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The dust has settled enough for an appraisal of Bolsonaro's "coup d'état". tl;dr: there was a coup attempt attempt (not a coup attempt) in late 2022 and a harmless chimpout on January 8th 2023. The latter was the bubble-bursting moment for the entire process, but the hundreds of sentences for insurrection were a miscarriage of justice. Some urgent context: *Bolsonaro is infamous for two things, edgy remarks about dictatorship, torture and political executions and chickening out of controversies. *He has a dedicated core of followers who would set themselves on fire if he ordered him to. *His presidency was not bad in day-to-day administration but the news cycle was a morass of controversies and ideological derangement. Trump-like, but Bolsonaro is too retarded to even pretend to be playing 4D chess. "Derangement" is not too strong of a word, he was accused of genocide because of the pandemic. *Bolsonarism is popular in significant portions of the military and law enforcement, including NCOs and young officers, but as usual, most of those institutions are filled with fence-sitting careerists. Bolsonaro stacked his cabinet and the civil service with military officers. *It took a couple years of government for the Executive to figure out how to bribe Congress, but it did succeed and dive into the fetid swamp that is Brasília. Congress is not much of a player in the following events. *A faction in the supreme court led by Foucalt-lookalike Alexandre de Moraes has asserted its power, eroded due process and abused harsh interpretations in legal gray areas. Or plainly illegal interpretations. But can the Supreme Court ever do anything illegal? The Constitution is whatever they say it is. "The king can do no wrong". *Bolsonaro made an enemy of this faction. And now, an outline of the news as a layman would see them, and not how the court reconstructed them: From 2021, Bolsonaro shed doubt into the security of our electronic voting machines. A proposed electoral reform was voted down in Congress. Had it passed, it would at worst have added costs and delays to vote counting, but the opposition made a big deal. On the day of the vote, marines on their way to an annual exercise near Brasília were called for a parade in the city. This was more comical than anything else. The talk of the day was the black smoke from the rusty old SK105 tanks. He and his followers wouldn't stop talking about the voting machines and demanding access to the source code. The Ministry of Defense formed a commission to examine the system. On election day, Lula wins with the narrowest margin in history. Claims of fraud were raised but I didn't see any credible evidence and the political climate suggested a narrow opposition victory was perfectly plausible. After the election, hardline bolsonarists camped in front of military bases demanding a "military intervention". Their media figures were all saying Bolsonaro had a master plan, the Executive would not be handed to Lula and they just had to wait. The encampments were themselves a major logistical operation but they had their financial backers in the private sector. A major point in said demonstrations, beyond claiming the vote was rigged, was that the Supreme Court's activism prevented a regular electoral campaign and regular separation of powers. On December 31st, Bolsonaro left for the US. Lula took office in the following day. Nothing happened.