Shock waves - The mob was dispersed and Lula will likely emerge stronger, but for how long?

Clad in canary yellow football shirts or draped in the colours of the Brazilian flag, pro-Bolsonaro activists applauded a line of heavily armed police marching into their midst in Brasília.

- Richard Lapper

Hundreds of extreme rightwing followers had been gathering in Brazil’s modernist capital since late last Friday. On Sunday afternoon they breezed past security cordons and trashed the elegant buildings that host Brazil’s most important democratic institutions – the presidential palace, the supreme court and the two houses of congress. Surely, they seem to have thought, these police were moving in to help them secure control, overturn the alleged fraud that had deprived Jair Bolsonaro of a second term, and just what they described as a leftwing dictatorship.

Just a few minutes later though, the same officers, units of the federal force, were bundling them onto buses and off to cells. With more than 1,000 people detained, the first phase of a promised pro-Bolsonaro insurrection had ended with a whimper.