Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
27-03-2025
BRASILIA: Justices on Brazil’s top court are debating whether former President Jair Bolsonaro should stand trial for allegedly attempting to stage a coup against the current President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
A five-member panel of the Supreme Court will weigh up evidence presented by the chief prosecutor, who accuses Bolsonaro of leading a plot to prevent his rival Lula from taking office after the latter won the 2022 election.
Bolsonaro, 70, says he is the victim of “political persecution” aimed at preventing him from running again for president in 2026.
The judges are expected to decide before the end of Wednesday whether there is enough evidence for the case to go to trial.
Bolsonaro is already barred from running for public office until 2030 for falsely claiming that Brazil’s voting system was vulnerable to fraud, but he has declared his intention to fight that ban so he can run for a second term in 2026.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain and admirer of US President Donald Trump, governed Brazil from January 2019 to December 2022.
He narrowly lost a presidential election run-off in October 2022 to his left-wing rival, Lula.
Bolsonaro never publicly acknowledged his defeat. Many of his supporters spent weeks camping outside army barracks in an attempt to convince the military to prevent Lula from being sworn in as president as scheduled on 1 January 2023.
A week after Lula’s inauguration, on 8 January 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed government buildings in the capital, Brasilia, in what federal investigators say was an attempted coup.
Parts of the buildings were ransacked and police arrested 1,500 people.
In 2023, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court has voted 5-2 to bar ex-president Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years.
Bolsonaro was found guilty of abusing his power ahead of last year’s presidential poll.
He had been accused of undermining Brazilian democracy by falsely claiming that the electronic ballots used were vulnerable to hacking and fraud.
Bolsonaro’s lawyers are expected to appeal against the verdict.
They have argued that his statements had no bearing on the election result.
The ban is backdated to 2 October 2022, when the presidential election took place.
If the verdict is allowed to stand, Bolsonaro will not be eligible to take part in the next presidential election in 2026, but will be able to run again in 2030.
He will also be barred from municipal elections due in 2024 and 2028.
Bolsonaro called the decision a “stab in the back” and said he would keep working to advance right-wing politics in Brazil.
The case against the ex-president revolved around a speech he gave while he was still president in 2022.
On 18 July, he invited foreign diplomats to his residence in the capital, Brasilia, where he falsely claimed that the electronic voting machines used in Brazil were prone to being hacked and open to large-scale fraud.
Bolsonaro maintained that he “simply explained how elections work in Brazil” and did not criticize or attack the electoral system but the speech came amid a polarizing presidential campaign which saw Bolsonaro being challenged for the top job by his arch-rival, left-winger Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The bitterly fought election went into a run-off on 30 October and was won by an extremely narrow margin by Lula. (Int’l News Desk)
