Sometimes history is full of contradictions. As the winds of democracy begin to blow, undermining autocracies in all corners of the world from Iran to China to Russia, two years after the attack on Washington’s Capitol Hill, in Brazil supporters have a different choice than Donald Trump, ie Jair, defeated by Bolsonaro, stormed into the halls of another parliament to challenge the result of the regular election. There was no doubt that an established democracy like America’s would have withstood the onslaught; in Brazil, on the other hand, it could have ended differently twenty years ago, but the population, the police and above all the army – apart from initial confusion – have shown that they have introjected the democratic spirit.
In an effort to see the glass half full, this is good news because South American democracies, traditionally thought of as fragile, appear to no longer be.
The half-empty glass, on the other hand, relates to another aspect that requires more general consideration. Indeed, it is somewhat simplistic and misleading to dismiss this affair as yet another sovereignist perversion. If by sovereignty we really mean putting the national interest above all else, then we fail to see how a sovereignist can challenge the will expressed by the people. The violent reactions against the parliaments that are temples of democracy tend to have authoritarian traits. Just think of the gesture made by Lieutenant Colonel Tejero in the Spanish Chamber of Deputies.
The question is therefore more complex and concerns the type of dialectic established within a democratic system: unfortunately, more and more often, the protagonists give in to the temptation to delegitimize the opponent, considering an electoral defeat almost as the emergence of a new regime. Such an attitude, reinforced by the use of social media, ends up triggering uncontrollable mechanisms that go beyond the intentions of the provocators. The democratic confrontation becomes the primal struggle and when playing with fire it is fatal that shamans and paramilitary uniforms appear. The more you tickle the worst moods in society, the bloodier the epilogue is likely to get. They are the boundaries of politics’ apprentices — from billionaire Trump to ex-military Bolsonaro — becoming sorcerers’ apprentices.
For this reason certain events should serve as a lesson. Here, too, the process of delegitimizing the opponent was frequent: Silvio Berlusconi was exposed to it for decades, and even in the last election campaign the Democratic Party incited the specter of fascism against Meloni.
Here too Parliament was surrounded by the Purple People and the Grillini.
Or smeared with paint like the activists of the last generation. The worst has not happened, but the fact remains that either Parliament is an untouchable temple for everyone because it represents the nation and the will of the people, or there is a danger of seeing images of Washington and Brasilia here too, always around the corner.