Why do generals attempting to coup always storm the palace? What happens next? Why do ordinary soldiers follow them? Are they in on the plot?
In: Economics
In the simplest terms, you have the hard-core current government and you have the hard-core coup members.
Then you have everyone else, who mostly don’t want a civil war, dont want to be jailed and don’t want to hanged from the neck until they are dead. Everyone else includes civilians and military forces.
The job of both hard-core sides is to convince everyone else they are in power, resistance is futile, and any resistors will be jailed or hanged from the neck until they are dead.
Once one side can convince enough of everyone else, they win, and everyone shifts to their side to save their own necks, at least nominally enough to end the coup and have the other side lay down their weapons.
Now, how a coup does that is varied: capturing the other side’s leaders helps but so does simply shutting them up by capturing the media, or trapping them outside the country, or turning off the internet and using confusion. The current government wins by appearing in control, by continuing to publicly and privately issue orders or having civilians and the military publicly rallying for them.
The important thing is for the winning side to have the *appearance* of enough control to both civilians and the military. Storming the Palace is one way to further that appearance.
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