The country that beat its Trump

BRASÍLIA, Brazil — André Borges’s aunt was pregnant when they took her.

Borges, now 50, grew up under Brazil’s military dictatorship. In power from 1964–1985, the regime was violently censorial — banning any speech it deemed subversive or leftist. Borges’s aunt was arrested simply for owning a book by a Marxist author. Unlike many others, her detention was brief; her father knew someone with pull in the regime, who made a phone call and got her released within a day.

Sitting in a left-wing bookshop in the capital city of Brasília, Borges tells me this story to underscore the fragility of Brazilian democracy. A political scientist who studies polarization and the Latin American right, he does not believe that Brazil has truly exorcised the demons of the past. The military is still uncomfortably involved in political life; as memory of the dictatorship recedes, citizens are increasingly oblivious to the danger.

But I had not come to Brazil to discuss its democracy’s vulnerabilities. Quite the opposite; I wanted Borges, and others like him, to help me understand why the Brazilian system proved far more capable than its American cousin at a paramount task: protecting democracy from a civilian president who wished to be dictator.

In 2018, Brazilian voters elected Jair Bolsonaro — a former military captain and congressional backbencher — to the presidency. An open admirer of the military regime, Bolsonaro ran as an outsider against a political class that Brazilians widely (and correctly) regard as deeply corrupt. Once in office, he pushed aggressively to consolidate power in his own hands. 

But while Bolsonaro’s efforts resembled what Donald Trump has done in his second term in the United States, the response from other branches was markedly different. 

While the US Congress and the Supreme Court have helped Trump build an imperial presidency, their Brazilian equivalents held the line. Center-right parties in Congress refused to rubber-stamp Bolsonaro’s power grabs. Brazil’s Supreme Court repeatedly blocked the president’s authoritarian moves, and led aggressive probes into crimes against democracy. 

Unable to accrue power through legal channels, Bolsonaro turned to the military, convening top generals in 2022 to discuss a coup. Yet the heads of the Air Force and the Army rebuffed him. When Bolsonaro’s hardcore supporters attempted a putsch on January 8, 2023 — an insurrection in Brasília deeply influenced by January 6, 2021 — the military did not join the uprising. After an extensive inquiry and trial, Bolsonaro and several key allies were sentenced to lengthy prison stints for the coup plot and subsequent riot.

On paper, the outcomes in the United States and Brazil should have been reversed. Democratic strength tends to track a democracy’s wealth and age — and the United States is both the world’s richest country and its oldest democracy. Brazil is a middle-income country that was governed by a military regime so recently that middle-aged citizens remember living under it.

And yet, when the test came, Brazil’s core democratic institutions — the legislature, courts, and federal agencies — defended democracy far better than their American peers. 

Why?

To find out, I spoke with all sorts of different Brazilians during my travels: from politicians and bureaucrats to journalists and political scientists, and even one of Bolsonaro’s longtime neighbors. 

What I found was a paradox: that some of the biggest problems in Brazil’s democracy, issues that fueled Bolsonaro’s rise in 2018, also made the system almost uniquely resistant to the tactics Trump is using in America today. 

“We certainly have weaker institutions than the US does,” said Pedro Doria, editor-in-chief of the Brazilian news outlet Meio. “But in a certain sense, our strength comes from the fact that our institutions are weak.” 

To learn Brazilian democracy’s lessons, we need to first sit with this tension. And we need to understand Brazil as it is: not as an idealized foil for America, but a real place in all its complexity. Only then can we identify how we can make America’s institutions as willing to fight for democracy as Brazil’s.

An unlikely success story

In Rio de Janeiro, I climbed a set of hilly, narrow streets to meet another well-known political scientist named Carlos Pereira for a drink.

He had described our destination as a music bar, but that did the place a disservice: It was more like a gigantic party that snaked across at least two blocks, with a small building housing the band stage at the center of it. It was hot in Rio, the peak of the mid-January summer, but people packed in anyway. A vegan brownie salesperson dressed up as a cannabis leaf roamed the crowd.

The ambience made talking tricky, but Pereira wanted me to experience “the real Brazil” while I was visiting. I think, though, he may also just have been in a partying mood — and I could see why. Brazil’s emergence from democratic crisis seems to have vindicated the argument he had staked his career on: that its constitution works.

