This was originally the script of a video for The Long Answer YouTube channel. But as life got in the way, we decided to publish it here instead.

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You might have seen this in the media lately, he’s Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro.

He shares many similarities with Donald Trump, also a former president. But unlike Trump, who’s running for president this year and is likely to win, Bolsonaro was banned from running for any public office and might even face some jail time. In this post, we’re going to look into the differences in the political systems in Brazil and the US that allowed this to happen.

But before we start, a little bit of my background and why I feel confident sharing my opinion on this. I’m a former journalist, and I’ve spent a decade working as a reporter in newsrooms in Brazil. I’ve spent quite some time on the Politics desk and covered 3 major elections and an Impeachment. So I have a good grasp of the Brazilian political landscape.

Let’s talk about these guys then. They’re so similar that Bolsonaro has often been called the Trump of the Tropics. They have the same far-right instances, they doubt election results when they lose, and their supporters have a tendency to storm official buildings.

But there’s one difference between Trump and Bolsonaro that, in my opinion, is crucial to understanding the different outcomes after they lost their elections. Unlike Trump, Bolsonaro has a military background and close ties with the army. This might be a small detail in North America, but it’s significant in South America, as we’ll see later on.

Now for the facts. We know that Trump, even after losing the election in 2020, still has a lot of political support. He has faced several lawsuits, but none of those were able to stop him from running for president again this year.

Bolsonaro, on the other hand, has become more and more politically isolated. In June 2023 he was convicted by the Electoral Court for abuse of power and misuse of media. With this decision, he was barred from running for any public office until 2030. He can’t even run for mayor of Rio. But this year things got even more complicated for him.

The Brazilian Federal Police raided the houses of former government officials and ordered Bolsonaro to hand over his passport, a clear indication that he might be arrested. The police have evidence to believe that Bolsonaro and his team were plotting a coup, including recruiting military personnel for support and putting Supreme Court Judges under surveillance.

This is a strong case against Bolsonaro. But this post is not to discuss the merit of the cases or how strong the accusations are. What I want to highlight here are the environmental factors and characteristics of Brazil’s and the US political system that allowed these two different outcomes.

1. Coalition Presidencialism

The first factor is coalition presidentialism. This is a term used by political scientists to describe the way Brazilian politics works. Let me explain it by comparing it to the US system. In the US we have two main parties that have historically alternated in power.

In every election, the parties dispute the presidency and also the seats in Congress and the Senate. And since there are basically only two parties, one of them will always have the majority in the respective legislative house and will have an upper hand at approving policies.

Now in Brazil, instead of 2 parties, we have 20.

Yes, we have as of today 20 parties represented in Congress (it used to be 30), which means that no party will ever have more than half of the votes. The biggest party in Congress today is Bolsonaro’s party (PL), but they hold less than 20% of the seats. This means that if anyone wants to get anything approved or win the elections, they need to make coalitions, which are basically groups of parties forming alliances to reach a broader goal. This is similar to what Trudeau and the NDP did in Canada recently, but in Brazil, this is the norm, all the time, for everyone.

Many people are very critical of this system, and I’m not going to go into the pros and cons and the mechanisms of it. What matters here is that this affects Bolsonaro’s situation in two ways, in my view:

First, this system makes parties weaker. Bolsonaro doesn’t have a strong party behind him like Trump does. His party does hold the most seats in Congress, but it only won for governor in 2 states. In the US, Republicans hold 27 states, the majority of them. The Republicans have more influence over their own political landscape than Bolsonaro’s party has.

Second, this system makes political loyalty very volatile, since everybody has to make an alliance anyway. Of course, parties in the extreme are not going to form a coalition with each other.

But there’s a large group of politicians that are known as the “big center” that are always moving to one side or the other, depending on which side looks more attractive. And there’s no better place to be in politics than on the side of the winning party.

People think that Bolsonaro comes from a far right-wing party, but his political base is actually the big center, which makes political support for him extremely volatile. Bolsonaro ran for president in 2022 in a formal coalition of 3 parties. Right after the election results came out, things started to change and to move… And today, a little more than a year later, all these parties have seats in Lula’s government.

So, the minute Bolsonaro lost, he started to get isolated, because his political allies thought it would be better to make friends with the new man in power than to stick with him and fight to convince people that he actually won.

2. Young Democracy

The second factor that in my opinion has led to this outcome has to do with how young democracy in Brazil is. It sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out.

