Ex-Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to stand trial over 2022 coup attempt

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro will stand trial for allegedly conspiring to overthrow the government after he lost a 2022 election, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday, moving swiftly in a case that could reshape the political landscape.

A five-judge panel decided unanimously to put Bolsonaro on trial. If found guilty in the court proceedings expected later this year, Bolsonaro could face a long prison sentence, isolating the far-right firebrand who has avoided naming a political heir.

Soon after the ruling, Bolsonaro held a press conference in Brasilia to deliver a lengthy defence against what he called “grave and baseless accusations”.

“It seems they have something personal against me,” he said, referring to the judges. Coups, he said, “have troops, have guns and have leadership. They haven’t found who this leader would be.”

In his opening remarks on Wednesday, Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is overseeing the case, screened dramatic footage of Bolsonaro’s supporters storming government buildings in violent scenes that unfolded just a week after the inauguration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in January 2023.

Moraes cast that insurrection as the result of Bolsonaro’s “systematic effort” to discredit the election he lost and then conspire to overturn using violence, with the help of senior military officers and cabinet members.

Bolsonaro, a former army captain who served as Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2022, is accused of five crimes, including an attempt to violently abolish the democratic rule of law and a coup d’etat. He has denied any wrongdoing and denounced the case as politically motivated.

The Supreme Court began reviewing charges against Bolsonaro and seven close allies in a Tuesday session he voluntarily attended, sitting silently in the first row in a scene reminiscent of US President Donald Trump’s trial last year.

In contrast with the tangle of criminal cases that had involved Trump, Brazilian courts and investigators have moved swiftly against Bolsonaro, threatening to end his political career and fracture the right-wing movement he built over the past decade.

Wednesday’s ruling, roughly a month after Brazil’s top prosecutor presented charges, reflected an extraordinary pace for a top court that often takes years to decide major cases.

The speed reinforced views that the justices are keen to wrap up the trial before the 2026 presidential campaign gets underway.

Bolsonaro has insisted he will run for president again next year, despite a ruling by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court that barred him from running for public office until 2030 for his efforts to discredit the country’s voting system.

Ahead of the landmark court hearing, Bolsonaro called a beachfront rally, in Rio de Janeiro, hoping to seize on Lula’s waning popularity and pressure Congress to pass an amnesty bill favoring him and his jailed supporters.

The demonstration, which some allies suggested could draw more than a million backers, was widely considered a flop after two independent polling firms found that only between 20,000 and 30,000 people showed up.

Still, political analysts expect the trial to galvanise Bolsonaro’s most avid supporters, who have been working to undermine the Supreme Court’s credibility in Brazil and abroad.

“There are two trials: the first against the accused and the second about the Supreme Court itself,” said Leonardo Barreto, a partner at Brasilia-based consultancy Think Policy.

Bolsonaro’s allies in Congress, where conservative lawmakers have voiced concerns about overreaching by the court, are unlikely to abandon him, Barreto said, adding that “he has something all politicians value the most, which is votes.”

As part of the case against Bolsonaro, the court also accepted charges against two retired generals, his former Defence Minister Paulo Sergio Nogueira and former Chief of Staff Walter Braga Netto, who was also his running mate in the 2022 election.

The ruling marks the first time high-ranking military officials will be put on trial for attempting to abolish democracy, a sharp break with the impunity that shadowed nearly a century of military coups in Brazil’s history.

Unlike Argentina and Chile, where armed forces also brought down elected governments to install bloody dictatorships during the Cold War, Brazil never punished the leaders of its military regime from 1964 to 1985.

“This attempted coup was possible because the military didn’t think they would be held accountable,” said Pedro Fassoni Arruda, a political science professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo. Instead, he said, they found “strong repudiation from society”.