When Brazil’s military dictatorship fell in 1985, the country elected a constitutional congress to build a new system from scratch. What they came up with, called the Citizen Constitution of 1988, was heavily modeled on the United States: a president, a bicameral Congress, and a federal system with 26 states and a federal district.

But the Chamber of Deputies, Brazil’s lower legislative body, is different from the US House. The US has local districts that elect representatives by a winner-take-all system: whoever gets the most votes wins. Brazil, by contrast, has proportional representation: Each state has a set number of seats, allocated to different parties based on their percentage of the state popular vote. 

While the US system encouraged consolidation into two parties, the Brazilian system allowed for many parties to win a slice of national power. All it took was a relatively small fraction of the vote in one state. There are currently 20 parties in the chamber, making it one of the most fragmented legislative bodies in the world. 

At the time, many American experts (and some prominent Brazilians) predicted disaster. With so many parties splitting seats, no president could hope to have a partisan majority in Congress. Instead, presidents would have to build coalitions and strike deals with out-parties, a system that seemed prone to legislative gridlock and even collapse.

“The combination of presidentialism and multipartism makes stable democracy difficult to sustain,” Scott Mainwaring, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, wrote in an influential 1993 article. “Not one of the world’s 31 stable democracies has this institutional configuration.”

But for the next 20 years, Brazil’s system flourished. Two historically successful presidencies — center-right Fernando Henrique Cardoso, followed by the first two terms of the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — tamed the country’s hyperinflation crisis and significantly expanded its welfare state. Between 1990 and 2010, Brazil’s GDP per capita grew by over 40 percent. By 2013, the country had formally eradicated extreme poverty.

Pereira was part of a generation of Brazilian political scientists who began their careers during Brazil’s stratospheric rise. In his view, the policy accomplishments under Cardoso and Lula were not in spite of its system but because of it.

In a 2012 article co-authored with Marcus André Melo, Pereira argued the key to Brazil’s system lay in the relationship between the president and Congress. Unlike in two-party systems, where presidents count on partisan loyalty to pass bills, presidents in multiparty democracies have to trade specific favors. Sometimes, this means appointing leaders of other parties to the Cabinet. Other times, it means using presidential powers to direct ungodly levels of pork-barrel spending to states represented by swing legislators.

Indeed, the dominant bloc in Congress is neither the ideological left aligned with Lula nor the radical right associated with Bolsonaro. It is instead something called the Centrão (Big Center): a loose group of parties that are center-right ideologically, but in practice willing to deal with any president who will help them secure pork funding and ignore their pervasive corruption.

Brazil thus replaced the American political logic of partisanship and ideology with self-interest and graft. Most deputies do not even aim to represent the general interest, but rather to secure enough pork for their constituents to ensure reelection. And the system encourages Brazil’s executive to overlook the endemic corruption in the legislature; without ideological votes, a push for anti-corruption campaigns will not only fail but also alienate the corrupt. 

Pereira and Melo acknowledged these downsides, but argued that they were not existential. The self-interested logic bound Brazilian leaders to the system, giving them a direct financial and careerist stake in maintaining democracy.

“We see a powerful presidency but also a potent web of watchdogs standing on guard to prevent wrongdoing,” they write. “All relevant political forces have found it best to keep submitting their interests and values to the uncertain interplay of democratic institutions.”

Soon after they wrote this, Brazil’s democracy would plunge into crisis.

Stopping Trumpism before it started

In 2014, Brazilian investigators uncovered shocking evidence of corruption at the highest levels of Brazilian politics. The multibillion-dollar “Lava Jato” scandal, one of the largest in the history of any democracy, implicated a vast swath of Brazil’s political, economic, and social elite — producing the greatest period of turmoil since the dictatorship fell. 

President Dilma Rousseff, a former anti-dictatorship guerrilla and Lula’s chosen successor in the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), was impeached in 2016 for alleged financial improprieties unrelated to the investigation. Her vice president, the center-right Michel Temer, was criminally charged as part of Lava Jato in 2017. Lula was arrested and convicted on (extremely dubious) corruption charges in 2017 as well; when he tried to run for president again in 2018 from prison, the courts blocked him.

All of this played out during a major economic downturn. Together, they caused an explosion of anti-incumbent sentiment in much the same manner as the twin shocks of inflation and revelations about President Joe Biden’s age did in 2024.

Thus, what Pereira and Melo identified as the glue holding Brazilian democracy — the transactional character of its legislators — set the stage for the rise of a would-be autocrat.

