The far-right ex-president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, was disabled yesterday for eight years, so that he will not be able to run for the next presidential elections in 2026. The sentence was adopted yesterday by the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), in the last session of the trial which took place this week in Brasilia. The decision was made by five votes in favor and two against.
However, before the TSE plenary session began, Bolsonaro announced that he would file an appeal before the Supreme Court, with which the sentence would not be final until the highest court in the country is issued. However, it must be taken into account that three Supreme Court judges are also part of the TSE, Cármen Lúcia, Alexandre de Moraes and Kassio Nunes Marques; the first two voted for the disqualification and the third against.
A majority of the seven TSE magistrates consider that during the 2022 campaign the ex-president discredited the electoral system and abused his power by sowing doubts about the reliability of electronic voting –which until then no political party had questioned–, spreading false information and conspiracy theories to destabilize the democratic system.
The main evidence for abuse of power against Bolsonaro analyzed by the TSE was a meeting that the then president held at his official residence in July 2022 –a few months before the elections– with foreign ambassadors accredited in Brazil, where the ultra leader put in question the credibility of the electoral results, criticizing the electronic voting system. "The meeting at the Alvorada palace constituted an abuse of political power," concluded yesterday Alexandre de Moraes, president of the TSE, who was the last to announce his vote, also in favor of disqualification.
Beyond the announced appeal before the Supreme Court, Bolsonaro assured on Thursday that he was confident that, in case of being disqualified, Congress would grant him amnesty, taking into account the weight that his supporters have in the legislature.
"The amnesty is provided for in the democratic regime and it is Parliament that decides it," said the former president, in relation to the bill that the Bolsonaro deputies announced that they would present to restore the political rights of the former army captain in the event that he was disabled until 2030, as anticipated.
This is the first sentence against Bolsonaro since he left power on January 1, although he did not attend the inauguration of his successor, the progressive Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. It is also the first of the 16 processes that he has open for different acts committed during his term (2019-2022). The ultra leader is also being investigated for failing to prevent the spread of the covid or for appropriating jewelry and other goods given away by Saudi Arabia when he was president.
It is also under judicial suspicion if Bolsonaro promoted the assault on the Plaza de los Tres Poderes in Brasilia, when hundreds of people who had been camping in the Brazilian capital for weeks asking for a military intervention against Lula's victory, razed the headquarters of the executive powers, legislative and judicial.
The president of the ruling Workers' Party, Gleisi Hoffmann, welcomed the disqualification because it is "dicactic" and "condemns the methods of the extreme right."
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro reacted to the sentence in a melodramatic tone and alluding to the attack he suffered in 2018 when he was stabbed by a man during a campaign event. “Recently I received a stab in the stomach and now they have stabbed me in the back with political disqualification for abuse of political power,” the far-right leader told reporters.
