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Brazilian court bars 'Trump of the Tropics' Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for 8 years [1]

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Date: 2023-07-02  

There is a democracy where a court has just ruled that the former president can’t run for office again for eight years after the judges concluded that he had abused his power and made claims that he knew to be false about the integrity of the country’s voting systems.

That country is Brazil where the top elections court voted Friday to bar 68-year-old Jair Bolsonaro, known as the “Trump of the Tropics,” from running for office again until 2030, which means that he can’t be a candidate in the 2026 presidential election.

The Superior Electoral Court voted 5-2 to impose the ban on Bolsonaro. Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice who heads the electoral court, said the decision represented a rejection of “populism reborn from the flames of hateful, antidemocratic speech that promotes heinous disinformation.”

x Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said a decision by Brazil's federal electoral court to bar him from public office until 2030 for his conduct during last year's fraught election was a 'stab in the back' https://t.co/cHjzfPuUsJ pic.twitter.com/q69thjr7uL — Reuters (@Reuters) July 1, 2023

Bolsonaro reacted to the court’s decision by saying: “Today, I was stabbed in the back. I’m not dead. We’re going to keep working. … it’s not the end of the right in Brazil, before me it existed but it had no form.”

Gleisi Hoffmann, chairwoman of President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva’s leftist Workers’ Party, said Bolsonaro’s election ban offers a teachable moment.

“The far-right needs to know that the political struggle takes place within the democratic process, and not with violence and threatening a coup,” she said. Bolsonaro “will be out of the game because he doesn’t respect the rules. Not only him, his whole gang of coup mongers has to follow the same path.”

x A inelegibilidade de Bolsonaro é pedagógica. A extrema direita tem de saber que a disputa política se dá no processo democrático e não com violência e ameaça de golpes. Não tem vitimismo não. Vai ficar fora do jogo pq não respeita as regras. Aliás, não só ele, mas toda sua turma… — Gleisi Hoffmann (@gleisi) June 30, 2023

Bolsonaro is expected to file an appeal to the Supreme Court. But Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University in Sao Paulo, told The Associated Press that the decision is “very unlikely” to be overturned. Brazil’s Supreme Court repeatedly took strong action to rein in the antidemocratic stances of Bolsonaro and his supporters.

“This decision will end Bolsonaro’s chances of being president again, and he knows it,” Melo told The AP. “After this, he will try to stay out of jail, elect some of his allies to keep his political capital, but it is very unlikely he will ever return to the presidency.”



So it only took Brazil, a relatively young democracy, about six months for the far-right Bolsonaro to be held accountable for making baseless claims that the country’s electronic voting system was rigged.

Those lies led thousands of Bolsonaro’s supporters to storm Congress and other buildings in the capital of Brasilia on Jan. 8, creating scenes reminiscent of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump. They wanted the military to oust the newly inaugurated Lula and restore Bolsonaro to power.

Supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro invade the National Congress building on Jan. 8, 2023

On Jan. 6, 2021, Trump supporters were allowed to leave the U.S. Capitol without being detained. That meant that federal law enforcement officers had to spend months tracking down and arresting hundreds of suspects across the country.

A year later in Brazil, hundreds of “Bolsonaristas” were immediately arrested once security forces had regained control of the breached buildings.

The Associated Press wrote:

Swift jailing and prosecution of hundreds of those who participated had a chilling effect on their rejection of the election’s results. Federal police are investigating Bolsonaro’s role in inciting the uprising; he has denied any wrongdoing.

Bolsonaro had left Brazil for Florida just days before Lula’s inauguration. He returned to Brazil at the end of March.

Almost two-and-a-half years have passed and Trump has yet to be held accountable for the Big Lie about election fraud and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, including the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Trump remains the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination despite two indictments at the federal and state levels.

He held a campaign rally on Saturday in Pickens, S.C., and again he repeated the Big Lie about the 2020 election.

"They rigged the election of 2020," Trump told the rally. "But we're not going to let them rig the election of 2024."

Bolsonaro was one of those authoritarian-style leaders whom Trump admired. Their terms in office were almost mirror images. Here’s how The Washington Post summed up Bolsonaro’s four-year presidency:.

Bolsonaro “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, widened Brazil’s culture-war divisions and presided over one of the world’s deadliest coronavirus outbreaks. And now he’s being investigated for alleged corruption himself.

So what was the difference between Brazil and the United States? It was the fact that the U.S. has no comparable authority to Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, which is empowered by the constitution to remove politicians from office and bar them from running again, according to The Washington Post. However, it is a power that can be abused.

