2025-09-01
8 分钟The Economist.
Imagine a country where a polarising president lost his bid for re-election and refused to accept the result.
He declared the ballot rigged and used social media to urge his supporters to rise up.
They did so in their thousands, attacking government buildings.
Then the insurrection failed,
the ex-president faced a criminal investigation and prosecutors put him on trial
for plotting a coup.
That sounds like a fantasy of the American left.
In the hemisphere's other giant democracy, it is reality.
On September 2nd, the trial of Jair Bolsonaro,
Brazil's former president and the Trump of the tropics, will begin in the Federal Supreme Court.
The evidence reads like a flashback to Brazil's turbulent past.
A former four-star general schemed to overturn the result of the election.
Assassins planned to murder its real winner.
As our investigation into the plot explains,
The coup failed because of incompetence rather than intent.
Mr Bolsonaro and his associates are likely to be found guilty.
That makes Brazil a test case for how countries recover from a populist fever.
In Poland, two years after law and justice, peace lost power.
A coalition led by Donald Tusk, a centrist, is constrained by a new peace president.