The Insurrectionist Playbook in Brazil after Bolsonaro’s Election Defeat

The second paper in this AoIR 2023 session is by Marco Bastos and Raquel Recuero, whose focus is on the 8 January 2022 insurrection in Brazil, after the election loss of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. They describe this insurrection as a form of connective action: a framework that has largely been applied to pro-social actions like Occupy or the Indignados, but can also be used to analyse anti-democratic actions. The present paper examines the framing devices used by populist politicians to inflame their grassroots activists by distributing disinformation and conspiracy narratives, to be backed up by the insurrectionist leadership.

This playbook was employed in Brazil: Bolsonaro himself spread a substantial number of falsehoods during the second half of 2021, as verified by Brazilian fact-checkers; and these statements were picked up again by the official Twitter accounts of Brazilian deputies and senators supporting Bolsonaro. Part of the message here was that a coup could be permissible if election fraud was proven; in spite of Brazil’s horrific experience with military dictatorship, in fact, such messages also called for army involvement in such a coup. Such ‘fraud’ was often positioned as being aided by communists, the UN, or the Venezuelans.

Such claims about fraud and calls for a coup ebbed and flowed with political developments in the country, especially after the first round of elections during which the parliamentary deputies are chosen and the two candidates going into the second-round run-off for president are selected. Especially key was that after the first round, the Centrão coalition of centrist parties moved away from fraud claims – this meant that support for a coup by Bolsonaro supporters began to dwindle.