The U.S. does have the Federal Election Commission, which is so ineffective that it recently deadlocked on a request by the advocacy group Public Citizen to develop regulations for AI-generated deepfake political ads.

The ruling on Bolsonaro marks the first time a former president has been banned from running for office for election violations rather than a criminal offense, The Associated Press reported. There is no U.S. law that would bar Trump from running for president even if he was imprisoned after a felony conviction.

Brazilian law forbids candidates with criminal sentences from running for office. Lula, who previously served as president from 2003-2010, was barred from running in the 2018 presidential election after being convicted and jailed on disputed charges of money laundering and corruption, paving the way for Bolsonaro’s election.

In 2021, a Supreme Court judge annulled Lula’s criminal convictions and restored his political rights, enabling him to challenge Bolsonaro’s re-election bid. Lula won the October 30 presidential runoff by 50.9% to 49.1%, the narrowest margin in Brazil’s history.

The Brazilian newspaper O Globo reported that between July 2021 and August 2022, judicial authorities had warned Bolsonaro at least 31 times that he could be punished for attacking the electoral system. But he continued to insist that the voting systems were vulnerable to fraud.

The lawsuit that resulted in the election ban was filed by Brazil’s left-wing Democratic Labor Party against both Bolsonaro and Walter Braga Netto, his running mate in 2022. The majority of judges voted to find Braga Netto not guilty.

It was one of a dozen complaints filed to the electoral court about Bolsonaro’s actions during the presidential election campaign.

The complaint focused on Bolsonaro’s comments in a nationally televised speech on July 18, 2022, that he gave to foreign ambassadors.

It alleged that Bolsonaro used government staffers, the state television channel and the presidential palace in Brasilia to tell the ambassadors that the country’s electronic voting system was rigged.

Bolsonaro’s lawyers argued that he was only making suggestions for improving the electoral system. The panel found that his false claims created the environment that resulted in his supporters storming buildings in the capital on Jan. 8.

In a 382-page opinion, presiding judge Benedito Goncalves wrote that Bolsonaro “was fully, personally responsible” for attacking the electoral system and “violated his duties as a president” during the meeting with ambassadors, according to The Washington Post.

“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.

Bolsonaro probably is facing even more criminal investigations than Trump. Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing in all the cases.

The Associated Press listed the cases under investigation against Bolsonaro in a March 2023 story:

— Bolsonaro is under investigation to determine whether he incited the Jan. 8 riot by his supporters in the capital. Bolsonaro said recently that the riot was not an attempted coup, describing it instead as “little old women and little old men, with Brazilian flags on their back and Bibles under their arms.”

-- The Supreme Court is investigating the spread of alleged falsehoods and disinformation in Brazil by Bolsonaro and his allies.

— Federal police are investigating Bolsonaro and his administration for alleged genocide of the indigenous Yanomami people in the Amazon rainforest by encouraging illegal miners to push into their territory.

-- Federal police and prosecutors are investigating whether Bolsonaro tried to sneak two sets of diamond jewelry worth millions of dollars into the country from Saudi Arabia without paying taxes.

An analysis in The New York Times pointed out a big difference between the situation in Brazil and the United States.

In the U.S., much of the Republican Party has embraced the baseless claims of election-fraud, states have passed laws that make it harder to vote, and voters have elected election-denying candidates to Congress and state legislatures. In Brazil, the political establishment has largely moved away from talk of election fraud — and from Mr. Bolsonaro himself.

Conservative leaders hope that they can drum up support by casting Bolsonaro as the victim of a corrupt system. Bolsonaro has said he will actively campaign for rightist candidates in the 2024 municipal elections. But The Washington Post reported that leaders of Bolsonaro’s conservative Liberal Party have already begun looking for a replacement candidate for the 2026 presidential election. One candidate being touted is Tarcisio de Freitas, Bolsonaro’s former infrastructure minister. De Freitas is the newly elected governor of Sao Paulo state, Brazil’s largest. Or their could be a different Bolsonaro on the ballot, Bolsonaro said he’d support his third wife, Michelle, as a 2026 presidential candidate, Reuters reported. He also has two sons from a previous marriage who are both federal lawmakers. In an Instagram post shortly after the electoral court decision was announced, Michelle Bolsonaro, an Evangelical Christian, wrote: “’Our dream is more alive than ever,’ … I am at your command, my CAPTAIN.” Bolsonaro can always count on the support of ultra-right MAGA Republicans like Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado. She made the Trump-Bolsonaro connection apparent in a recent Tweet. She wrote:

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