By Anthony Boadle and Eduardo Simões
BRASILIA (Reuters) – A failed bomb attack on Brazil’s Supreme Court looks set to re-unite Brasilia against far-right radicalism and scuttle a possible comeback by former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is fighting a court decision to bar him from the ballot.
But any such institutional response will also feed his supporters’ belief that they are being silenced, further polarizing the country which has seen a surge in political violence since the rise of Bolsonaro in 2018.
The attack, which killed the bomber but caused no other casualties, brings into sharp focus the extent to which Brazil’s Supreme Court has become the target of the hard right’s wrath, driven by a deep sense that the court has sought to expel them from the political arena.
It also comes after the re-election of Donald Trump as U.S. president had raised hopes among some Bolsonaro supporters that it could help spur their resurgence.
As in the United States, both sides in Brazil believe democracy is at risk.
Progressives point to violence such as Wednesday’s bombs as a direct attack on Brazil’s democratic institutions, while the right insist those very institutions are rigging democracy against them.
In the wake of the explosions, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes doubled down on the view that far-right hate speech is threatening Brazil’s democracy and spurring violence, the grounds he has used to silence some of his harshest critics on social media.
“It is not an isolated incident,” Moraes said on Thursday. “This has been growing under the false mantle of criminal uses of freedom of expression.”
He compared the bomb attack to riots in the capital on Jan. 8 last year, when Bolsonaro supporters rampaged through the court and other government buildings to protest his electoral defeat to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Wednesday’s explosions, which also blew up a car in a congressional parking lot, appear to have hardened consensus in Congress against a proposal to offer amnesty to participants in those violent protests last year.
Senior sources from two of Brazil’s biggest centrist parties in Congress said that amnesty proposal, which was already losing steam, now looks dead in the water.
“The possibility of an amnesty for the people in the Jan. 8 attack, and by extension for Bolsonaro, is finished – end of discussion,” said Andre Cesar at consultancy Hold Assessoria Legislativa.
It may also be the death knell for Bolsonaro’s hopes to…
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