THE invasion of Congress in Brasilia by supporters of the defeated President Jair Bolsonaro has, rightly, been condemned as an “act of terrorism” by the House of Bishops in that country. It was good to see such a swift and robust reaction, given the stakes involved. As the Bishops said, the attacks were not just against the new President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, but against the voters who subscribed to the election — supporters of both candidates — and who trusted the result to be accurate. All the evidence indicates that it was. Yet the outcome was undermined by, first, criticism of the electronic voting system by the former President (followed by a sulky silence) and, second, by attacks on the vote by a series of right-wing influencers on social media, Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon among them, who wrote: “Lula stole the Election. . . Brazilians know this.”

The threat of this attack is of concern to others as well as Brazilians. It will take painstaking investigations to discover whether Mr Bolsonaro was in touch with those plotting the attack on Congress, but his Florida trip, far from proving his innocence, suggests the opposite. The lesson from the US Capitol riots in 2021 is that he needed no direct involvement. Touch-papers need a very small flame: Mr Trump’s contribution — claiming that the presidency had been stolen from him and failing to discourage those who decided to act on this disinformation — was enough to trigger the Capitol attack. As a result, democracy is under a greater threat now than at any time in the recent past. The blueprint for its destruction was drawn up in Mar-a-Lago, Mr Trump’s Palm Beach home, and can easily be followed by any unscrupulous political leader willing to deny the will of the majority in order to cling on to power.

The thwarted coup triggered mass street demonstrations in Brazil this week in support of President Lula and the democratic process. Sometimes, it takes such an attack to demonstrate how vulnerable political institutions are. (The Duke of Sussex has been relentlessly demonstrating this in another sphere.) Those who live in a nation not governed with the use or threat of force perhaps need to express their gratitude more often, not least by tending the delicate plant of democracy, sometimes by propagating, occasionally by pruning (namely, the House of Lords in the UK), always by feeding. Political concord is assumed by too many to be inviolable and thus to be neglected without worry. First Washington and now Brasilia have shown that to be untrue. The bishops in Brazil called for “permanent prayer for peace”. It is a salutary adaptation of the dictum attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”