In early 2018, reporter Ana Clara Costa spent roughly two months with Jair Bolsonaro on the campaign trail. When we met for coffee in Rio, Costa summarized her impressions of the man during those months in three words: “He was insane.”

“Everything he said was so narrow-minded…it was very much based on conspiracy theories, things that were trending on Facebook,” she recalls. “I thought he was [playing] a character, but…the character was what he was 24/7.”

Bolsonaro’s public record certainly supported her claims. He made no secret of his nostalgia for military dictatorship: When he voted to impeach Rousseff, he dedicated his vote to the army colonel who supervised her torture in the 1970s. Once, he told a female legislator that “I wouldn’t rape you because you don’t deserve it.” Another time, he told an interviewer that given the choice between one of his sons coming out as gay or dying, he’d prefer the latter.

Yet in an anti-incumbent moment, none of this was disqualifying — and perhaps even helped by situating him well outside the “normal” political elite. He won the 2018 election handily. 

When Bolsonaro assumed office in January 2019, he had many of the same advantages as Trump did in 2025. Both men began with relatively high favorability numbers, owing to the combination of a rabid base and anti-establishment sentiment among swing voters. Both had a legislature with a center-right majority. 

And both sought to take advantage in the same way: wielding presidential authority aggressively to consolidate power.

In his first weeks, Bolsonaro used the expansive formal powers of his office — including provisional decrees, which are like executive orders with the legal status of a law — to surveil NGOs, purge “disloyal” civil servants, and loosen gun restrictions. His moves pushed the boundaries of presidential power, cutting into authority rightly reserved for Congress.

“Bolsonaro, he’s not a politician in the common sense,” Thomas Traumann, the former minister of communications under Rousseff, said. “He doesn’t like to talk to people and negotiate; he just wants to issue orders.”

In the United States, Trump’s version — which was significantly more aggressive and legally dubious — faced little pushback from Congress. But in Brazil, legislators immediately fought back. 

Congress passed a law stripping Bolsonaro of the power to surveil NGOs. It blocked efforts to expand the number of fireable civil servants. And it reversed his effort to seize control over gun policy.

This congressional assertiveness wasn’t just an early-days phenomenon. According to data from Pereira and Melo, Bolsonaro issued 254 provisional decrees — by far the most any Brazilian president issued in a four-year term. Yet these decrees require congressional approval to remain in force, and the institution only provided it in 115 cases. This was the worst success rate of any president to serve a full term; in fact, he was the only such president who had fewer than 50 percent of their decrees approved by Congress.

Similarly, Congress voted to override a Bolsonaro veto on legislation 30 times over the course of his presidency. By comparison, the four prior presidents — stretching back to 1995 — had a total of nine vetoes overridden.

The evidence leaves little doubt that Bolsonaro would like to have acted as Trump has done in his second term. But unlike in the United States, legislators bristled at Bolsonaro’s efforts to arrogate lawmaking powers to himself. In effect, they stopped the rise of the imperial presidency before it started.

This resistance was, much like the Bolsonaro presidency itself, a product of the deep logic of the Brazilian system.

In the American two-party system, the entire right-wing ecosystem ran through the Republican Party — an organ that Trump controlled. Those center-right Republicans in Congress who have private qualms about Trump’s authoritarian politics do not, for the most part, dare criticize him publicly: They are too afraid for their jobs, social standing, and potentially even their lives. Many of them have acted like what the political scientist Juan Linz called “semi-loyal democrats”: people who pay lip service to democratic ideals, but act in a way that encourages and even normalizes the radicals.

Brazil’s multiparty system meant that Bolsonaro had no such control. Legislators had independent political support bases, and could win reelection without backing from the president. 

Even more fundamentally, the self-interested logic that ran through the system gave center-right Centrão deputies incentives to actively defend the powers of their branch. 

The Centrão cooperated with Bolsonaro when it suited them — he pushed through a major pension reform bill with their support in 2019. But they drew the line at his attempts to build an imperial presidency. The more power he got, the more threat he posed to their narrow interests. And Bolsonaro needed their support more than they needed his. 

So from very early on, Brazil had the reverse institutional logic of the United States under Trump II: a center-right Congress calling the shots in a far-right administration.

“It’s very clear to me that Bolsonaro [wanted to be] a populist president who slowly undermines checks and balances,” Borges said. “But this wouldn’t be good for the old-style, traditional mainstream right. For them, it would be much better to have a weak president.”

