A panel of justices on Brazil’s Supreme Court has accepted charges against former president Jair Bolsonaro over an alleged attempt to stay in office after his 2022 election defeat, and they have ordered the former leader to stand trial.
All five justices ruled on Wednesday in favour of accepting the charges levelled by Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet. Last month, Gonet charged Bolsonaro and 33 others of attempting a coup that included a plan to poison his successor and current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and kill a Supreme Court judge.
The former president has repeatedly denied wrongdoing.
“Coups kill,” Justice Flávio Dino said when casting his vote. “It doesn’t matter if it happens today, the following month or a few years later.”
If found guilty in a trial expected later this year, Bolsonaro could face a lengthy prison sentence stretching over two decades.
In his opening remarks on Wednesday, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is overseeing the case, screened dramatic footage of Bolsonaro’s supporters storming government buildings in violent scenes that unfolded just a week after the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in January 2023.
Supporters of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro who refuse to accept his loss in the recent presidential election stormed government buildings in the country’s capital Sunday, just a week after the inauguration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Bolsonaro, a far-right former army captain who served as Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2022, is accused of five crimes, including an alleged attempt to violently abolish the democratic rule of law and a coup d’état.
Moraes said that Bolsonaro led “a systematic effort to cast doubt on the electronic voting machines” used in Brazil, part of his efforts to undermine the election he lost.
The Supreme Court began reviewing charges against Bolsonaro and seven of his closest allies on Tuesday in a session that Bolsonaro voluntarily attended, sitting silently in the first row in an echo of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trial last year.
Ahead of the landmark court hearing, Bolsonaro called a beachfront rally in Rio de Janeiro, hoping to seize on Lula’s waning popularity and pressure Congress to pass an amnesty bill favouring him and his jailed supporters.
The demonstration, which some allies suggested could draw more than a million backers, was widely considered a flop after two independent polling firms found that only between 20,000 and 30,000 people showed up.
Bolsonaro has insisted he will run for president again next year, despite a ruling by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court that barred him from running for public office until 2030 for his efforts to discredit the country’s voting system.
