wholesale leap to working with the traditional enemy.
That helped Trump when it came to resisting prosecution during the time that he was out of office. So did his opponents’ fear of being seen to engage in political persecution; they bent over backwards to try to avoid any suspicion of unfairness. But playing by the book takes time, and it meant that, despite apparently overwhelming evidence, the proceedings against Trump were unable to get to trial before last year’s election foreclosed on them.
Brazil is determined not to fall into the same trap, although other pitfalls may well await. Nor, it seems, is Romania, whose presidential election last year was annulled and re-run after apparent Russian interference in favor of far-right candidate Călin Georgescu. Now Georgescu and a number of his associates have been charged with plotting a coup. The alleged ringleader, mercenary leader Horațiu Potra, is said to be on the run and “may seek asylum in Russia.”
This is difficult territory for democracies. The natural instinct is to avoid prosecution of political figures and to let the electorate punish their malfeasance where possible. But when democracy itself is under threat, relying on elections alone is taking a big risk. And when a serious attack has been made on the constitutional fabric, the process of repair is a difficult one: a recent paper by Tom Daly highlights this in the context of Brazil.
There are no good answers. Legal remedies risk further polarisation, particularly in a context where the very idea of factual inquiry has been called into question. But sending a message that certain people are above the law is equally fraught. With hindsight, it’s easy to say that the Biden administration should have done things differently when it had the chance, but there is no guarantee that a different approach would not have made things worse.
The World is Not Enough 
It’s more than I can say, how natural this instinct is, but what I do know is that it’s a bad instinct.
It is unsurprising and predictable that (in general) the more powerful a person is, the less stringent the standards to which they are held, but that doesn’t change the fact that it should be the other way around: the more powerful somebody is, the more stringently their conduct should be evaluated and consequences applied.
LikeLike
Yes, that makes a lot of sense. But I think we need to acknowledge the downside – that if we get into the habit of prosecuting fallen leaders, we risk getting into a cycle of retaliation that poisons public life. Amnesty might be morally dubious, but sometimes it has practical advantages.
LikeLike