As president, the “Trump of the Tropics” repeatedly asserted without evidence that the voting systems in Latin America’s largest country were vulnerable to fraud. With the vote of Judge Cármen Lúcia Friday afternoon, the seven-member Superior Electoral Court reached a majority to convict the right-wing populist of abuse of power for undermining faith in the country’s young democracy.
The ruling, if it survives a planned Supreme Court appeal, means Bolsonaro, 68, won’t be able to run for president until the 2030 election, when he’ll be 75. It’s the first time in the court’s 90-year history that it has applied the ban to a former president.
Bolsonaro, aides and allies anticipated the result.
“It’s unfair to me, for God’s sake,” he told reporters on Thursday. “Show me something concrete that I did against democracy. I played within the bounds of the Constitution the whole time.”
The former army officer won the presidency in 2018 on promises to clean up corruption in government. During his four-year term, he gutted protections for the Amazon rainforest and its Indigenous inhabitants, stoked Brazil’s culture-war divisions, presided over one of the world’s deadliest coronavirus outbreaks and is now being probed for alleged corruption himself.
He left office in December after losing his reelection bid to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by the narrowest margin in the country’s history. He did not concede the race, but fled to Florida before his term ended, skipping Lula’s inauguration and the ceremonial passing of the presidential sash, a key affirmation of the country’s democracy.
The verdict Friday was the first in several investigations against Bolsonaro. He remains accused in multiple criminal and electoral cases.
Bolsonaro’s attorney, Tarcísio Vieira de Carvalho, said before the ruling that he would appeal it to the Supreme Court.
At issue before the court were Bolsonaro’s comments at a meeting with foreign diplomats last summer in the Presidential Palace. In a 45-minute address that was broadcast on national television, the panel found, he made false claims about the voting system’s vulnerability to fraud. They say the comments created the environment in which thousands of his supporters stormed the Presidential Palace, Congress and Supreme Court on Jan. 8 in hopes of overturning his election loss.
The complaint was brought by Brazil’s left-wing Democratic Labor Party. The electoral court is led by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, whom Bolsonaro’s supporters accuse of persecuting him politically.
Bolsonaro’s lawyers argued that the meeting was an “act of government” with “suggestions for the electoral process.” Bolsonaro did not attend the trial, but commented from the sidelines.
“Is it fair to revoke the political rights of someone who gathered ambassadors?” the former president asked reporters on Monday. “We cannot passively accept in Brazil that possible criticism or suggestions for improving the electoral system is seen as an attack on democracy.”
But the court, made up of a rotation of three Supreme Court justices, two other federal judges and two lawyers, found that Bolsonaro’s comments to the diplomats were part of a script that led to the Jan. 8 insurrection. In a 382-page opinion, presiding Judge Benedito Gonçalves wrote that the former president “was fully, personally responsible” for attacking the electoral system and “violated his duties as a president” during the meeting.
“It is not possible to turn a blind eye to the anti-democratic effects of violent speeches and lies that jeopardize the credibility of the electoral system,” Gonçalves wrote.
Supreme Court justices agree.
“We have never had a president who has so unequivocally attacked the institutions like Bolsonaro did,” Justice Gilmar Mendes, a two-time president of the electoral court, told The Washington Post.
“And there was a context,” Mendes continued. “When he meets with ambassadors and diplomats in his position and announces defects in the electronic ballots that he knew did not exist, he is seriously abusing his power as president.”
According to O Globo newspaper, judicial authorities warned Bolsonaro at least 31 times between July 2021 and August 2022 that he could be punished for attacking the electoral system.
Brazil’s top prosecutor for electoral cases, Paulo Gustavo Gonet Branco, said at the outset of the trial that the former president’s rhetoric “went far beyond freedom of expression.”
“Bolsonaro’s allegations were not just reckless; they were known to be unfounded,” he said.
No one in Brazil has shown Bolsonaro’s capacity to energize the right. But his allies are already seeking his replacement. They hope that casting the former president as a victim of a corrupt system will strengthen their cause. One candidate to succeed him, supporters say, is his wife, Michelle Bolsonaro.