Brazilian Politics Is Done With Bolsonaro, For Now

Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s right-wing ex-president, has been banned from holding office for the next eight years. Brazil’s top electoral court found on Friday that Bolsonaro had abused his power by repeatedly lying about the integrity of the 2022 election, in which former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, defeated him.

The seven-member panel of the Superior Electoral Court voted 5-2 to restrict Bolsonaro’s office. Bolsonaro has the option of appealing this decision to the country’s highest court, a move he is likely to make. But Bolsonaro is no longer an elected officialand as a private citizen he faces several criminal investigations, including an investigation into whether he interfered with the federal police a protect their children from corruption investigations; a probe in a fake news factory supposedly goes through the former president’s office; and spreading misinformation about Brazil’s electoral system.

After losing to Lula in a runoff in October 2022, Bolsonaro refused to concede the election and did not attend the inauguration of his successor, choosing instead to head to Florida, as his American analog former president Donald Trump. A week after the transition, on January 8, Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed federal buildings in the capital of Brasilia, briefly taking control of the Supreme Court and Congress and breaching the presidential palace.

Although the decision against Bolsonaro seems to have stifled his political career, he still has some influence; in addition to the thousands of supporters who stormed Brasília on his behalf, the former president has allies, including his son Eduardo, in Congress and has hinted that his wife Michelle might run for president in 2026.

The court’s decision, too, is not without complications. Although Brazil has an independent judiciary, both the electoral court and the Supreme Court are facing accusations that they have overstepped their bounds, specifically the Supreme Court jurist. Alexandre de Moraes. For many, de Moraes is a crusader against the extreme right and corruption; to others, he is a threat to free speech, an unelected official with too much power.

Controversy in Brazil’s judiciary

Superior Electoral Court of Brazil, named by its Portuguese acronym TSE, has no exact equivalent in the US, but its closest corollary is the Federal Election Commission. The TSE oversees Brazil’s electoral process and, together with the regional electoral tribunals, their judges and electoral boards, constitutes the Electoral Court of Brazil.

De Moraes is both the head of the TSE and a member of the Supreme Court, which gives him significant power over Bolsonaro’s future.

De Moraes has it led many probes to Bolsonaro, including the investigation into the riots of January 8 and ssocial media misinformation surrounding the 2022 campaign. Brazil’s constitution allows a sitting president to be arrested only if the Supreme Court convicts him of a crime; now that Bolsonaro is a private citizen, is subject to the authority of the lower courts, Reuters reported in January.

Brazil’s presidents are no stranger to criminal charges; Lula himself was elected after spending two years in prison on corruption charges, and Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff was accused in the same corruption scandal that initially brought down Lula. Lula’s charges were canceled in 2021; Rousseff was meimpeached and removed from office in a separate scandal.

There are also precedents for apparently politically motivated investigations, including, allegedly, the investigation into Lula’s involvement in a corruption scandal. Operation Car Wash, or Lava Jato in Brazil, was hailed as the largest anti-corruption investigation in history and a critical step in a country and region where politics and corruption are intertwined.

But Lava Jato’s legacy was short-lived, after the Supreme Court found that former judge Sergio Morowho supervised Lava Jato, had embarked on a “power project, which required politically delegitimizing the Workers’ Party and, especially, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.” Supreme Court judge Gilmar Mendes said

Some observers now fear that de Moraes is participating in an equally political project and that he is also consolidating a worrying amount of power in the judiciary. “Today he is doing it against our enemy. Tomorrow he will do it against our friend, or against us,” Irapuã Santana, Brazilian lawyer and legal columnist for O Globo. he told the New York Times in January “It’s a dangerous precedent.”

But if de Moraes is exaggerating, it is only in response to Bolsonaro’s shocking actions while in office and his alleged crimes, according to Fernando Bizarro, Brazilian political scientist and postdoctoral researcher at Yale’s Leitner Program for Effective Democratic Governance. “[Political elites] She very clearly made this tacit endorsement of him as the person who would play this role and supported him in all of his decisions,” Bizzarro said in an interview.

“People like the president of the senate or the president of the chamber rarely discussed anything about Moraes; in fact, they often endorsed everything he did, and every time Bolsonaro said something scary or tried to do something criminal and De Moraes reacted against it, congressional leaders stood by [him],” he said.

Bolsonaro is out. But what about Bolsonaroism?

Even without Bolsonaro in politics, Bolsonarism, his nationalist and right-wing ideology continues.

Bolsonaro himself lost last year’s election, but his Liberal Party won 22 seats in the lower house of Congress, giving his right-wing coalition control of the chamber. The senate also saw Bolsonaro gains, and Bolsonaro’s right-wing allies also had a strong showing in the gubernatorial races. Reuters reported at the time.

It is in those governorates and local elections where Bizzarro sees Bolsonarism live.

“At this level, the 2022 elections were much more favorable to the Bolsonaros: they won the main governorates, they rule São Paolo, which is the largest state. They rule Minas Gerais, which is the second largest state,” he said . “They rule several of the largest states and south-central Brazil, which is the richest part of the country.”

To the extent that the ideology persists and regroups, it may not do so around Bolsonaro himself. It is difficult to know which political allies Bolsonaro has apart from his family; Unlike Lula, Bizzarro explained, Bolsonaro does not have the support of a long-standing party machine and significant political victories to help him remain relevant until he is allowed to return to politics. Therefore, if there is a future Bolsonaro leader, it is as likely to be one of the governors as Bolsonaro or someone from his inner circle.

Bolsonaro is not stirring up his base like he did after the election

Bolsonaro himself is on the run, as he has done since he resigned from the presidency. He returned to Brazil at the end of March after his three-month self-imposed exile in the US; since his return, he has “opted for occasional meetings and greetings and lukewarm speeches”, as Guilherme Casarões, professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) Business School and coordinator of the Observatory of the Far Right, wrote in Brazil the Americas Quarterly Wednesday.

With so much scrutiny directed at him, and so much political and personal vulnerability, Bolsonaro has denounced the investigations as politically motivated, but has not communicated crying videos or they organized mass rallies as he has done before. As Casarões writes, his ability to irritate his supporters is the sole basis of his populist power; without that, it’s hard to imagine what’s next for the man or his movement.

Still, Bolsonaro’s base can do some of that work for him, as Rodrigo Nunes, a Brazilian philosophy scholar who teaches at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and the University of Essex, told Jonathan Guyer from Vox in January:

But the leader sits on the back of a swarm of what you might describe as political entrepreneurs who are social media influencers, who are YouTubers, legacy media commentators, etc., to whom the leader outsources much of work of agitation and mobilization and organization. Whereas, on the other hand, these people see the leader as expanding the scope of what they do and offering them political and even economic opportunities. Your YouTube channel is your politics, but it’s also how you make money.

Bizzarro told Vox he was skeptical about whether there will be a violent uprising in response to Bolsonaro’s political impeachment. The January uprising was the last gasp of “a months-long effort to destroy Brazilian democracy,” he said. “This was really a last desperate attempt; everything else, all the other ideas that had been shut down and were ineffective, and this was kind of a desperate attempt to make something happen.”

There is always the possibility that, as the political winds change, Bolsonaro could return to the political stage before the 2030 elections, just as Lula miraculously returned from prison when political sentiment returned to its please

But Bolsonaro would take several years to make this comeback, Bizzaro told Vox. “Brazilian democracy is probably safe in the short term.”