Casually dressed in a navy blue shirt, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro decided to close, at least a little, the Pandora's box that he opened last Sunday by not acknowledging his electoral defeat for more than 48 hours.
The long wait, and the constant coup winks over the last few months, was understood as an authorization for its radical bases to set up more than 800 roadblocks –trucks, cars and burning tires–.
"Do not think ill of me, (...) I am with you," said the defeated president. "But we are going to clear the roads," Bolsonaro added. Then he added: “Protest in another way; It is part of our democracy.”
In reality, the latest tactic in the president's Trumpist destabilization strategy was already being abandoned before the declaration. Several governors, as well as the powerful president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, Alexandre de Moraes, managed to scare the truckers and convince the Highway Police –infiltrated by Bolsonarists– to act more forcefully. This Thursday at noon, in Brazil, there were only about 80 blocks left.
"The elections ended democratically on Sunday," said Moraes, at a conference this Thursday in Brasilia. 124 million Brazilians voted – he explained – and the result was given quickly in just two hours, proof of the effectiveness of the electronic voting system that Bolsonaro has been questioning for months. “The overwhelming majority of voters democratically accept the result. Those who answer it with criminal movements will be fought with the full weight of the law”, he said.
Moraes has earned points in the last year for his aggressive defense of the rule of law. But, as the large Bolsonarista demonstrations made clear on Wednesday, many people do not accept the result and consider Moraes himself to be a dictator.
In the demonstrations, Bolsonaro's ambiguity was interpreted as a green light. “The president made it very clear; he will not admit that the thief gains power, ”said a Bolsonarista in Rio, referring to Lula. As with the Trumpists who stormed the Capitol in Washington in January 2021, there is an air of theater to the Bolsonarist protest. This protester was wearing a green and yellow wig and a Neymar shirt, and was smiling as he called for military intervention.
Beyond the feverish imagination of the Bolsonaristas –and of some foreign journalists– the possibility of a coup is almost zero. O Globo columnist Bela Megale quoted interlocutors from the Workers' Party (PT) who had consulted the military before the elections. The message: “We are going to respect the results of the elections but don't count on us to support (Lula's) campaign”. The old rule in Latin America is that support for a Washington coup is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a coup, and Joe Biden gets along very badly with Bolsonaro. After speaking with Lula on Wednesday, the US president announced yesterday that he will send Vice President Kamala Harris to Lula's inauguration on January 1.
To add a dose of soap opera to the theater, star actress Cássia Kis, who plays a manipulative executive in the new soap opera Travessia, knelt with a rosary at the coup protest in Rio and prayed that Lula would not be president. “If they have their Che Guevara, we have our Roberto Jefferson,” said another protester in Rio, referring to the former deputy who fired two grenades at federal police last week.
So that football would not be lacking, left-wing fans of clubs like Corinthians formed shock groups to dismantle the barricades shouting "Be careful, truckers!" There were few violent incidents, although several Bolsonaro protesters were run over in one of the roadblocks.
It should not be underestimated how many Brazilians share the mistrust of Lula. "The blockades are annoying, of course, but it is not easy to accept a thieving president," said a waitress in a restaurant in Minas Gerais. "People have to go to the street and break everything," interjected a kitchen assistant. Of course, the silent majority in Brazil is not from Bolsonaro. Lula's team does not plan to call demonstrations in defense of democracy, since it considers that the best option is to go ahead quickly with the transfer of power.
After winning the elections, Lula has gone to rest for three days on the beaches of Bahia, the most left-wing in Brazil. The job of agreeing on the transition with Congress is assumed by his vice president, the centrist and former rival Geraldo Alckmin.
But everything indicates that the PT has managed to agree with allies in Congress on an expansive budget with 200,000 million reais of spending necessary to face a serious humanitarian crisis, with more than 30 million starving. These quick measures of social support and Bolsonaro's inability to back up his calls with action are expected to dampen coup sentiment.
But the big demonstrations on Wednesday have aggravated the already palpable concern in the PT after the elections. Two or three months ago, a victory by 12 or 15 points was expected. But Lula won by less than two points. The latest protests "represent a strategic moment in the Bolsonarist mobilization that is already becoming a big problem for democracy," tweeted journalist Igor Mello, who was covering the coup rally in Rio. “They are not just radicals; there are a lot of normal people”.
Much of the political establishment and the mainstream media agree that a monster is growing. But few comment on a historical fact: that if Bolsonaro has finished opening Pandora's box in recent months, the first lifting of the lid was done precisely by these political and media powers. With the help of the politicized prosecutors of Judge Sérgio Moro, they criminalized the former president without evidence and dismissed former president Dilma Rousseff without justification. The Frankenstein will hardly be contained anymore.
