Will Brazil have its own Jan. 6 crisis?

It is no secret that Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s role model in politics is former U.S. president Donald Trump. Like Trump, Bolsonaro spent most of his term warning about election fraud, including the election he won. Like Trump, Bolsonaro is an incumbent president whose highly divisive politics put him behind in the polls, in the uncommon and uncomfortable spot of not being the favorite to win the election against a well-known challenger.

In the long history of U.S. democracy, incumbent presidents occasionally have failed to be reelected, but in Brazil — since reelection was established in 1997 — never has a present failed to win reelection. So, like his U.S. role model, incumbent Bolsonaro has said he will only accept the results of the upcoming elections on Sunday if he is reelected.

Both Trump and Bolsonaro are right-wing populists and wannabe authoritarians who came from the fringes of the political system and whose election, once considered unimaginable, was in part enabled by a unique use of social media to explore a toxic and highly polarized political environment.

Like Trump, Bolsonaro did not become more “presidential” once elected; instead, he spent his term exhibiting no concern to broaden his strong and often fanatical political base.

As Brazilians prepare for the run-off election on Sunday between Bolsonaro and former president Lula da Silva, it is undeniable that Bolsonaro is following Trump’s playbook. Given the striking similarities between the original Trump and the so-called “Trump of the tropics,” it is no wonder that many political commentators and even some officials are concerned that Brazil may have its own Jan. 6.

Still, while the similarities are striking, a few critical differences are worth mentioning. If a Jan. 6 is about to happen in Brazil, we should understand these differences to evaluate whether the consequences of such an event would be any different.

First, Trump and Bolsonaro come from very different personal perspectives. Trump is both a real estate mogul and an entertainer who had never held elected office before sitting in the Oval Office. Bolsonaro, on the other hand, had been a somewhat irrelevant member of the Brazilian House of Representatives for almost three decades by the time he was elected president.

Coming from the military ranks — a role Trump avoided and reportedly fails to understand — Bolsonaro was never comfortable with the deliberative and horizontal environment that characterizes the legislative branch, which may explain his incredibly low productivity as a representative from the State of Rio de Janeiro in Congress.

Unlike Trump, who is more a pragmatist than an ideologue, Bolsonaro is more an ideologue than a pragmatist. While Trump, for example, described himself as “pro-choice” on abortion only to later present himself as a champion of “pro-life” for purely political gains, Bolsonaro has consistently been a defender of the kind of national conservatism Trump adopted later to become president. Bolsonaro has consistently been an outspoken opponent of abortion, same-sex marriage, and drug liberalization.

What do these personal characteristics mean regarding a possible Jan. 6 in Brazil? On the one hand, Bolsonaro’s lack of pragmatism may be a hurdle, as his current political base in Congress may act more realistically and abandon him if it becomes clear that he will lose the election. A lack of pragmatism is usually an obstacle for aspiring coup plotters. On the other hand, Bolsonaro may have something that Trump did not have: the military. Not only is Bolsonaro a former military officer, but he stacked key positions in his cabinet with army officers. His vice-president is no Mike Pence, but a retired army general.

This takes us to the second important difference between the two. Trump came to office as the 45^th president of the oldest democratic republic in the world, in a country with no history — apart from four years in the middle of the 19^th Century — of institutional breakdown. That makes it extremely difficult for any individual alone to destabilize the political system. As the House Jan. 6 Committee has made clear, members of the Trump administration consistently tried to convince the former president not to go forward with his election fraud claims and instead accept the results.

When Trump tried to pressure Mike Pence not to certify election results, the vice president ignored him and performed his constitutional duty.

On the other hand, Brazil’s constitution is 200 years younger than the U.S. Brazil has been a democracy for a little over three decades and has an extensive history of institutional breakdowns and military coups.

That means the relationship between Brazil’s armed forces and the country’s politics has been far from detached. The fact that Bolsonaro has stacked several positions in his administration with military officers is thus a reason for concern. Many of the generals who are now part of Bolsonaro’s cabinet were in the army when Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship. Some of them, like the president himself, do not hide their admiration for that period. That means that in the event of a Brazilian Jan. 6, Bolsonaro may hear very different advice compared to what Donald Trump was told in 2020.

Like the United States in 2020, Brazil faces a dilemma. Trump and Bolsonaro are not party leaders but leaders of a personalistic movement: Trumpism and Bolsonarismo.

While populist movements branded after a strongman in the United States are rather a novelty, Brazil is part of a larger Latin American tradition of “caudillos.” Some analysts argue that Bolsonaro’s reelection might put Brazil on the path of a gradual deterioration of its democracy, but his loss may lead to a more abrupt institutional breakdown.

The question is whether Brazil’s democratic institutions will be resilient enough to survive a crisis like the one the United States faced in 2020. This Sunday and in the days that follow, the world will find out.

Carlos Gustavo Poggio Teixeira is a professor of Political Science at Berea College in Kentucky. He received a Ph.D. in International Studies from Old Dominion University in Virginia as a Fulbright Scholar. He is the author of “Brazil, the United States, and the South American Subsystem: Regional Politics and the Absent Empire,” chosen by Foreign Affairs Magazine as one of the best International Relations books of 2012.