The political future of one of the big names of the global populist right is on the line this week as Brazilian judges prepare to decide whether Jair Bolsonaro should be banned from running for office.
Members of Brazil’s superior electoral court will gather on Thursday to consider the first of 16 cases being brought against the far-right former president, who failed to win a second term after losing last October’s election to leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
If an absolute majority of the court’s seven judges find Bolsonaro guilty of misusing his presidential powers in order to boost his re-election campaign, he could be barred from seeking office for eight years.
That would rule Bolsonaro out of Brazil’s next general election, in 2026, and mean the Donald Trump-emulating radical, now 68, would be 75 by the time he could seek the presidency again, in 2030. He would also miss municipal elections in 2024 and 2028.
“The signs aren’t good but I’m relaxed,” Bolsonaro told supporters last weekend as his backers braced for the judgment.
Political observers believe a guilty verdict is assured but likely to be delayed, possibly until September, if a judge asks for more time to consider evidence.
The case relates to Bolsonaro’s decision to summon dozens of foreign diplomats to his residence before last year’s election to make unfounded claims against Brazil’s electronic voting system. But judges will also consider more recent events surrounding the 8 January 2023 riots in Brasília, including the police discovery of a blueprint for a military takeover at the home of Bolsonaro’s former justice minister.
Last week it emerged that police had found documents outlining plans for a coup d’état on the mobile phone of one of Bolsonaro’s closest aides, Lt Col Mauro Cid Barbosa, who was arrested last month.
“Bolsonaro must be removed from the political arena because he broke the rules of the political area – he tried to destroy the political arena,” said Bruno Boghossian, a columnist for the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper.
“Someone who tries to stay in power after losing an election shouldn’t be competing in an election. They aren’t following the rules of the game … so they should be removed from the game,” Boghossian added.
Bolsonaro’s anticipated banishment will be celebrated by millions of detractors who were horrified by the onslaught against democracy, the environment and the arts that unfolded during his 2019-2023 presidency.
But some fear the decision could strengthen the former president, allowing him, like Trump or Boris Johnson, to pose as a political martyr being persecuted by a witch-hunt or kangaroo court. Others believe Bolsonaro’s sidelining could help the right. Thomas Traumann, a Brazilian journalist and political expert, said he suspected some Lula allies would have preferred to face a profoundly polarising candidate such as Bolsonaro in the 2026 election, just as some within the UK’s Labour party would rather have faced Johnson than Rishi Sunak.
“They’ll never admit this, but it’s obviously … much better to face an opponent like [Bolsonaro] than an opponent who is able to move between the far right and the centre,” Traumann said.
Should Bolsonaro be stripped of his political rights, the person widely tipped to fill his shoes is Tarcísio de Freitas, the 48-year-old governor of São Paulo and Bolsonaro’s former infrastructure minister.
“Tarcísio won’t create the same excitement … or the same spectacles [as Bolsonaro],” Traumann predicted. But Freitas could prove a greater threat to Lula’s left by attracting moderate conservatives and centrists turned off by Bolsonaro’s extremism.
The swiftness with which electoral authorities have moved against Bolsonaro contrasts with sluggish efforts to hold his ally Trump accountable for his alleged role in inciting the 6 January riots.
Boghossian said he thought Brazil’s centralised and independent electoral authority gave it an advantage over the US’s decentralised system. He said he also believed senior members of Brazil’s judiciary had decided to act quickly to signal that Bolsonaro’s anti-democratic behaviour was intolerable and needed punishing.
Traumann also attributed the swift response to the ferocity with which Bolsonaro targeted supreme court judges, whom he called bastards, scoundrels and imbeciles. “He made this a personal matter,” Traumann said.
