Brazil bans Bolsonaro from office for election fraud claims
Brazilian election officials on Friday blocked former President Jair Bolsonaro from seeking public office until 2030, removing a top contender from the next presidential contest and dealing a significant blow to the country’s far-right movement.
Brazil’s electoral court ruled that Bolsonaro had violated Brazil’s election laws when, less than three months before last year’s vote, he called diplomats to the presidential palace and made baseless claims that the nation’s voting systems were likely to be rigged against him.
Five of the court’s seven judges voted that Bolsonaro had abused his power as president when he convened the meeting with diplomats and broadcast it on state television.
“This response will confirm our faith in the democracy,” Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice who leads the electoral court, said as he cast his vote against Bolsonaro.
The decision is a sharp and swift rebuke of Bolsonaro and his effort to undermine Brazil’s elections. Just six months ago, Bolsonaro was president of one of the world’s largest democracies. Now his career as a politician is in jeopardy.
Under the ruling, Bolsonaro, 68, will next be able to run for president in 2030, when he is 75. The next presidential election is scheduled for 2026.
Bolsonaro said Friday that he was not surprised by the 5-2 decision because the court had always been against him. “Come on. We know that since I took office they said I was going to carry out a coup,” he told reporters (although he, too, had hinted at that possibility). “This is not democracy.”
His lawyers had argued that his speech to diplomats was an “act of government” aimed at raising legitimate concerns about election security.
Bolsonaro appeared to accept his fate, saying Friday that he would focus on campaigning for other right-wing candidates.
Yet he is still expected to appeal the ruling to Brazil’s Supreme Court, although that body acted aggressively to rein in his power during his presidency. He has harshly attacked the high court for years, calling some justices “terrorists” and accusing them of trying to sway the vote against him.
Even if an appeal is successful, Bolsonaro would face an additional 15 cases in the electoral court, including accusations that he improperly used public funds to influence the vote and that his campaign ran a coordinated misinformation campaign. Any of those cases could also block him from seeking the presidency.
He is also linked to several criminal investigations involving whether he provoked his supporters to storm Brazil’s halls of power on Jan. 8 and whether he was involved in a scheme to falsify his vaccine records. (Bolsonaro has declined the COVID vaccine.)
A conviction in any criminal case would also render him ineligible for office, in addition to carrying possible prison time.
Bolsonaro was a shock to Brazil’s politics when he was elected president in 2018. A former army captain and fringe far-right congressman, he rode a populist wave to the presidency on an anti-corruption campaign.
His lone term was marked by controversy from the start, including a sharp rise in deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, a hands-off approach to the pandemic that left nearly 700,000 dead in Brazil and harsh attacks against the press, the judiciary and the left.
But it was his repeated broadsides against Brazil’s voting systems that alarmed many Brazilians, as well as the international community, stoking worries that he might try to hold on to power if he lost last October’s election.
Bolsonaro did lose by a slim margin and at first refused to concede. Under pressure from allies and rivals, he eventually agreed to a transition to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
After listening to Bolsonaro’s false claims for years, many Bolsonaro supporters remained convinced that Lula, a leftist, had stolen the election. On Jan. 8, a week after Lula took office, thousands of people stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices, hoping to induce the military to take over the government and restore Bolsonaro as president.
Bolsonaro said Friday that the riot was not an attempted coup, but instead “little old women and little old men, with Brazilian flags on their back and Bibles under their arms.”
Since then, more evidence has emerged that at least some members of Bolsonaro’s inner circle were entertaining ideas of a coup. Brazil’s federal police found separate drafts of plans for Bolsonaro to hold on to power at the home of Bolsonaro’s justice minister and on the phone of his former assistant.
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Bolsonaro’s attacks on the voting system and the Jan. 8 riot in Brazil bore a striking resemblance to former President Donald Trump’s denials that he lost the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.
Yet the result for the two former presidents has so far been different. While Bolsonaro has already been excluded from the next presidential race, Trump remains the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump could also still run for president even if he is convicted of any of the various criminal charges he faces.
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The ruling against Bolsonaro upends politics in Latin America’s largest nation. For years, he has pulled Brazil’s conservative movement further to the right with harsh rhetoric against rivals, skepticism of science, a love of guns and an embrace of the culture wars.
He received 49.1% of the vote in the 2022 election, just 2.1 million votes behind Lula, in the nation’s closest presidential contest since it returned to democracy in 1985, following a military dictatorship.
Yet conservative leaders in Brazil, with an eye toward Bolsonaro’s legal challenges, have started to move on, touting Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas, the right-wing governor of Brazil’s largest state, Sao Paulo, as the new standard-bearer of the right and a 2026 challenger to Lula.
“He is a much more palatable candidate because he doesn’t have Bolsonaro’s liabilities and because he is making a move to the center,” said Marta Arretche, a political science professor at the University of Sao Paulo.
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The Brazilian press and pollsters have speculated that Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle, or two of his sons would run for president. Bolsonaro said recently that he told his wife she doesn’t have the necessary experience, “but she is an excellent campaigner.”
Friday’s decision is also further proof that Moraes, the head of the electoral court, has become one of Brazil’s most powerful men.
During Bolsonaro’s administration, Moraes acted as the most effective check on Bolsonaro’s power, leading investigations into Bolsonaro and his allies, jailing some of his supporters for what he viewed as threats against Brazil’s institutions and ordering tech companies to remove the accounts of many other right-wing voices.
Those tactics raised concerns that he was abusing his power, and Bolsonaro and his supporters called Moraes an authoritarian. On the left, he has been praised as the savior of Brazil’s democracy.
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Bolsonaro’s case before the electoral court stemmed from a 47-minute meeting on July 18 in which he called dozens of foreign diplomats to the presidential residence to present what he promised was evidence of fraud in past Brazilian elections.
He made unfounded claims that Brazil’s voting machines changed ballots for him to other candidates in a previous election and that a 2018 hack of the electoral court’s computer network showed the vote could be rigged. But security experts have said the hackers could never gain access to the voting machines or change votes.
The speech was broadcast on the Brazilian government’s television network and its social media channels. Some tech companies later took the video down because it spread election misinformation.
As for Bolsonaro’s future plans? He told the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo that during the three months he spent in Florida this year after his election loss, he was offered a job as a “poster boy” for American businesses wanting to reach Brazilians.
“I went to a hamburger joint and it filled with people,” he said. “But I don’t want to abandon my country.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.