Sparks: Brazil’s neck-and-neck election offers test for growing pro-Trump Latin American bloc
If a people will not condemn the coup, they have already voted for the next one; the ballot this Sunday asks them which they intend to be.
Written constitutions survive the coup attempt; what must be watched is whether the habit of obedience to them survives the man who tested it.
That a nation, having convicted its former president of overturning the republic, should then find his son standing at the threshold of its highest office, is the experiment the founders of every republic must be prepared for and few are.
Two camps strain against each other, and the tighter each grips the country, the more it slips; the ruler who governs least is hardest to topple.
Half the country wants to go back to the man who burned the bridge behind him; my work taught me never to trust the guide who set the fire.
The election is described as a choice between two futures; beneath the description, one future is being pulled in two directions, and the tension, not either side, is what holds the nation together today.
From the favela the question is not left or right; the question is whether the price of rice rises, whether the bus fare rises, and which man's promises mean a full plate on Sunday.
A nation can survive a convicted president; what it cannot survive cheaply is the habit of forgiving him because the alternative requires thought.
Travelling through the interior, one finds the election argued not in newspapers but over strong coffee and saints' processions, where the patroness of the country has been drafted into a quarrel she would not recognise.
How fortunate that the son of the man convicted of staging a coup now offers himself for the presidency, so that the voters may enjoy the best of all possible dynasties.
A country that nearly lost its democracy and immediately considers handing the family another turn at power is not making a political calculation; it is repeating what it has not yet finished mourning.
Power conceded nothing without demand, and democracy conceded nothing without vigilance; a people that must be reminded why the coup-plotter stood trial has already begun forgetting what the trial was for.
They say the country cannot risk another term of this or that, but nobody saying it has stood in the line to vote since four in the morning, and the risk always lands heaviest on those who waited.
Count the bloc: one convicted coup-plotter, one son now on the ballot, one foreign patron cheering from the north, and the pattern stops being coincidence and starts being a ledger.
Everyone treats the dynasty's return as a voter preference, and it is worth asking who benefits from treating a movement with a convicted leader at its head as ordinary common sense rather than what it is.
The republic tried the former president for overthrowing it, obtained a conviction, and now proposes to evaluate his son for the same office, which is a remarkably efficient recycling scheme.