On the rubble of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk created the Turkish republic in which, above the powers of the rule of law, the military were located. If the army considered that a ruler was inadequate for the ideological and cultural parameters of Ataturkism, it had the power to remove him. In 1960 the military overthrew President Celal Bayar and executed Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. In 1971 they overthrew Suleiman Demirel and in the following decades there were three more riots.
The model that places the army above the powers of the republic and gives it the right to overthrow presidents is the one that he has proposed throughout his political life. Jair Bolsonaro. For this reason, while still presiding over a rule of law, he repeatedly urged the military to intervene against Congress and against the Judiciary. And when he lost the election, he first personally tried to find soldiers willing to kick the institutional chessboard so as not to hand over power to Lula, and then he excited crowds of supporters to go, literally, to “knock on the door of the barracks.”
The first follows from disturbing silence that he maintained after confirming his defeat, while the latter occurred in full view of the world. The problem is that not everyone is willing to see what is in sight.
As at the time HHitler, Mussolini, Mao and Pol Pot, among others, the new authoritarian messianism has the power to convert important portions of society into sects. The masses stop seeing the reality that exists before their eyes, because they see the reality that the leader describes to them. It does not matter how far that subjective reality is from the reality that exists objectively. The messianic leader gets his followers to see what he describes, and what he describes is what they want to see.
From those crowds come fanatics who attack with violence rhetoric to those who describe the real reality; that which exists objectively before the eyes of whoever wants to see it. For the sectarian, describing the real reality is something that can only be done cunningly, because it is in the service of an evil plan. In the case of Brazilian ultra-conservatism, the plan they seek to conjure is “the destruction of the family, property and God”.
There is also messianic leadership on the left. The reality of Venezuela is visible to all, the country that went from being an insular democracy in a sea of military dictatorships and having immense natural wealth, to suffering from an obtuse and repressive dictatorship that caused calamities and a diaspora of biblical dimensions. But what leftism turned into a sect sees is heroic leadership confronting imperialism bent on impoverishing Venezuelans.
In the United States, the election that lost took place before the eyes of the North Americans and the world. donald trump, who has been denouncing fraud since polls showed he could be beaten. He continued to denounce fraud while pressuring state governments to change the counts, that is, while trying to perpetrate fraud.
He eventually launched a mob against the Capitol, causing five deaths in that violent attempt to destroy the electoral process. Yet even today there are millions of Trumpists convinced that Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent.
Everyone can see that in Brazil there was an impeccable election in which the president lost to a coalition that ranges from the center-right to the center-left. Nevertheless, Millions of Bolsonarists Demand a Coup from the Military because they believe that there was an “unfair electoral process” to convert the South American giant into a communist country.
On the left and on the right, messianic leaders appear who turn crowds into lunatic sects that describe parallel realities and fiercely attack on the networks anyone who dares to describe the visible reality. In Brazil, the new sectarianism is ultraconservative and launched crowds to pressure the Army to stage a coup to prevent compliance with the mandate of the polls. In the 20th century, to describe the fact that civil sectors favored coups, the image “banging on the door of the barracks” was used. That was the metaphor about contacts being made in secret.
In Brazil, that metaphor materialized when thousands of Bolsonarists gathered in front of several barracks to ask the military to prevent Lula from assuming the presidency. The world saw these crowds “banging on the doors of the barracks.” He heard them claim “a federal intervention”, an absurd substitute for a coup d’état. This is what the president may have requested, by telephone, when he locked himself in the Palacio de la Alborada and maintained a disturbing silence for almost two whole days.
That after the scrutiny that showed his defeat, Bolsonaro tried to contact soldiers willing to carry out a coup, is a logical deduction, but not evidence. The dark ambiguity of the very brief statement with which he ended that silence suggests that he did so. And they seem to confirm it the pickets in front of the barracks. Those crowds that explicitly demanded a coup d’état so that the candidate who won the election does not take office, is not an inference, it is a visible and audible reality.
Now, Bolsonaro had the coup attitude, not his government. During the long hours of silence after the vote, many pro-government legislators and high-ranking members of the government and its political coalition opposed the conspiracy. That is why Hamilton Mourao, the military man who holds the vice presidency, came out to acknowledge the result and communicate with the vice president-elect. Gerald Alckmin to agree on the transition.
The trickle of pro-government legislators and officials who appeared acknowledging the result while their boss maintained a threatening silence shows that the pro-government political space did not want to join the coup plan either. What these public pronouncements did was put pressure on Bolsonaro to accept the result.
Under that pressure from his own leaders, officials and legislators, the president had to do what he did not want to do: publicly pronounce on the electoral act that he lost. But to leave open a possibility of kick the boardread the ambiguous and obscure statement, visibly calculated not to deactivate, but to encourage, the protests of the multitudes who demanded a coup.
