São Paulo – Former President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) could suffer an eight-year disqualification from participating in elections with the trial that will begin today by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) for having abused the power of the State to put into question doubt, with “fake news” and without evidence, the Brazilian voting system before foreign authorities.
Bolsonaro has 16 open processes in the electoral Justice for crimes committed in the last campaign to take advantage of last year’s elections, in which his re-election attempt was defeated by the current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The first of them, with a high possibility of conviction, according to a source from the Electoral Justice Prosecutor’s Office, has to do with the complaint made at the Palacio de la Alvorada, the presidential residence, that the electronic ballot boxes were not reliable.
He said this when summoning more than a hundred foreign ambassadors and diplomats to make an alleged complaint that the entire electoral system was against him, an accusation that according to the Prosecutor’s Office means an abuse of power that affects the credibility of the democratic rule of law.
In case of conviction, Bolsonaro could run again in the 2030 elections, at the age of 75, and would lose the municipal elections of 2024 and 2028 and the presidential ones of 2026.
Resignation?
Bolsonaro himself recently, in a speech at the Liberal Party headquarters, said that he should expect a sentence, which he describes as “unfair.”
These processes are running parallel to the cases opened in the Federal Supreme Court (STF) for various causes originating in his government and above all the investigation into the attempted coup against Lula da Silva that his followers perpetrated by assaulting the headquarters of the powers.
The electoral court is made up of judges Alexandre de Moraes (president and also Supreme Court judge who is following the cases against Bolsonaro), Cármen Lúcia, Kassio Nunes Marques, Benedito Gonçalves, Raul Araújo Filho, André Ramos and Floriano de Azevedo.
Bolsonarismo hopes that Nunes Marques, designated by Bolsonaro, will ask for an intermediate period of the process to be able to postpone it for 90 days.
Meanwhile, Benedito Goncalves, the rapporteur of the case, has already given signs that he is in favor of the ex-president’s disqualification.
The process was opened by a complaint from the now official Democratic Labor Party (PDT) of the presidential candidate Ciro Gomes.
Bolsonaro’s case mainly revolves around the abuse of political and institutional power to obtain electoral advantages.
The Electoral Public Ministry expressed its support for the request for the disqualification of the former president because it observed irregularities in the attacks carried out by the former head of the Executive against electronic voting machines during the meeting with the ambassadors.
According to the electoral law, the abuse of political power occurs in situations in which the defendant takes advantage of his position and uses public assets to act in order to influence the voter.
The false complaint was also made by official social networks and official television.
The considered certain conviction of Bolsonaro in the electoral Justice is seen by analysts as a reduction in political tension, since the right and ultra-right would have other options for 2026, such as governors Tarcisio de Freitas (San Pablo) and Romeu Zema (Minas Gerais).
The president of Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party, Valdemar Costa Neto, assured that if he is disqualified, the former president will be the “great voter” of the 2024 municipal elections, working for the candidacies of the force that is the first minority in the Chamber of Deputies.
Bolsonaro was the first president of the Brazilian democracy to fail to achieve re-election but also the protagonist of the most disputed election in history, since Lula da Silva won him in the second round of October 30 by 50.9% to 49.1%.
Telam Agency
Source: Ambito