The Supreme Court strikes back

About a year into Bolsonaro’s presidency, he faced his first major crisis: the coronavirus pandemic. And by all accounts, he botched it. His extreme opposition to both social distancing and vaccines, together with his embrace of crank cures like hydroxychloroquine, led to both mass death and a collapse in his poll numbers. 

At the same time, Bolsonaro also became more and more openly authoritarian. At the beginning of the pandemic, he asserted an emergency power to ignore the requirement that Congress approve provisional decrees — effectively asking to be able to make law unilaterally. He arrested critics of his Covid policy using a dictatorship-era national security law, and launched eight times as many investigations under this law per year than the average under prior presidents. He moved repeatedly to block the work of government transparency watchdogs and nominated his hyperloyal chief bodyguard to run the national police.

Perhaps most ominously, he began a sustained attack on the integrity of Brazil’s elections, calling the country’s electronic voting system corrupt and trying to move to a paper system. On Election Day 2022, he sent federal police officers to obstruct access to polling stations in the opposition’s core territory in Brazil’s northeast.

Once again, institutions pushed back. Congress had acquired even greater say over Bolsonaro at this point: Facing Covid-related impeachment threats, he was obliged to strike a formal coalition deal with Centrão parties, ceding key control over the legislative agenda and the budget. Congress was able to both repeal the national security law and block the voting changes. 

But it was Brazil’s judiciary that ultimately took center stage in the pushback against Bolsonaro. The country’s highest court blocked his provisional decree power grab, overturned his anti-transparency moves, stopped his crony police appointment, and moved within hours to remove roadblocks at polling stations.

The Brazilian Supreme Federal Court did not merely respond to Bolsonaro’s actions, but went on the legal offensive. In 2019, the Court asserted a novel power to open an investigation into threats made against judges by Bolsonaro allies and supporters. This unprecedented court-ordered inquiry spiraled into a wide-ranging investigation into “fake news” and anti-democratic activity led by Justice Alexandre de Moraes, a center-right former prosecutor who would, in 2022, take on a dual role as president of Brazil’s highest court for electoral matters (the Superior Electoral Court).

With backing from other justices, Moraes wielded his powers aggressively — emerging as the most effective and ruthless opponent of Bolsonaro’s power grabs.

The president repeatedly tried to challenge court authority. In 2021, for example, he turned out hundreds of thousands of supporters for rallies on Brazil’s Independence Day in which he openly promised to ignore Supreme Court rulings. But the political blowback was severe; two days after the rally, he released a humiliating public letter apologizing for things he said “in the heat of the moment.”

The judicial offensive against Bolsonaro was hardly a given. If you looked at the Court’s pre-Bolsonaro record, you might have predicted something like what happened in the United States: ideologically aligned justices greenlighting a president’s power grabs. 

“The supreme court was heavily divided ideologically prior to Bolsonaro,” said Celso Rocha de Barros, a columnist at Folha de São Paulo (Brazil’s New York Times equivalent). “If you look at the two guys with the highest legal reputations, Gilmar Mendes and Luís Roberto Barroso, they hated each other. If you look for it on YouTube, there’s video of them cursing at each other during Supreme Court sessions.”

But the clearer Bolsonaro’s authoritarian agenda became, the more united the Court grew in opposing him. 

So here we have a puzzle: Why did Brazil’s seemingly politicized Supreme Court manage to unite in defense of democracy in a way that SCOTUS demonstrably has not?

Once again, the multiparty system is a big part of the story. As in the United States, Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Except in Brazil, the Senate has members from roughly a dozen parties — meaning that presidents would never have the majority required to approve a true rubber-stamp justice.

“In Brazil, the Supreme Court is not partisan because you don’t have this two-party system,” said Christian Lynch, a prominent Brazilian legal theorist. “You can’t nominate a judge who is going to be loyal to you as a person, the president.”

But Lynch cautions against reducing the Court’s behavior to a simple mechanistic model, in which multipartyism guarantees good judicial behavior. There was an element of choice here: a decision by the justices to push back against Bolsonaro’s attempts to consolidate power in his own hands. 

This choice, he believes, reflects the post-dictatorship ideology of the Brazilian judiciary. Judges saw their role as not just adjudicating criminal cases, or even disputes between the branches, but rather as guarantors of the new democratic order. The Court’s expansive powers, in their view, can and should be wielded aggressively to both ensure democracy’s survival and promote its health.

