Gerardo Lissardy
BBC News World
Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been barred from contesting elections until 2030, a sentence that deals a severe blow to him and his right-wing movement, although his controversial political career seems far from over.
A majority of five of the seven judges of the Brazilian Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) ruled this Friday in favor of declaring the ex-president ineligible due to abuse of power when he served as president between 2019 and 2022.
The other two magistrates opposed the disqualification of the former president, which will last eight years from last October.
The case responds to a complaint by a political party for unfounded questions that Bolsonaro made about the security of the Brazilian electoral system during a meeting with foreign ambassadors prior to last year’s elections, in which he was defeated by the current president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The investigating judge in the case, Benedito Gonçalves, maintained that Bolsonaro’s meeting with diplomats, broadcast on official TV and social networks, served to “incite a state of collective paranoia in the face of the accumulation of false or distorted information” about the electoral system.
“I’m not dead” politically
The former president referred to the ruling and he told the press that the political incapacity he faces does not mean that he is “dead” politically.
“Here, in Juiz de Fora, they tried to kill me not long ago when they stabbed me in the stomach. Today, they stabbed me in the back with the disability for abuse of power,” Bolsonaro said.
“I am not dead, we are going to continue working, we intend to elect several mayors in next year’s elections. It is not the end of the right in Brazil”.
The former president said that he and his defense were also going to appeal the decision before the Federal Supreme Court, the country’s highest court.
The disqualification from contesting the 2026 elections presents the Brazilian right with the difficult challenge of finding a leader who can keep its motley electorate together.
“His absence (in the elections) leaves a void and that void will have to be filled by someone,” Marco Antonio Teixeira, a political scientist at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, an elite Brazilian university, told BBC Mundo.
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See original article on BBC