Lula moves to defuse extreme protests after farcical riot

As if more evidence was required, Sunday’s riot in Brasília by supporters of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro highlighted once again the nefarious influence Donald Trump has had on domestic politics in Brazil.

In a conscious imitation of the storming of the US Capitol two years ago, a hoard clad in Brazil’s famous yellow football top invaded and trashed the presidential palace, congress and supreme court in an attempt to overturn last year’s election result, in which former left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Bolsonaro.

To the former army captain’s supporters, many of whom also revere Trump, Lula’s victory was illegitimate and his swearing in on New Year’s Day a fatal step on the road to a communist dictatorship. But despite their neuralgic reaction to all things leftist, the mob’s behaviour on Sunday only reinforced Karl Marx’s dictum that history repeats itself as farce.

Trump’s supporters at least made their move in a bid to halt the transfer of power. Their Brazilian imitators left it until a week after it was completed, with Lula’s administration already occupying the heights of the state apparatus while Bolsonaro himself continued his long sulk since his defeat last October at the Florida home of a retired mixed martial arts fighter.

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Within a few hours that did nothing good for Brazil’s image abroad the riot had petered out and over 1,000 of those involved have since been arrested. Mixed in with the domestic reaction of shock and anger is a strong current of embarrassment. For months the increasingly delusional Bolsonaro supporters camped out in front of army bases calling – and at times praying – for a military coup to overturn the election result have been the butt of the country’s comedians. But Sunday was pushing their political pantomime too far.

The Lula administration and the supreme court clearly think so. Both have seized on the riot and the show of unity it has provoked across the political spectrum as a chance to finally clear the camps. These had become the focus point of political disorder. There had been a trial run to Sunday’s chaos in the capital last month when radicals marked congress’ formal certification of Lula’s victory with acts of vandalism. As happened with previous law breaking, the failure to crack down properly only invited further trouble from a fringe increasingly operating in parallel reality dominated by cranky conspiracy theorists.

But after Sunday’s events there is no longer a need to debate how to close the camps without inflaming the situation further or treading on the sensitivities of the armed forces, who have been equivocal about the protesters. The mass arrests and vows to prosecute those involved in the riot and to go after the organisers and roll up their financiers mark a shift in approach towards the radicals.

Constitutionally the most significant demonstration of this is the move by the federal government to seize control of the administration in charge of the federal district around Brasília, which was in the hands of allies of the former president. The capital’s police were woefully ineffective as events unfolded on Sunday. An investigation is to discover whether this was operational incompetence or perhaps criminally prosecutable leniency.

The police were under the command of Anderson Torres, Bolsonaro’s former justice minister and a member of his family’s inner circle who had taken up the post of Brasília’s secretary of public security only on Monday of last week. He has now been removed from his position and faces possible arrest while swearing he knew nothing of the planned protests.

Curiously he happened to find himself in the US on holidays as the riot unfolded, with Brazilian media locating him in Orlando. He denied he had met with Bolsonaro there. An investigation into Torres’ activities might also clear up how much involvement – if any – Bolsonaro had in Sunday’s farce, even from Florida where he has been conveniently located since losing his immunity from prosecution in Brazil.