The Brazilian electoral tribunal reached the necessary majority on Friday convict former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro of “abuse of power”, for which he is ineligible for eight years.

Political disqualification will leave Jair Bolsonaro68 years old, from the next presidential election in 2026 and could open a race for the leadership of the right in Brazil, with no clear alternatives for now.

The Superior Electoral Court (TSE) reached a majority of 4 votes to 1 in favor of condemning Bolsonaro for questioning the reliability of the electronic voting system with “false” information at a meeting with ambassadors in July 2022, three months before his defeat by leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The fourth session of the trial began Friday with the fifth vote, that of Judge Carmen Lúcia. Until then, three of the seven judges on the court had voted in favor of the conviction and one against.

Lúcia’s was decisive, as the verdict is determined by a majority of the plenary assembly (at least 4 votes out of 7).

Now the opinion of two judges remains, who could ask for a postponement of the end of the trial.

Bolsonaro, absent from all sessions of the trial that began last week at the TSE headquarters in Brasilia, did not appear this Friday either.

The former captain is in Belo Horizonte (Minas Gerais, southeast), where he plans to have lunch with members of his Liberal Party (PL), the group reported.

Bolsonaro, who narrowly lost the October elections to Lula, defends his innocence.

“I have not committed any crime by meeting ambassadors. Wanting to take away my political rights for abuse of political power is inexplicable,” he told reporters on Thursday.

Bolsonaro’s lawyer, Tarcisio Vieira, expected that if convicted, he would appeal the decision to the Federal Supreme Court.

What happened

The case revolves around an event with diplomats organized by Bolsonaro at the presidential residence of Alvorada, in which he assured without evidence that he was trying to correct “breakdowns” in the electronic voting system with the “participation of the armed forces”.

In his speech, broadcast on public TV and social networks, Bolsonaro said that the alleged fragility of the system could serve to manipulate the result against him, something he repeated repeatedly during the election campaign against Lula.

The four judges who have already voted to convict him have strongly criticized his conduct.

The investigator of the case, Benedito Gonçalves, associated Bolsonaro with a “violent speech and lies” that “brought the credibility of electoral justice under check”, saying the meeting with the diplomats “served to create a state of collective paranoia to awaken”. about the electoral system.

Bolsonaro’s speech became a “delusion with disastrous consequences for democracy”, and it was not an isolated act, but something “strategically linked over time, for electoral purposes”, stressed the president, Judge André Ramos Tavares .

“What could be more serious for a head of state than to mobilize, for electoral purposes, the apparatus of the Republic to deliberately convey the idea that the Brazilian elections are not fair?” Magistrate Floriano Marques added, justifying his condemnatory vote .

The only opinion favorable to Bolsonaro so far was that of Raul Araújo, for whom “the intensity of the conduct was not such as to justify the extreme degree of exclusion”.

Bolsonaro faces other investigations

Following their leader’s defeat in October (with 50.9% to 49.1% of the vote), radical Bolsonaristas blocked roads and encamped in front of barracks across the country, calling for military intervention.

On January 8, a week after Lula’s inauguration, thousands of Bolsonarists raided and looted the Presidency, Congress and Supreme Court buildings in Brasilia.

The far-right faces more than a dozen other administrative trials in electoral court and is the subject of five Supreme Court investigations, with sentences that include jail time.