The pro-Bolsonaro ‘insurrection’ was pathetic – and, for now, has made President Lula stronger | Richard Lapper

The real threat from Brazil's radical right is not from showy coup attempts, but from less deluded ultra-conservatives playing the long game

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 as it marched into their midst in Brasilia on Sunday.

Hundreds of extreme rightwing followers had been gathering in Brazil's modernist capital since late on Friday. On Sunday afternoon they breezed past security cordons and trashed the elegant buildings that host the country's most important democratic institutions - the presidential palace, the supreme court and the two houses of congress. Now, 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 in office, and oust what they described as a leftwing dictatorship now in office.

Richard Lapper is author of Beef, Bible and Bullets: Brazil in the Age of Bolsonaro