From this perspective, the aggressive prosecution of corrupt politicians in the 2010s and the pushback against Bolsonaro in the 2020s reflected the same judicial approach: a self-confidence in its unique role as democracy’s guardians. Though the facts of the corruption cases split the justices, and the Bolsonaro situation united them, the ideological logic that governed rulings in both cases was similar.

The justices said as much, both in private and in public. In a remarkable April 2022 essay, then-Justice Luís Roberto Barroso openly positioned the Court as a bulwark against what he called an “institutional coup” by Bolsonaro, describing a court once divided on corruption cases but now “joined in the defense of democracy.” This was, he argued, necessary: Courts play a “decisive” role in resisting authoritarian presidents, and must proactively choose to resist them.

Tellingly, Barroso’s essay omits any praise for Congress. In fact, he writes that the Centrão is “allied” with Bolsonaro, describing the faction as being “renowned for its voracity for political offices and public funds.”

This rhetoric reflects another aspect of the court’s ideology, and of the Brazilian democratic paradox more broadly. Though Congress’s performance during Bolsonaro’s term is impressive from an American perspective, the Court mistrusted such a cynical and self-interested body. Here, the weakness of the system indirectly generated another strength: the problems in the legislature emboldening the Supreme Court to shoulder a greater amount of the burden of democratic defense than it might have been expected to.

“Now the judiciary is the ringleader in a process of defending democracy, when it is no longer the legislative branch, which should be,” says Tião Viana, a former senator and governor from Lula’s left-wing PT party. “Alexandre de Moraes is the expression of this.”

The mysterious non-coup

In October 2022, Brazilian voters delivered the greatest rebuke to Bolsonaro yet: denying him a second term in office. The election was closer than expected: Lula won in a second-round runoff with just 50.9 percent of the popular vote, the slimmest margin of victory of any president in Brazilian history. Support from the center-right was decisive: Some of Lula’s prominent rivals, like Geraldo Alckmin and Simone Tebet, backed the leftist on defense-of-democracy grounds.

When Lula’s victory was announced, nearly everyone in Brazilian politics immediately accepted the results. The exception, of course, was Bolsonaro. He started plotting a coup.

On December 7, the president met with his minister of defense and the heads of each branch of the military. Bolsonaro presented them with a draft of an order that would declare a state of emergency, annul Lula’s victory, and place Justice Alexandre de Moraes under arrest. While the head of the Navy signed on, both the Air Force and Army leaders refused. But they did not notify Moraes or the police — nor did they do so after a second meeting a week later, where Bolsonaro’s team again pitched them on the coup plan.

Stonewalled by top generals, Bolsonaro began plotting with some lower-ranked ones. At the same time, his supporters set up an encampment outside the army barracks in Brasília — and, on January 8, the mob swarmed the presidential palace, the Congress, and the Supreme Court simultaneously.

The attack was clearly shaped by the events of January 6, 2021. But instead of intending to convince members of Congress to vote to annul the election, the demonstrators were hoping to inspire the military to follow them out of the barracks and into the halls of power. 

They were disappointed. Though the governor of the Federal District (DF), the state in which Brasília is located, was a Bolsonaro supporter who delayed deploying local police, Moraes stepped in swiftly — suspending the governor’s authority and ordering a deployment to quash the riot.

In the months following, the justice — backed fully by his colleagues and the newly inaugurated President Lula da Silva— launched a sweeping investigation that uncovered the true scope of the coup plot. We know much of what we know about the plot thanks to depositions from the Army and Air Force chiefs, both of whom testified as part of the Moraes-ordered inquiry.

The evidence was damning enough to secure indictments for Bolsonaro, his former vice president, his defense secretary, and dozens of other generals and aligned officials. Late last year, Bolsonaro and his allies were convicted of masterminding a conspiracy against Brazilian democracy. He was sentenced to 27 years in prison and is currently serving time; a separate electoral court ruling, in 2023, had already disqualified him from running for public office until 2030.

The Bolsonaro inquiry has become the signature moment for the courts: the definitive example of both its vital role in safeguarding democracy and the damage it did to democratic freedom along the way.

From an American point of view, it’s hard not to be jealous of a country where a former president incited an insurrection and actually suffered consequences for it. But in the pursuit of accountability, Moraes asserted extraordinary powers — including authority to suspend the DF governor and imprison people without trial if they made violent threats on social media. He both led the investigation into Bolsonaro and served as the presiding judge in the trial. 

