Global Courant
Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who used transgression to become the leader of his country’s right, has just hit the hardest limit of his political life.
The sentence for abuse of political power, which had the favorable vote of five of the seven judges of the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), leaves the ex-president out of the next presidential elections in 2026, as well as other elections for different positions.
The trial focused on unfounded questions that Bolsonaro made in a meeting with foreign diplomats about the reliability of Brazil’s electoral system ahead of the 2022 election, when he lost re-election to his arch-rival, current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
In that meeting, broadcast on public TV and social networks, the then president showed a willingness to “incite insecurity, mistrust and conspiracy, fuel for a growing collective anti-institutional sentiment,” said the investigating judge in the case, Benedito Gonçalves.
Bolsonaro has rejected the conviction as “a stab in the back” and his defense anticipated that he will appeal it to the Federal Supreme Court, the highest Brazilian court.
Even for a politician like him, who for decades gathered votes without having a fixed party structure, the challenge of maintaining the unity and fidelity of his movement is now more complicated.
“What is probably going to happen is a fragmentation of Bolsonarismo,” says Isabela Kalil, coordinator of the Observatory of the Brazilian Extreme Right, to BBC Mundo.
However, both she and other analysts rule out that this alone ends the political career of the former president.
“Very diverse voters”
The one that was settled this Friday in the TSE is just one of the legal problems facing Bolsonaro, who lost privileged jurisdiction since he left the presidency on January 1.
Other investigations range from his response to the covid pandemic, being accused of spreading falsehoods about the vaccine against a virus that killed more than 700,000 Brazilians, to his responsibility for the assault of his followers on government buildings in Brasilia on past January 8.
AFP The Superior Electoral Court of Brazil condemned Bolsonaro by five votes to two.
Bolsonaro has always seduced voters by challenging the limits of what is possible in Brazil.
He was first elected councilor of Rio de Janeiro after being tried by a military court in 1988, when he was an Army captain, for his alleged participation in a plan to demand an increase in military salaries that included the use of bombs in barracks.
Although on that occasion he was acquitted, that same year he went to the reserve and dedicated himself to politics with the key support he had won among the military sectors.
Later, Bolsonaro came to the Brazilian Congress, where he spent 27 years as a federal deputy, generating new controversies and complaints against him: he declared himself “in favor of the dictatorship” and was sentenced to compensate a deputy for moral damages after telling him that ” does not deserve” to be raped.
At the same time, he increased his electoral wealth until he was elected president in 2018, in the midst of a colossal economic crisis in the country, corruption scandals and a widespread disenchantment with the political class.
His voters are largely conservative and evangelical, but he also has support from militarist groups, nationalists, ultras and defenders of weapons.
“Bolsonaro managed to bring together very diverse audiences and segments of voters. Today there is no figure in Brazil that can do the same; there is no substitute for Bolsonaro,” says Kalil.
Getty Images Bolsonaro gathered a broad and heterogeneous electoral base.
internal disputes
A professor at the São Paulo School of Sociology and Politics Foundation, Kalil believes that internal disputes could arise within Bolsonarism.
“For example, certain segments of voters will support non-religious conservative candidates, others will support religious conservatives, others (to candidates) more linked to the weapons agenda, others more radicalized, others to anti-gender and transphobic leaders,” Kalil points out.
Marco Antonio Teixeira, a political scientist at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, an elite Brazilian university, agrees that “in the vacuum that opens up in Bolsonarismo, new right-wing leaderships may emerge over time.”
He points to São Paulo Governor Tarcíso de Freitas, a former Army engineer and former Minister of Infrastructure in the Bolsonaro government, as a possible replacement.
The three eldest sons of the former president have dedicated themselves to politics and were once seen as his eventual electoral heirs, but analysts such as Teixeira consider that unlikely due to the wear and tear they have suffered.
Bolsonaro said a few days ago that his current wife, Michelle Bolsonaro, could run for office, but added that she lacks “experience” to be president.
In fact, the former president has avoided immediately naming a successor, although he says he has a “silver bullet” for the 2026 elections.
“I’m not dead”
Recent Brazilian history shows that it can be hasty to take the disqualification of a former president as the end of his public life.
Fernando Collor de Mello resigned as Brazil’s president while impeached for corruption in 1992 and was declared ineligible for eight years.
But Collor was elected senator in 2006 and held the post for more than a decade. In May of this year, the Brazilian Supreme Court sentenced him to 8 years and 10 months in prison for another corruption case.
Lula was also convicted of corruption in 2017, in the context of the Lava Jato mega-scandal, and the TSE declared him ineligible in the following year’s elections that Bolsonaro would win.
But after spending 19 months in prison, the leader of the Brazilian left was released, the Supreme Court annulled his convictions for errors in the proceedings, and last year he was elected president again by less than two points ahead of Bolsonaro.
Getty Images Magistrate Benedito Gonçalves instructed the case against Bolsonaro and was the first in the electoral court to vote on his sentence.
Caution
Bolsonaro, for his part, still has an appeal pending before the Supreme Court, which, according to specialists, will hardly change his disqualification.
However, he himself said after the ruling on Friday that he intends to continue participating in politics.
“I’m not dead. We intend to make many mayors in next year’s elections. It is not the end of the right in Brazil. Before me it existed but had no form; it went on to gain materiality, ”he declared.
Teixeira warns that “eight years go by quickly and (Bolsonaro) is still old enough to try to come back.”
“It is too early to talk about the end, but Bolsonarism is going to weaken,” the analyst told BBC Mundo.
As Brazilian legislation establishes that the eight years of disqualification of the former president began counting from the first electoral round of 2022, they would end on October 2, 2030.
That is just four days before the 2030 presidential elections, in which Bolsonaro could become a candidate.
“Even being ineligible for eight years or more, he can act politically: he’s going to continue to be a political force supporting candidates,” says Kalil. “I would be very cautious in ordering the political death of Jair Bolsonaro.”
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