The former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, will be tried for having pretended to organize a coup against the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after a decision of the country’s Superior Court.
The panel of five members of the Supreme Court voted unanimously in favor of the trial.
It could start this year, and if he was found guilty, Bolsonaro, 70, could incur years in prison.
Speaking after the court’s decision, Bolsonaro told a press conference that the accusations held against him were “serious and baseless”. He has always denied having tried to block the inauguration of Lula.
“It seems that they have something personal against me,” he added in an article on X, referring to the judges.
Bolsonaro says he is the victim of “political persecution” aimed at preventing him from presenting himself again for the president in 2026.
The panel was responsible for determining if there was enough evidence to put Bolsonaro in trial.
The first to vote on Wednesday was the judge at the head of the panel, Alexandre de Moraes.
He recommended to Bolsonaro, as well as seven other former civil servants described by the Attorney General as “co-conspirators”, continue on the events which led to the assault of government buildings by his supporters on January 8, 2023, a week after the inauguration of Lula.
The seven men accused of being co-conspirators are:
- Alexandre Ramagem, former spy chief
- ADM Almir Garnier Santos, former commander of the navy
- Anderson Torres, former Minister of Security
- Gen Augusto Heleno, former Minister of Institutional Security
- Mauro Cid, the former Bolsonaro assistant
- Gen Walter Braga Clean, former Minister of Defense
- Gen Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira former Minister of Defense
Bolsonaro, a former army captain and admirer of American president Donald Trump, ruled Brazil from January 2019 to December 2022.
He narrowly lost a runoff of the presidential elections in October 2022 against his left rival, Lula.
Bolsonaro has never publicly recognized its defeat. Many of his supporters spent weeks camping outside the army barracks in order to convince the soldiers to prevent Lula from being sworn as president as expected on January 1, 2023.
A week after the inauguration of Lula, on January 8, 2023, thousands of supporters of Bolsonaro stormed the government’s buildings in the capital, Brasilia, in what federal investigators say they are an attempted coup.
Buildings were ransacked and the police arrested 1,500 people.
Bolsonaro was in the United States at the time and still denied links with rioters.
An investigation by the federal police on riots and events that have been launched were launched.
The investigators said they had found evidence that there was “a criminal organization” which had “acted in a coordinated manner” to keep the president of the Bolsonaro era in power.
Their 884 -page report, not sealed in November 2024, alleged that “the president of the time, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, had planned, acted and was directly and effectively aware of the actions of the criminal organization aimed at launching a coup and eliminating the law of democratic law”.
The prosecutor general of Brazil, Paulo Gonet, went even further in his report published last month, in which he accused Bolsonaro not only to be aware but of directing the criminal organization which, according to him, sought to overthrow Lula.
According to the Gonet report, the alleged plot included a plan to poison Lula and shoot Alexandre de Moraes – the judge of the Supreme Court who directed the panel who now decided that the case should be tried.
Bolsonaro has always denied allegations which, according to him, are politically motivated and designed to prevent him from presenting himself again for the presidency.
Although it is already forbidden to present itself to public functions until 2030 for having falsely affirmed that the Brazil voting system was vulnerable to fraud, it had declared its intention to fight this ban so that it could arise for a second term in 2026.
However, Wednesday’s decision by the Supreme Court placed a very large obstacle on its way to a possible candidacy.