Remember when I said that Bolsonaro having a military background was a factor? That’s because Brazil, like other South American countries, spent 20 years in a military dictatorship. In 1964 the army deposed the president with the excuse of ridding the country of a Communist threat. They did so with the support of the U.S., of large sectors of Brazilian conservative groups and vowed to hold elections soon.

What followed was 20 years of censorship, assassinations, torture, persecution and exile for a lot of people. And because this is so recent, many of Brazil’s politicians today, mostly on the left, but also on the right, are survivors of that period, including former presidents (FHC, Lula, Dilma).

This makes any anti-democratic talk sound a lot of alarm bells for part of the political class. And yes, we have people who even want the return of the military regime, but most authorities treat this threat very seriously.

In the US, when Trump gives signs that he’s not going to accept the election results, people get rightly worried. But when Bolsonaro does that in Brazil, people panic. Because unlike in the States, we actually have pictures to show what non-democracy looks like.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Americans don’t value democracy. Democracy is a really important part of American culture. But I don’t think you value something enough until the moment you actually lose it. Is not that Brazil is a better or more complete democracy than the states, but it’s certainly a more paranoid one. And with reason.

So the authorities cracked down on Bolsonaro and his circle pretty fast, even before the elections. One of the things they did was to have very little tolerance when it comes to politicians spreading misinformation about the voting process. A lot of fake news videos were removed from social media by court order during the 2022 election period.

I think there’s a poetic justice to it, one of the reasons why we avoided another dictatorship is because we have a lot of experience with authoritarianism.

3. Voting System

The third reason is Brazil’s voting system. Remember when I said that Brazil’s democracy is not necessarily better than the US? Well, the Brazilian voting system is way better than the US. And come on, We have only 3 things we’re proud of in Brazil – soccer, memes and the electronic ballot, so let us have this.

Brazil’s elections are mandatory, unified, centralized and 100% digital. Let’s explore these points one by one.

Mandatory – everybody between the ages of 18 and 70 is obliged to vote. If you don’t go to the polls on election day, your social security number is labelled as irregular, and then you’ll have problems even getting a credit card.

So the idea of making voter access harder in certain states doesn’t exist, it’s the opposite. Authorities will literally put the electronic ballots in canoes and cross the Amazon River to get to a remote village because every single person has to vote. That leaves less room for shenanigans.

Unified – Brazilian elections are also unified, meaning they all happen on the same day, every two years on the first Sunday of October all across the country.

This year (2024) we have elections for mayor and city councils. On the 6th of October, all Brazilians of age are going to the ballot to vote. They’re going to elect mayors and city council members for the almost 6,000 cities in the country, all at the same time.

There’s no voting early, with rare exceptions, there’s no voting by mail either. And this unification of elections, added to the fact that everybody needs to get out of their homes and vote, makes election day an important day in the calendar.

This is completely different from the system we have in North America, in which each province or state has their own rules and election dates. I remember when I started dating my partner, who is Canadian and really likes politics, and I asked him when we would have elections for a new mayor of Toronto. And he said – “I don’t know”. And I was like, “how come you don’t know?”

In Brazil, if you ask a dog on the street when we will vote for mayor, they will know. That makes elections very central, very public, and harder to fraud, because everybody is paying attention.

Centralized – And in order to get all this voting done on the same day, Brazilian elections also have to be centralized. There’s a permanent separate organization in Brazil that runs the voting system for the whole country – they are part of the judicial system.

The elections, from the mayor to the president, are not organized by committees or the states, it’s all the Electoral Tribunal. So there’s no way that Bolsonaro could call a state official and ask them to find him votes because they’re not involved in the process.

100% Digital – And finally, Brazilian elections are 100% digital and have been for the past 30 years. We started using the electronic ballot in 1996. I’m 38, and I’ve never used paper ballots. Even when I’m voting from Canada for president in Brazil, I vote electronically.

The digital system has been evolving all this time, which means that we had 3 decades to make the ballot information extra secure. Not only in the digital aspect, but also in the way that the election is managed, and which groups get to oversee the process.

Voting 100% digitally also means that the results come in fast. Instead of taking days to manually count the votes, we had 150 million votes counted in two hours. And the result is announced by the electoral national authority, and not by the media, as it’s done in North America.

So Bolsonaro’s claim that the voting process in Brazil is unsafe not only carried no weight, but they had little effect on the broad political class since the population learned to trust the system. So much so that nobody actually disputed the result officially.

So there you are, these are the the differences in the political systems in Brazil and the US that in my opinion led to the result we have today. A combination of volatile political support, paranoia about democracy and a robust and organized voting system.

Do you agree? What are the factors that in your opinion led to these different outcomes? Let us know in the comments.