Democracy has won in the US and Brazil. Is populism losing its steam? | Opinion

It may be too early to cry victory, but there’s good news for the hemisphere: the two largest countries in the Americas — the United States and Brazil — have averted constitutional crises that threatened to destroy their democracies.

Only a week ago, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that right-wing Republican extremists would win by a landslide in the Nov. 8 midterm elections.

Polls had suggested that far-right candidates who had echoed former President Trump’s false claims about an alleged fraud in the 2020 elections — even after his loss was confirmed by the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court and more than 60 lower courts — would win key gubernatorial and state attorney races. That would have placed election deniers in positions where they could rig the 2024 presidential elections.

Instead, the vast majority of election deniers lost on Nov. 8. races in competitive states. Americans showed that, while concerned about inflation and crime, they are also tired of Trump’s contempt for the most basic rule of democracy — accepting the will of the people.

Even some of Trump’s staunchest former supporters, such as the editorial page of the The Wall Street Journal — owned by the same company that runs Fox News — ran a telling Nov. 9 editorial under the headline, “Trump is the Republican Party’s biggest loser.”

The editorial noted that Trump caused the Republican party to lose the 2018 mid-term elections, the 2020 presidential elections, and now — by actively campaigning for election deniers — ruined what was expected to be red wave in the 2022 mid-terms.

Trump once bragged that, with him, Republicans would get tired of winning, but “maybe by now Republicans are sick and tired of losing,” the editorial concluded.

Of course, you can make the argument that after Trump’s Nov. 15 announcement that he will run for president in 2024, the mid-term elections are old news, and that the master populist politician has managed to place himself once again at center stage.

But the main reason he announced his candidacy this early is that he fears imminent federal and state indictments against him, including those related to his apparent coup attempt during the violent Jan. 6, 2020, takeover of the Capitol, and his apparent stealing of classified White House documents.

Trump had little choice but to charge forward and announce his bid in order to strengthen his narrative that he’s a victim of a political persecution from Democrats to thwart his return to the presidency.

But it won’t be easy for him to make that case. Growing numbers of leaders in his own Republican Party say they want to focus on the future, and that Trump’s divisiveness and obsession with his 2020 election loss is alienating independent voters and Republican moderates.

In Brazil, likewise, widespread speculation that there would be a constitutional crisis and possibly a coup if far-right President Jair Bolsonaro lost the Oct. 30 election didn’t materialize. Bolsonaro, a Trump ally, had repeatedly suggested in recent months that his country’s electoral system is rigged, and that he wouldn’t accept an adverse election result.

But he accepted his loss, albeit reluctantly, and Brazil’s democratic institutions prevailed.

Leftist President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva may turn out to be a bad president, scare away investments and disappoint many of his followers, because unlike during his previous 2003-2010 term, he won’t enjoy a commodity boom bonanza. But Lula will face a strong Bolsonaro-controlled opposition in Congress that will prevent him from doing much harm.

Granted, democracy is not making headway everywhere in the region. It is under attack in Mexico, where President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador wants to dismantle the much-respected independent National Electoral Institute, which has been the main guarantor of free and fair elections since 1996.

But the fact that the United States and Brazil — two of the world’s biggest democracies — defeated serious potential challenges to the rule of law should be cause for celebration. At a time when authoritarian populists seemed to be winning across the world, democracy has won two key battles.

Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show on Sundays at 7 pm E.T. on CNN en Español. Twitter: @oppenheimera