Even some supporters of Moraes’s actions, like Meio’s Pedro Doria, describe his actions as a kind of democratic chemotherapy: necessary to defeat the cancerous coup plot, but with dangerous side effects that Brazilians now must reckon with.

Moraes’s approach was one “that involves weak institutions, that involves constitutional hardball playing, and that involves a system that’s not a full-fledged liberal democracy,” Doria said. “But for the first time in our history, we survived to live another day, and we have a shot at getting this right in the next decades.”

As Brazilians still debate the benefits and risks of Moraes’s growing power, they also contemplate another unsettling question: Why did the coup fail in the first place?

This can’t be credited to other institutional actors: Neither Congress nor the courts knew about the full scope of Bolsonaro’s plans until Moraes’s post-facto inquiry. The decision depended entirely on choices made by the Brazilian brass, which had in the past been relatively supportive of Bolsonaro. The military all but openly backed his 2018 bid, and his administration was staffed top to bottom with soldiers who dutifully carried out his orders (however questionable).

“The military themselves, they don’t have democratic convictions,” said Adriana Marques, a political scientist who studies civil-military relations in Brazil. “The military in the government used to say that Bolsonaro won the election, so he can do what he wants to do [without limits].”

No one knows for sure why the military made the choices they did. The officers’ stony commitment to public silence makes their true intentions hard to divine. In Brasília, I was scheduled to meet with an admiral to discuss all of this. At the last minute, he dropped out — citing an alleged family emergency.

The best theory I’ve heard, advanced by Marques and others, is that their decision reflected not democratic principle but cost-benefit analysis. The generals simply had little to gain from backing Bolsonaro’s coup, and would be risking quite a lot in doing so.

Without consolidated elite support, and with the notion of a coup deeply unpopular with the public, the military would have had a very difficult time consolidating control over the country without risking chaos, economic upheaval, and even mass death.

Moreover, the Biden administration had sent very clear signals that it wouldn’t tolerate a coup. Given the Brazilian military’s heavy dependence on the United States for training and advanced weapon systems, the specter of an aid cutoff from Washington was a powerful deterrent.

These are, to be clear, narrowly practical reasons to reject Bolsonaro’s plan. Few informed people I met in Brazil believed the military had truly come to believe in civilian rule as a matter of principle. 

In the United States, by contrast, there is a very long tradition of the military keeping out of civilian affairs. But at present, there is a live debate over whether Trump will order security services to interfere with voting during the midterm elections.

What choice will they make, if faced with a similar test to their Brazilian counterparts?

Brasília on the Potomac

On January 8, I attended the president’s official commemoration of the riots three years earlier. Standing in a hall in the presidential offices, I spotted politicians chatting with uniformed generals behind velvet ropes — their very presence, seemingly, a reassurance that the coup plot had been contained.

The stage featured a giant photo of the Brasília skyline, such as it is, with the phrase “defesa da democracia” emblazoned on it. Geraldo Alckmin, now well into his term as Lula’s vice president, claimed that their victory saved Brazilian democracy.

“If they attempted a coup d’état after losing the elections, imagine what they would have done if they had won the elections,” he said.

Two days earlier, Washington marked its first anniversary of January 6 with Trump back in office — and, in a way, proved Alckmin’s point.

There were no solemn presidential proclamations marking the day, as there had been under Biden, nor even the vaguest of gestures toward respect for democracy from the president. Instead, a group of rioters who had ransacked the Capitol, pardoned by Trump immediately on his return to power, reenacted January 6 by marching from the White House to the Capitol.

It is important not to overstate Brazil’s democratic stability, even in comparison. Its weaknesses were on display even at Lula’s January 8 event. The crowds were sparse, illustrating the minimal role the public played in democracy’s defense. There were no actions during Bolsonaro’s term comparable to the No Kings protests or Minneapolis anti-ICE resistance.

Even more tellingly, the event’s centerpiece moment was a staged veto of a bill that would overrule court sentences for roughly 1,000 people convicted of coup-related crimes. The legislation, which would slash Bolsonaro’s sentence from 27 years to two, may still become law if the Centrão joins with Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress to support an override — a clear illustration of how the elite self-interest that helped stiffen resistance to Bolsonaro’s power grabs can just as easily turn against democratic accountability when circumstances change.

