Brasilia – The Brazilian electoral prosecutor’s office yesterday requested the political disqualification of former president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) until the 2030 elections for having abused the power of the State to defame the electoral system before foreign authorities and trying to influence voters on a ghost of fraud in the elections that he lost in October to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Thus began the first day of the trial in the Superior Electoral Court for crimes against the electoral law committed by the Bolsonaro-Walter Braga Netto formula and whose result, if convicted, should reconfigure the opposition for the 2026 presidential elections, with a new candidate to absorb the legacy of popularity of the far-right leader.
The trial will continue next Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. -with chances of ending that same day- with the vote of the magistrates of the electoral court, after the hearings began yesterday with the accusation of the Deputy Attorney General of the Electoral Public Ministry, Paulo Gonet , the rapporteur of the process, Judge Benedito Gonçalves, the defender of Bolsonaro, Tarcisio de Veira de Carvalho, and the lawyer of the Democratic Labor Party, the author of the original complaint.
“If they convict me it will be an affront to democracy. I will continue to be the most beloved ex in Brazil and I am still alive, from somewhere I will continue to collaborate with my country,” said Bolsonaro, who traveled to a Liberal Party event in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, to repudiate the process against him.
In case of disqualification, Bolsonaro will not be able to participate in the presidential, gubernatorial and legislative elections of 2026 and two municipal elections.
The prosecutor’s office asks to disqualify Bolsonaro because on July 18, 2022 he gathered more than a hundred ambassadors at the Alvorada Palace in Brasilia to denounce, without evidence, the existence of alleged plots and computer errors that were going to conspire against him in the elections in which Lula finally won in the two rounds of October. The meeting, with display of graphics, was broadcast on official television and government networks.
The prosecution said that Bolsonaro used that complaint before the ambassadors as a starting point for a series of actions aimed at undermining the credibility of the entire electoral system, leading his followers to adopt that discourse until after the elections, the results of which were accepted by the entire political spectrum.
“Launching proposals to the public that undermine the legitimacy of the electoral process on the eve of its completion, which had already been denied, without exposing the new bases that support them, is not contributing to the progress of the structures of democracy, it is degrading democracy. consciously,” he said.
Prosecutor Gonet assured that the meeting with the foreign ambassadors was an “electoral maneuver”, “manipulating information, without evidence” and defended as if it were the right to freedom of expression.
“The call to distrust the elections did not yield a majority of votes, but it provoked reactions of mistrust from part of the population regarding the legitimacy of the polls, as had never been seen since the 1988 constitution,” he criticized.
Strategy
The author of the complaint is the PDT, of the defeated former presidential candidate Ciro Gomes, a force that today forms part of Lula’s parliamentary base and is in charge of the Ministry of Social Welfare.
In his speech, lawyer Walber de Moura Agra used the strategy of linking the meeting with the ambassadors to a broader context of anti-democratic attacks and attempts to discredit the electoral system, which culminated in the attempted coup d’état on 8 January in Brasilia.
Bolsonaro had a “coup obsession,” said the plaintiff lawyer, citing the discovery in the house of former Bolsonaro Justice Minister Anderson Torres of a document with the institutional outline for a military coup to prevent Lula’s inauguration.
Torres was the Secretary of Security of Brasilia on January 8 and is under house arrest for having liberated the area and allowed the assault on public buildings so that the Bolsonaristas ask the Army for a coup to remove Lula.
Bolsonaro argued that elements after the meeting with the ambassadors cannot be incorporated, because the process would be corrupted. This is how it was decided in 2017 by the electoral court when it judged the legality of the election of Michel Temer – former vice president of Dilma Rousseff – and refused to incorporate accusations of illegal financing of the campaign made by the construction company Odebrecht.
Bolsonaro’s lawyer, Tarcísio Vieira de Carvalho, asked to depoliticize this process. “Bolsonarism is not on trial as they want us to believe,” he shot.
Vieira de Carvalho said that the discussion about the electronic voting system cannot be considered a taboo topic in a democracy and that the meeting was a diplomatic event.
According to him, Bolsonaro only tried to propose a public debate to improve the system, but he used an “inappropriate tone.”
In the Bolsonarismo, the hopes to avoid a disqualification next week is that Judge Marques Nunes requests a “view” of the process to analyze the vote and postpone the decision for the maximum legal term of 90 days.
Source: Ambito
