Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, will be tried in judgment for supervising a vast plan to cling to power after losing the 2022 elections, including an attempt to overthrow the vote and a plot to assassinate the elected president of the country, decided on Wednesday the country’s supreme court.
The decision marks an important effort to hold Mr. Bolsonaro responsible for the accusations according to which he sought to effectively dismantle Brazilian democracy by orchestrating a large plan to stage a coup.
The judge of the Supreme Court, Alexandre de Moraes, who oversees the case, said by explaining his decision that there was no doubt that Mr. Bolsonaro “knew, managed and discussed” for a coup.
Mr. Bolsonaro and seven members of his inner circle, including his running mate and a former spying chief, will be judged accusations filed by prosecutors last month of “the violent abolition of the law of democratic law” and the “coup”, among other crimes.
In a surprise decision, Mr. Bolsonaro attended the first day of the two -day hearing alongside his lawyers but remained silent.
Mr. Bolsonaro, in a statement, said that the court’s decision was politically motivated, calling this an attempt to “silence the opposition”.
Mr. Bolsonaro, who was prevented from presenting himself to the elections until 2030, added that the president should be chosen by the Brazilians “during the ballot box, not a handful of judges in a courtroom”.
Celso Sanchez Vilardi, one of Mr. Bolsonaro’s lawyers, did not deny the existence of a coup d’etat, calling for the details of the “very serious” plan in his argument before the High Court. But he insisted that there was no link between Mr. Bolsonaro and the program.
“Bolsonaro is the most studied president in the history of the country,” Vilardi told court. “Absolutely nothing was found.”
The Panel of the Supreme Court of five justice voted unanimously to move forward with a trial.
The trial, which has not yet been planned, is the result of a radical investigation of two years during which the police have made a descent into the houses and offices, arrested people near Mr. Bolsonaro and obtained a key confession of an assistant superior to the former president.
In a report of 884 pages not sealed last November, the investigators accused Mr. Bolsonaro of directing and approving a detailed conspiracy, which included plans to cancel the elections, dissolve the courts, grant special powers to the military and the elected president elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva a few days before taking office.
Judge Moraes, who is considered by the extreme right as an adversary of Mr. Bolsonaro, was himself the target of the assassination plans revealed by the coup d’etat investigation.
The investigation revealed how close Brazil has become close to a military dictatorship of almost four decades in its history as a modern democracy.
According to prosecutors, the program also included unfounded doubts about the reliability of Brazil electronic voting machines in the months preceding the 2022 vote. Mr. Bolsonaro said he could only lose if the elections were faked in favor of his opponent.
After Mr. Bolsonaro lost, he and his allies encouraged right -wing demonstrators to camp in front of military barracks across the country, demanding that the army reversed the results. A week after Mr. Lula’s start, many of these demonstrators stormed Brazil’s power rooms in an episode that echoes the January 6 attack on the Capitol by the supporters of President Trump.
Experts say it is unlikely that Mr. Bolsonaro will be arrested before his trial, unless the Moraes judge judges him a risk of theft.
After the police searched Mr. Bolsonaro’s home and seized his passport last year, he spent two nights in the Hungarian Embassy in Brazil, which raised if he had sought to use his links with another head of the right as a lever effect to escape a possible arrest.
If it is convicted, Mr. Bolsonaro could incur 12 to 40 years in prison, according to the indictment, although political analysts expect a shorter sentence. A conviction would also make him permanently ineligible to present himself to the elections under the current law.
In an attempt to save the political future of Mr. Bolsonaro, the legislators who are allied with the former president tried to modify a Brazilian law which prohibits criminals sentenced to present themselves in the elections.
They also put pressure for a new bill which would forgive the convicted people during the insurrection of January 8, 2023 in the Brazilian capital, which could also benefit the efforts of Mr. Bolsonaro to present themselves again.
Mr. Bolsonaro also seems to be a bet on Mr. Trump’s support. Last week, one of Mr. Bolsonaro’s sons said he was planning to seek political asylum in the United States and put pressure on Trump administration to put pressure on the Brazilian authorities to stop what he calls his father’s unjust pursuit.
Last month, only a few hours after Brazilian prosecutors charged Mr. Bolsonaro, Mr. Trump’s media company continued judge Moraes, the judge supervising the case, before the American Federal Court, accusing him of illegally censoring right -wing votes on social networks.
