It’s that easy to get into Brazil’s parliament – I’ve tried it
Which: Julian Eide; Boris Pofalla
“Order and Progress” is written on Brazil’s flag. But the Bolsonaro supporters who instigated an insurgency wanted neither. Our author knows Brasilia. To see the right-wing storming of parliament, the presidential palace and the Supreme Court is doubly frightening for him.
Dhe coup failed. The storm of thousands of right-wing demonstrators on Brazil’s government district left a lot of shards, broken works of art and thousands of ugly pictures. The Bolsonaro supporters have been expelled and some have been arrested. Democracy in the huge country seems saved for the time being.
The storming of Brasília is not as surprising as the storming of the Capitol – it’s surprisingly easy to get into the Brazilian Parliament when it’s not in session. You stumble through marble halls, then you are already standing in the plenary hall. Upholstered leather seats, modernist decor, beige carpeting – it’s not easy to get into the plenary hall of the Bundestag.
Brasilia is an open city. Demonstrators regularly march to just outside the domed (Senate) and shell (Chamber of Deputies) parliament building and wave their banners on the green lawn.
But the Bolsonaro putschists didn’t just want to demonstrate, they wanted to abolish democracy – and in doing so they damaged more than a few window panes and works of art. The test-tube city, which was built in record time on a wooded plateau in the middle of nowhere according to plans by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, is the embodiment of the unconditional belief in a better, more beautiful, faster future for everyone.
Its floor plan is intended to symbolize a cross, but is more reminiscent of an airplane. In Brasília, President Juscelino Kubitschek’s Ford Galaxy is on public display in a glass pavilion like a relic, here the individually driven automobile and a quasi-socialist pathos reign hand in hand. Everything about the architecture looks straight ahead, and the addresses are not named after any kings, but are named according to their function and location, like the parts of a machine.
Brasília’s founding was the maximum break with the country’s imperial past, which Bolsonaro’s admirers would like to see back. But even the small-scale bicycle paradises that are favored in present-day Europe are not possible there; urban planning has merged too radically with the utopias of the time for that.
It is doubly frightening to see the radical right-wing storming of parliament, the presidential palace and the Supreme Court. The Bolsonaristas demonstratively broke with the human civilization that triumphs here. They relieved themselves, drank, quarrelled, destroyed works of art that embody a hundred years of Brazilian history.
But there’s something else that you can’t see in the photos that you can only feel. The map of Brasília runs symmetrically along the central axis, so everything seems to exist twice. As a visitor, one then likes to imagine oneself in a slightly shifted, second city with the same buildings, but has only landed on the other side of the axis.
This gives a second disturbing layer to the events of the past weekend: Democracy does not always have to be stormed in order to turn into its opposite. Sometimes it is enough if it tilts gently.