The slap.
Last Friday, Brazil’s electoral court compromised a possible return of populist Jair Bosolnaro to the helm of the country by sentencing him to eight years of ineligibility, due to the attacks and lies he has made against the electoral system. Brazilian during the last presidential campaign in this country.
A decision aimed at protecting Brazil’s young democracy, the justice said, and which could well mark the beginning of the end of impunity for populists for their “hateful disinformation”, in the words of the Brazilian judges, aimed at “arousing a state of collective paranoia” among the voters, to better establish their power.
In July 2022, 11 weeks before the first round of elections in Brazil, Bolsonaro summoned ambassadors from several countries to his official residence to publicly question, and baselessly, the reliability of Brazil’s electoral system.
The event was part of a sequence of attacks, taking up the scenario of Donald Trump in the United States, against democratic institutions, as a ballot approaching announced the victory of the left of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
This sequence culminated on January 8 with the attack on the presidential palace, the congress and the Supreme Court by millions of supporters of the radical in the hope of annulling the results, however legitimate, of the election.
There is certainly a strong and necessary message that attempts to overthrow the electoral system are no longer acceptable.
“We have to start being tougher on the populists, whether through justice or through the adoption of collective standards stating loud and clear what society tolerates and no longer tolerates from its political leaders”, comments Marc Froese, Director of International Studies at Burman University, joined by The duty in Alberta. “This decision is very important for the future of Brazilian democracy, especially since Bolsonaro is very close, in spirit, to Donald Trump, also addressing a loyal fanatic base”, with consequences as well harmful and unpredictable on the country’s democratic regime.
“There is certainly a strong and necessary message that attempts to overthrow the electoral system are no longer acceptable,” adds American jurist Samuel Issacharoff, professor of law at New York University. And it is a message which, by targeting Jair Bolsonaro, is also addressed to other “demagogues like Donald Trump” who “also poison democracy”, he adds.
Chance of the calendars: the decision of the Brazilian justice which has just cut short Bolsonaro’s electoral ambitions, at least until 2030 and on the eve of his 75th birthday, intervened barely a few hours before new revelations on the numerous attempts reversal of the result of the 2020 American elections by the former American president with an authoritarian leaning.
According to washington postthe former reality TV star sought to personally pressure Republican Arizona Governor Doug Ducey at the end of 2020 to annul the results of the presidential election in his state, by encouraging him to claim, without proof, that he had found enough fraudulent votes.
The daily quotes several people having witnessed the call and specifies that the special counsel of the Department of Justice, Jack Smith, would have contacted recently the entourage of Doug Ducey in connection with a meeting with donors where he was issue of this call. Other governors exposed to obsessive pressure from Trump in the aftermath of his defeat are also in the prosecutor’s line of sight.
Last June, in a landmark ruling, Smith filed 37 counts against Trump for his unlawful keeping of about 100 secret documents at his private residence in Mar-a-Lago. And his lack of cooperation with justice to restore them.
The populist is currently being hunted by the courts in Georgia for having tried to make voters appear there in his favor in 2020, in order to avoid defeat. He did so in a recorded call on January 2, 2021 with Georgian Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Punish to tame
“Even though Trump faces several large and serious cases and indictments, none of these cases, however, have the prospect of barring him from running for president in 2024 in the hope of re-election. commented political scientist Kurt Weyland of the University of Texas at Austin in an interview.
Unlike in Brazil, a criminal conviction in the United States does not lead to ineligibility, but can ironically and paradoxically lead to suspension of the right to vote in several states.
“Taming illiberal and anti-democratic populists cannot be done without state institutions being able to sanction and punish them when they refuse to play by the democratic rules of the game,” says Sheri Berman, professor of political science at the Columbia University, contacted by The duty in New York State. “The decision of the Brazilian Electoral Tribunal is therefore a very positive development for Brazil’s democracy. »
But, according to her, it is difficult to see how this decision could come to inspire American institutions to curb the antidemocratic ambitions of Donald Trump. “Here we are,” she said. American politics is so polarized that opinions about Trump and his actions are overwhelmingly driven mostly by partisanship, rather than an “objective” assessment of the threat he poses to American democracy. »
Since his last indictment, the ex-president’s popularity has fallen among the Republican electorate, but it still remains very high, at 60% in favor, against 68% just before his appearance before a judge. federal court in Florida, according to the latest probe from the NORC Institute on behalf of the Associated Press.
“Societies must use all the tools at their disposal to delegitimize populists and their politics,” says Marc Froese. Brazil has an electoral court. Canada and the United States do not have any, but they have other resources: the political parties, the first safeguard of liberal democracy, which must play their role by opposing them. And then, every citizen also has the personal responsibility to block the way to the undemocratic tyranny of populism, because when the authoritarians destroy our democracies, it is these same citizens who are the first victims.