One of seven judges in a trial in which former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro is accused of abuse of power on Tuesday to voted bar him from running in the 2026 elections, with the other judges to deliver their rulings later this week.
The Brazilian Superior Electoral Tribunal is trying Bolsonaro over a televised meeting he held with foreign diplomats in July last year — three months before his election defeat to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva — at which Bolsonaro said that there were security flaws in Brazil’s electronic voting system.
Speaking after his vote, lead judge Benedito Goncalves said that Bolsonaro had resorted to “violent speech and lies” that “endangered the credibility of electoral justice.”
Photo: AFP
If found guilty, Bolsonaro could be sidelined from the 2026 vote.
The trial resumed on Tuesday and the court’s seven judges were expected to hand down their rulings one by one.
As lead judge on the case, Goncalves was the first to vote.
Photo: Reuters
Insiders say that the court is almost certain to convict Bolsonaro, who skipped the first session of the trial in Brasilia last week to meet supporters and attend events in the southern city of Porto Alegre.
“Everyone is saying I’m going to be found ineligible” to run for office, Bolsonaro said in an interview with newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo.
“I’m not going to lose hope... I’m going to continue doing my part,” he added.
Bolsonaro faces an eight-year ban on running for public office if found guilty of the charges of abusing his office and misusing state media.
A third court date has been scheduled for today if the judges did not finish delivering their rulings, and the case could potentially be extended longer.
“Bolsonaro awaits the decision with respect,” said Tarcisio Vieira, a lawyer for the former president, before entering the courtroom.
The evidence was “fragile for a sanction of that magnitude,” Vieira said.
Earlier, Vieira said that if necessary he would appeal to the Brazilian Supreme Court.
At the meeting last year, Bolsonaro spent nearly an hour making his argument to the assembled ambassadors.
He said that electronic voting machines that Brazil has used since 1996 compromised the transparency of the elections.
Opponents say the event contravened electoral law, given that it was organized with state resources, held in the official presidential residence and broadcast live on public TV in the middle of an election campaign.
The briefing “was aimed at giving the false impression the voting process was obscure, rigged to manipulate the results and award a fraudulent victory to [his] adversary,” prosecutor Paulo Gonet Branco said at last week’s opening hearing.
He linked the former president’s statements to the aftermath of the elections, when Bolsonaro supporters invaded the presidential palace, Congress and Supreme Court on Jan. 8, a week after Lula’s inauguration.
Vieira rejected the allegations.
Bolsonaro, who spent three months in the US after his term ended, has kept a low profile since returning to Brazil in March to serve as honorary president of his Liberal Party.
He faces a raft of other legal challenges, from five Supreme Court investigations that could send him to jail — including over the Jan. 8 incidents — to police probes into allegations of a faked COVID-19 vaccination certificate and diamond jewelry snuck into the country from Saudi Arabia.
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