Brazilian politics are getting extra dramatic once more.
The South American nation’s legal professional common filed 5 legal costs in opposition to former President Jair Bolsonaro and 33 others in its Supreme Court docket on Feb. 18, 2025, detonating political shock waves. The fees embody plotting a coup d’état to forestall Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidency. The opposite defendants embody a number of former distinguished officers, together with a former spy chief, protection minister, nationwide safety adviser and Bolsonaro’s operating mate.
Lula took workplace in Brazil for a 3rd time in January 2023, after he defeated Bolsonaro within the 2022 presidential election. Bolsonaro, a right-wing politician allied with U.S. President Donald Trump, had served the earlier four-year time period. Bolsonaro and his codefendants are additionally charged with attempting to poison Lula and assassinate his vice presidential operating mate, Geraldo Alckmin, and Brazilian Supreme Court docket Justice Alexandre de Moraes; taking part in an armed legal group; and searching for to violently overthrow the democratic rule of legislation. He denies doing something fallacious.
As a professor of Brazilian politics, I imagine that Bolsonaro’s authorized troubles threaten to definitively finish his political profession. There’s additionally a chance that the 69-year-old former president shall be sentenced to jail. However, on the identical time, the fees might additionally impress Bolsonaro’s base – enjoying right into a narrative that sees the right-wing chief as stymied, unfairly, by the federal government he used to run.
No sash handed
Bolsonaro’s conduct earlier than, throughout and after his second presidential marketing campaign was uncommon for any president searching for one other time period. He claimed, when he was nonetheless in workplace, that Brazil’s digital voting system was not safe and predicted that fraud may crop up within the 2022 elections.
Though he by no means produced any proof to assist this declare, he promoted it on social media, fostering skepticism concerning the election amongst some voters.
Bolsonaro by no means formally conceded his slender electoral defeat to Lula in October 2022, insinuating that as an alternative the election had been stolen. In 2023, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court docket dominated that he had abused his energy and banned him from operating for political workplace once more for the subsequent eight years.
As an alternative of attending Lula’s inauguration on Jan. 1, 2023, the place he would have been anticipated to take part within the conventional passing of the sash from the incumbent to the incoming president, Bolsonaro flew to Orlando, Florida, on Dec. 30, 2022. He stayed in Kissimmee, Florida, for the subsequent three months.
That meant Bolsonaro was not in Brazil when hundreds of his supporters rampaged by and vandalized three authorities buildings in Brasília on Jan. 8, 2023. The incident was strikingly just like Trump supporters’ assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The brand new costs accuse Bolsonaro of collaborating in a conspiracy to delegitimize the elections. The indictment additionally alleges that after the outcomes had been introduced, Bolsonaro and the opposite defendants inspired protests and urged the armed forces to intervene, declare a state of siege and stop the peaceable transition of energy from Bolsonaro to Lula.
Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro can nonetheless draw crowds of supporters, as occurred on Copacabana Seashore in Rio de Janeiro on April 21, 2024.
Buda Mendes/Getty Pictures
Risk of jail
The proof on this indictment is predicated, partly, on plea-bargained testimony by one of many alleged conspirators, the previous presidential adviser and armed forces Lt. Col. Mauro Cid.
The legal professional common has additionally accused Bolsonaro and his associates of being linked to businessmen who paid for buses to take Bolsonaro supporters to Brasília so they might take part within the Jan. 8 assaults, which brought on injury estimated at 20 million Brazilian reais (US$3.5 million). And the indictment alleges that the coup plot failed as a result of the commanders of Brazil’s military and air drive refused to assist the conspiracy, though the commander of the navy did, which explains why he was named as a defendant.
If Brazil’s Supreme Court docket accepts the fees, which appears probably, the authorized battle will start. If Bolsonaro is convicted, he might go to jail.
Bolsonaro’s protection group, for its half, says that the fees are “inept” and unconvincing. His attorneys expressed confidence that they might win the case.
President Lula, carrying a hat, walks alongside Brazil’s first woman, Rosangela Janja da Silva, in a pink swimsuit, throughout a rally in Brasilia on Jan. 8, 2025 – two years after supporters of his predecessor staged a failed coup try.
Claudio Reis/Getty Pictures
Slender path
Bolsonaro and his supporters have lengthy criticized Brazil’s Supreme Court docket, arguing that it has exceeded its constitutional powers and develop into a judicial “dictatorship.” They’ve additionally pushed for Congress to grant amnesty to everybody who took half in or helped perform the Jan. 8 assaults, together with Bolsonaro.
Thus far, Brazil’s Supreme Court docket has convicted 371 folks for taking part within the assaults. These convicted have acquired jail sentences of between three and 17 years.
In contrast to in the USA, nonetheless, there was a broad consensus in Brazil that the assaults had been illegitimate and unacceptable. This consensus consists of many lawmakers on the appropriate and center-right in Brazil’s Congress, in addition to in state and native governments.
So, though the instance of Donald Trump returning to the presidency and pardoning the members within the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol evokes Bolsonaro’s supporters, his path to attaining an identical result’s narrower than was Trump’s.
In the meantime, Trump’s media firm, which owns Reality Social and Rumble, sued Moraes, the decide Bolsonaro is accused of plotting to kill, for ordering the suspension of social media accounts and thereby undermining the First Modification rights of U.S. residents. The case was filed in federal court docket in Tampa, Florida, on Feb. 19.
Any trial of Bolsonaro and the opposite alleged coup plotters might spark a political wrestle.
Brazil’s proper wing is presently divided between advocates of hard-line Bolsonarismo – a disruptive ideology that advocates social conservatism, a calmly regulated financial system, militarism and a powerful govt department – and a extra pragmatic conservatism that works throughout the typical guidelines of politics and is principally centered on patronage and the administration of the spoils of workplace.
Ought to Bolsonaro and his fellow defendants be tried within the Supreme Court docket, these hard-liners may very well be mobilized and energized.
They’d see the trial because the political institution’s persecution of their political hero. And a wrestle to seek out Bolsanaro’s successor, most certainly between his son Eduardo and the previous president’s spouse, Michelle, would ensue.
The successor would declare the mantle of opposition to Lula, who’s eligible to hunt a fourth presidential time period and claims to need to run for reelection in 2026 – when he can be about to rejoice his 81st birthday.
Excessive stakes
There are, to make certain, some Brazilian politicians who’re extra average than Bolsonaro and would additionally prefer to run in opposition to Lula subsequent time. They’d deliver a lot much less baggage to that presidential race.
Their candidacies may supply a doable return to the relative political stability Brazil had skilled for nearly 20 years earlier than 2013, when the principle dividing line in Brazilian politics was between coalitions led by the center-right Social Democratic Occasion and the center-left Employees’ Occasion.
To be clear, it’s exhausting to overstate the potential penalties of the Supreme Court docket’s deliberation and judgment on this case.
The trial, ought to it happen, can be televised and now have a geopolitical dimension, as a result of it will be carefully watched by advocates of hard-right populism in different international locations throughout the Americas and past. The stakes are excessive.
Within the meantime, I’ve little doubt that Bolsonaro’s supporters will attempt to use his authorized woes to rally his political motion. The judgment of Brazil’s Supreme Court docket, ought to it determine to listen to this case, might due to this fact finish Bolsonaro’s political profession. Nevertheless, it doesn’t matter what occurs, I imagine that Bolsonarismo would nonetheless be alive and properly as a political drive in Brazil and an element within the 2026 elections.