In Rio de Janeiro, I climbed a set of hilly, narrow streets to meet a 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.
The ambience made talking tricky, but Pereira wanted me to experience "the real Brazil" while I was visiting. I think 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 staked his career on: that the country's constitution works. That has potent lessons for other democracies, including the US.
Brazil and the United States are very different countries, of course. But they've recently faced similar threats to their democratic systems. In 2018, Brazil elected a Trump-like figure named Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist who rode into power on a wave of anti-incumbent sentiment.
In his first weeks in office, Bolsonaro moved to surveil NGOs, purge "disloyal" civil servants, and loosen gun restrictions. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he accelerated his authoritarian project, attacking the integrity of Brazilian elections and claiming dangerous vast emergency powers.
None of these tactics proved popular, however, and in October 2022, Brazilians voted Bolsonaro out. Not content to go quietly, he then attempted to recruit the country's military leaders into a coup. When that failed, his supporters mobbed the presidential palace, Congress and Supreme Court in an event that has drawn many, many comparisons to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
In Brazil, however — unlike in the US — Bolsonaro and his supporters faced a true reckoning for their attempts to overturn the election. Late last year, Bolsonaro was convicted of masterminding a conspiracy against Brazilian democracy and sentenced to 27 years in prison. (And even before that, Brazil's Congress and courts fiercely resisted Bolsonaro's attempts to seize more power for himself.)
On January 8, I attended Brazil's official commemoration of the riots three years earlier. The stage featured a giant photo of the Brasília skyline with the phrase "defesa da democracia" emblazoned on it. Geraldo Alckmin, now Brazil's vice president, claimed that voter's rejection of Bolsonaro 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 had marked its first anniversary of January 6 with Trump back in office — and, in a way, proved Alckmin's point. There were no solemn proclamations, nor even gestures toward respect for democracy. 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's important not to overstate Brazil's democratic stability; the country still faces serious threats. But its legislature and judiciary did successfully stand up to a would-be autocrat, where ours have been comparatively complicit.
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, reform would be to adopt a multiparty system like Brazil's, which fragments power across many factions and denies would-be strongmen the machinery they need to consolidate control. Brazil uses proportional representation: Each state has a set number of seats, allocated to different parties based on their percentage of the state popular vote. There are currently 20 parties in Brazil's Congress, making it one of the most fragmented legislative bodies in the world.
A second (and more pragmatic) set of reforms might focus on making Congressional politics less ideological. In the Brazilian system, legislators win reelection by providing tangible goods for their constituents, which means they don't need to stay loyal to a president or party leader to stay in power.
American legislators, on the other hand, depend on partisan primary voters and their party's national reputation to get elected. Electoral reforms that seek to make this process less ideological — by banning partisan gerrymandering, for instance, or nixing primary elections for Congressional seats — could give members of Congress incentives to stand up to a future Trump-like president.
These specific reforms are hardly exhaustive: They would not "fix" Congress, let alone the Supreme Court or other corroded institutions. 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 — sources of broad guidance, rather than rigid prescriptions. The good news is that, as Pereira has written, democracy can be surprisingly resilient.
Read Zack's full story here.
