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Bolsonaro was attacking democracy. Claiming the election was stolen and ginned his supporters up to try and cease power by force. That sort of person is incompatible with democracy.
Him: "Iran is a democracy."
Me: "Not fully, because the Guardian Council reserves the right to decide who can run."
Him: "Well, you can't have some sheepherder become president."
I thought about that for a long time. And still am.
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At its core, I think there can only be two unforgivable sins barring anyone from electability.
1 - There must always be as unbiased of an election process as possible, so that candidates can most clearly be judged on their merits and platforms.
2 - There cannot be any intent to change or remove the election process.
Other than that, let sheepherders compete fairly! But there are many world leaders of "democratic" countries that fail that test, precisely because they have mettled with one of those two principles: Xi, Putin, Orban, Erdogan.
Transgressions can be of greater or lesser severity, but at the end of the day any level of transgression should be unacceptable.
An authoritarian who submits to regular democratic elections is much less of a threat than one who removes that check.
This all gets pretty sticky. Putin, for example, followed both rules 1 and 2 (at least publicly). It wasn't until he'd consolidated enough power that he attacked #2 "for the good of the people". He was in office at the time.
That's where I think really healthy skepticism around "stolen election" claims needs to be in play. When someone claims the elections are unfair (even when they win!) that's a sign they aren't making those claims in good faith.
It'll generally help if the party runs on a moralist/religious platform. "We've sinned and need to bring the nation back to god." That way, as the party breaks laws they can claim to do it in the name of god so that's ok. This even often gives them some wicked heathens to hate. Having a common enemy really brings people together. However, if they can't find that it's easy enough to blame outsiders for all the problems. Perhaps a conspiracy or two about how "those foreigners are taking all our jobs, resources, and are generally making everything here worse. If it wasn't for them, our country would be amazing. Let's make their lives a living hell because they've harmed everyone with their presence"
You know, standard fascist stuff.
ok but I mean in global history democracy is more temporary than other governments so what if they say your team is the temporary hysteria instead
I feel like you can't compare murder to allowing someone to run for office.
That's an integral part of democracy.
There's a vaguely similar case in Germany at the moment, where a political party and its voters was in favour of a a rule to keep fringe parties out of parliament, and now that same party is in danger of falling below the threshold it helped set, even if it wins every seat for which it fields a candidate. The voters for that party wanted the threshold then, wanted it to apply to future elections including the upcoming election, and if their party is below the threshold in the upcoming election, their past will conflict with their present vote.
Nothing compels the demos to have conflict-free preferences.
Not enforcing election laws is what's incompatible with democracy, because it results in a loser being declared the winner.
When you're caught tampering with an election, there's no reason to give you a chance to try again. When you're caught organizing a coup, there's no reason to give you a chance to try again, either.