“Brazil’s society still doesn’t know how to handle what happened, there’s no consensus,” said Creomar de Souza, founder of political risk consultancy Dharma Politics. “Brazil’s society is now in extreme opposites. And parts of those opposites are in a place that they cannot reconcile with the other.”
Mimicking the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection by defenders of outgoing U.S. president Donald Trump at the Capitol in Washington, thousands of Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed the presidential palace, Congress and the Supreme Court buildings, in one of the biggest challenges to Latin America’s most populous democracy.
This kind of unrest feels like the end of democracy and the purpose of populist authoritarians.