Brazil and the United States have convergent and divergent trajectories regarding the relationship between democracy and the rise and contention of autocratic populist leaders. In both countries, leaders with this profile came to power—Donald Trump, in the United States, in 2017 (and again in 2025), and Jair Bolsonaro, in Brazil, between 2018 and 2022. This convergence, however, contrasts with the divergence in the response of political institutions, especially the Judiciary, to the attempts at democratic subversion undertaken by both.
In both cases, the leaders attempted to reverse unfavorable electoral results: Trump in 2021, with the January 06 episode, and Bolsonaro in 2023, with the January 08 invasion and vandalization of the “three powers square” in Brasilia. Neither succeeded in their coup attempts. However, the consequences were substantially different. In the United States, institutions failed to effectively punish former President Trump for his anti-democratic actions, allowing him to remain a central player in the political landscape. In Brazil, the Supreme Court adopted a more assertive stance, culminating in the conviction of former President Jair Bolsonaro, sentenced to 27 years and 3 months in prison for attempted coup d’état.
This article seeks to analyze these two processes from a comparative perspective. My objective is, first, to identify the main elements of coup attempts in Brazil; second, to discuss the forms of institutional response, with an emphasis on the role of the Judiciary; and, finally, to reflect on the impacts such responses have on the quality of democracy in each country.
Bolsonarism, Backsliding, and the Coup attempt
As Lucio Rennó and I argue in our recent book, The crisis of democracy in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro is a product of the deterioration of Brazilian democracy that began with the failure to recognize the 2014 election results by the defeated candidate, Aécio Neves, followed by an impeachment on shaky legal grounds in 2016, and then the election of a candidate who openly declared his desire to rehabilitate the legacy of the authoritarian period between 1964 and 1985. Bolsonaro has clashed repeatedly with the Supreme Federal Court, particularly with Justice Alexandre de Moraes, and even declared on September 7, 2021, that he would not obey Supreme Federal Court decisions. Unlike the United States, Brazil has an independent electoral authority, the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). All election results are sent to the court, which declares the final binding result. The president of the Electoral Court is a justice of the Supreme Federal Court, a position that rotates among the members of the Supreme Federal Court. Alexandre de Moraes, at that time a Supreme Court Justice and the president of the electoral court, declared the victory of opposition candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Jair Bolsonaro not only refused to recognize the election results but also began plotting a coup d’état by trying to declare a state of siege and annulling the election results. On December 6, 2022, Mauro Cid, then Jair Bolsonaro’s aide-de-camp, went to the Planalto Palace and, in the president’s office, met with General Mario Fernandes, a former commander of the special forces known as the “black kids.” The two arrived at the Planalto Palace at 5:45 p.m. and, a minute later, received the message “PR at the Palace.” As soon as Bolsonaro arrived, they printed a document titled “Green and Yellow Dagger.” Named “Fox_2017.docx,” the plot involved a conspiracy against democracy and the lives of three individuals: President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Vice President-elect Geraldo Alckmin, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The plan detailed a strategy for monitoring them and eventually assassinating them. According to the indictment filed by the prosecutor’s office.
According to the investigation carried out by the Federal Police and the Attorney General’s Office on December 15, a member of the coup group traveled from Goiânia to Brasília to carry out a plan to kidnap Minister Alexandre de Moraes. The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office also identified the movement of an official vehicle linked to the Commando Action Battalion to Brasília. At 8:42 PM, one of them sent a message to the group stating: “I’m in position.” The position was that of a sniper at Minister Moraes’s house with orders to assassinate him. At 8:43 PM, the sniper again asked the group: “What’s the procedure?” and the response was “Wait.” Shortly thereafter, at 8:57 p.m., he sent a message saying, “I’m close to the position, are you going to cancel the game?”, to which the response, at 8:59 p.m., was “abort… return to landing site.” This is how close Brazil was to a coup d’état.
During the constitutional process following Brazil’s democratization in the late 1980s, the Supreme Court acquired new prerogatives among them constitutional review which was enshrined in law; the power to review lawsuits from lower courts; and the role of a special court for political crimes committed by high-ranking officials. These three new attributions strengthened the court, especially after the onset of the political crisis in 2014. During the first year of his administration, Bolsonaro created the “hate cabinet,” a group of influencers who attacked democratic institutions from within the presidential palace. The Supreme Court opened an inquiry into “fake news” in 2019 and appointed the court’s youngest justice, Alexandre de Moraes, to lead it. Moraes immediately clashed with Bolsonaro and from then on became the regulator of the president’s actions. Two differences between Brazil and the United States come to mind: the first one is the stronger prerogatives of the Brazilian Supreme Court that associated with a law on defense of democracy gives it the leeway to decisively act for the defense of democracy. I would add that synthetic constitutions like the United States lack the capacity to defend democracy when the composition of the Supreme Court is unfavorable to progressive forces.
Jair Bolsonaro and 33 other people (mostly military) were tried for an attack on democracy based on a 2021 law he enacted and sentenced to 27 years and three months in prison. The trial played a role, highlighted by Hannah Arendt who in Eichmann and Jerusalem and later in “Thinking and Moral Considerations” and The Life of the Mind stressed the public role of the act of judging. The ability to “stop and think” that Arendt stressed allowed public discussions about what constitutes a coup attempt played an important role in Brazil. It was also historic that high-ranking military personnel, including two former defense ministers, were tried for the first time in over 60 years in a country that did not have transitional justice. In this sense, although Brazil remains divided, the cost of actions against democracy has increased whereas in the United States it has decreased. Thus, among the fundamental differences between Brazil and the United States, the first is the ability of the judiciary at its highest level to act against politicians who attack democracy due to the institutional design of the Brazilian Supreme Court. The shadow of Brazil’s recent authoritarian past allowed for a stronger reaction to the coup attempt than in the case of the United States.