There is also a presidential election in the fall. While Bolsonaro is disqualified, his son Flávio is looking likely to be Lula’s chief rival. Lula is ahead in the polls currently, but his lead is not insurmountable — and the president turned 80 in October.

But these are problems that many Americans wish they had. It would be better if Congress acted as the first line of defense, resisting Trump’s power grabs before things got so bad that ordinary citizens needed to put their literal lives on the line. And it would be better if the US Supreme Court was not so deferential to the Trump administration, but so militantly pro-democratic that the concern was not complicity but rather overreaction.

So if we wanted to learn from Brazil — to think about how we could repair our system so, in the future, it might be as resilient as theirs — what lessons could we take away?

The first, and most obvious, would be to try to create a multiparty system. 

This is certainly consistent with Pereira and Melo’s takeaway. Their excellent postmortem on the Bolsonaro presidency, titled “Why didn’t Brazilian democracy die?” argues that the crisis during his presidency basically vindicates their prior claims about the virtues and stability of Brazil’s multiparty system. And indeed, the international expert view on multiparty presidentialism has shifted quite far in their direction. 

In a 2023 paper published by Protect Democracy, Scott Mainwaring — the American political scientist once so skeptical of Brazilian-style systems — conceded that he had gotten it wrong. He and his co-author, Lee Drutman, argued that the United States should move to a multiparty system — specifically, by adopting Brazilian-style proportional elections for the House that would provide safeguards against democratic erosion. They write:

Comparative evidence suggests that presidential democracy is most likely to fail when the president’s party has a majority in both chambers of the national Congress. A moderate multiparty system would likely induce most presidents to govern more toward the center so as to be able to pass legislation.

The Brazilian case certainly provides real evidence for these conclusions. If the political stars align for something like it, I’d support it — but that likely won’t happen anytime soon. So, is there any way to adopt Brazilian-style safeguards against authoritarianism in the meantime?

There is — but we have to shift our focus from structures to incentives.

Brazilian legislators win reelection by providing tangible goods for their constituents. American legislators depend on highly partisan primary voters and the national reputation of their party.

The Brazilian system has problems: It promotes wasteful spending and outright graft. But the American system has bigger ones: It creates ideologically disciplined parties whose members are terrified of bucking an in-party president. This is why a Republican Congress and a Supreme Court confirmed by GOP majorities are so much more supine in the face of Trump than their Brazilian peers.

To Brazilianize the US political system, then, we need to think of specific ways to change the incentives for legislators: to make politics less ideological, and more tied to place and specific deliverables for constituents. 

On the electoral front, this might involve a national ban on partisan gerrymandering (which nearly became law during the Biden presidency) and the reform, or ideally abolition, of legislative primary elections (a corrosive American practice with no real peers elsewhere). These two reforms, when put together, would increase the number of representatives in both parties who were responsive to more mainstream electorates — creating incentives for a Brazilian-style culture of dealmaking rather than pure partisanship.

America should also take inspiration from Brazil’s approach to congressional oversight. Currently, Congress has no formal role in approving or rejecting executive orders, allowing members of a president’s party to easily deflect accountability for power grabs by saying it’s out of their hands. But if the United States adopted a version of the Brazilian provisional decree system, mandating that executive orders expire within a set number of days absent affirmative congressional approval, members of a president’s party could be held more directly responsible for White House actions — giving purple-state legislators more incentives to buck the party.

These specific reforms are hardly exhaustive: They would not fully “fix” Congress, let alone the Supreme Court or corroded institutions like the Department of Justice. But no study of another country will yield a single reform idea that saves American democracy on its own. Foreign models are best seen as rough templates, not strict blueprints — sources of broad guidance, rather than rigid prescriptions.

And the most valuable insight from Brazil is not that its specific system is the best possible, but rather that its operating logic — its ability to bind political actors to democracy through self-interest and incentives — was incredibly effective at hemming in a would-be authoritarian. American reformers need to start reflecting on that lesson and designing policies that work in our context (with an eye toward not replicating Brazil’s corruption problem).

I believe that Americans will soon have an opportunity to put this into practice. Trump’s authoritarian project will likely fail as Bolsonaro’s did, albeit for very different reasons. Its failure should create an opening to build new barriers against any future president who tries to replicate his unilateral rule.

In that future, we had best be humble enough to learn from younger democracies like Brazil — places that, as of late, have much better democratic recent track records than our own.

This story was supported by a grant from Protect Democracy. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.