With the former president of Brazil convicted of plotting a coup, Global Insight assesses the implications for the country’s democratic resilience ahead of its 2026 presidential election.

It took just ten days for Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court to convict former president Jair Bolsonaro of plotting a military coup to overthrow the government, sentencing him to 27 years and three months in prison.

After hearing testimony from more than 70 witnesses, on 11 September the Court found the former Brazilian leader and seven of his allies guilty on multiple counts of conspiring to overthrow the government after Bolsonaro lost the 2022 election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The conspiracy ultimately failed to win the backing of Brazil’s military and Lula was sworn in as president on 1 January 2023. However, a week later, on 8 January, thousands of Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed and vandalised government buildings in Praça dos Três Poderes in the capital, Brasília.

The incident, which led to around 1,500 arrests by the security forces, underscored the deeply polarised divisions inside the country and drew parallels with the attack on the US Capitol by rioters on 6 January 2021.

Prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling, Bolsonaro was already barred from running for president until 2030 after a 2023 judgment by the Superior Electoral Court found him guilty of making false claims – namely, that Brazil’s voting systems were vulnerable to hacking and fraud – ahead of the 2022 election. The 70-year-old had declared his intention to fight that ban to allow him to stand for a second term.

Bolsonaro and his legal team also questioned the impartiality of the Supreme Court’s justices, including Alexandre de Moraes who was presiding over the trial.

It was in this hyper-politicised context that, in September, Brazil’s Supreme Court was faced with the monumental question of whether to convict the former leader, who governed Brazil from January 2019 to December 2022, of conspiring to overthrow the government.

Breaking the cycle

At the beginning of the trial, Moraes reportedly took several minutes to rebut criticism against him and the Court, saying the justices would ‘judge impartially and deliver justice in each case, regardless of threats or coercion, ignoring internal or external pressures’.

Although one justice voted to acquit the former president, the remaining four members of the panel found him guilty, citing evidence of an extensive plot to assassinate Lula, Lula’s running mate Geraldo Alckmin and Moraes.

The Supreme Court’s ruling to convict not only Bolsonaro but also seven co-conspirators has been hailed as a landmark judgment for a country that still bears the scars of its 21-year military dictatorship four decades later.

‘The Court said it was not only Bolsonaro, but a group of people – including those in very high-ranking positions in the military and people that are still holding positions in government – that used the state machinery to prevent the democratic transition,’ says Laura Trajber Waisbich, a political scientist based in São Paulo and former Director of the Brazilian Studies Programme at the University of Oxford.

While Trajber Waisbich says that, historically, Brazil has grappled with attempts by the military to ‘correct’ its democracy, she hopes the ruling will send a powerful message across the country and further afield that nobody is above the law. ‘This is important for countries with authoritarian legacies, particularly those, like ours, in which the military played a role in fomenting and fostering these coups,’ she says.

In 1988 Brazil promulgated its Constitution, marking the country’s triumphant return to democracy after more than two decades of dictatorship. However, it was only in 2021 that a Brazilian court issued its first conviction for human rights abuses committed during its 1964–1985 military dictatorship.

Oscar Vilhena Vieira, Dean of the School of Law of the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, says Bolsonaro’s conviction demonstrates just how far Brazil has come in terms of tackling impunity. ‘Since the beginning of our republic in 1889, there have been more than ten movements that destabilised constitutional order,’ he says. ‘The military participated in all of them. In none of these cases were those involved punished. In Brazil, impunity for those who attack democracy has always been the rule. This trial breaks that cycle. The cost of attempting a coup has gone up.’

Public and political backlash

The public reaction to the Court’s ruling has been predictably divided. In a survey published by polling institute Datafolha on 16 September, some 50 per cent of respondents supported the idea of Bolsonaro being jailed, while 43 per cent said he shouldn’t go to prison.

However, Carlos Roberto Siqueira Castro, a senior partner at SiqueiraCastro in Rio de Janeiro, says there has been little evidence to suggest that members of the public regard the sentence as too severe. ‘There is only a minority segment of society that considers the sentences somewhat severe, which relates solely to the so-called sentencing calculation – dosimetria das penas – and not to the culpability of those convicted,’ he says.

Bolsonaro remains on house arrest and his legal team have said they intend to appeal the verdict. However, any appeal must be conducted via a procedure known as embargos de declaração – a process that seeks to correct any potential inconsistencies, omissions or contradictions in the judgment. This procedure has ‘very narrow admissibility requirements,’ says Siqueira Castro. If it goes ahead, the appeal process is expected to be completed by the end of 2025.

As the prospects of a legal challenge appear slim, a group of Bolsonaro’s most fervent supporters continue to claim he has been a victim of political persecution. They have succeeded in garnering the support of individuals both in Brazil and further afield, including US President Donald Trump.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling, the lower house of Brazil’s Congress passed a controversial ‘shielding bill’, which proposed allowing lawmakers to vote via a secret ballot before a legislator is arrested or convicted. A second bill – nicknamed the ‘bandit bill’ or amnesty bill – was also fast-tracked by a group of lawmakers who accuse the Court of judicial overreach. The proposals raised the concern that legislation could ultimately be used to pardon the former president and his fellow co-conspirators.

For Trajber Waisbich, the political pushback to the ruling was not unexpected. ‘The moment that you have the Supreme Court intervening in cases and safeguarding the democratic order, of course it generates tensions with other powers,’ she says. ‘That’s exactly what happened here. Congress then said it doesn’t agree with that interpretation and that it also has powers to legislate over those matters.’ However, the proposals sparked widespread protests across Brazil on 21 September. Three days later the Senate struck down the ‘shielding bill’. The public backlash also weakened political support for the amnesty bill, but Bolsonaro’s supporters are still pushing for it to be approved by the Senate.

Some constitutional law experts have already expressed their concerns that the amnesty bill, if approved, would be unconstitutional. Siqueira Castro says the Constitution already regards ‘the actions of armed groups, whether civilian or military, [as] against the constitutional order’ and is doubtful the amnesty bill will pass. ‘Although [the Constitution] does not explicitly state that such crimes are not subject to legislative amnesty,’ he says, ‘there are strong arguments in the sense that the prohibition of amnesty is also implicitly contained within this constitutional norm.’

These tensions come at a febrile time ahead of Brazil’s presidential election in 2026. The coup trial has extended the ban on Bolsonaro running as president until 2060 – eight years after the end of his sentence.

'Trump of the Tropics'

The coup trial has also exposed a growing tension between the governments of the US and of Brazil.

Bolsonaro’s firebrand approach and tough stance on corruption won over voters in 2018. He quickly earned the nickname ‘Trump of the Tropics’ on account of his incendiary remarks on issues such as gender, race, gun control and the climate.

In July, President Trump – who Bolsonaro has often referred to as a friend – declared the trial against the former Brazilian president a ‘witch hunt’ and followed through on previous threats to impose 50 per cent tariffs on Brazilian goods.

Soon after, the US Treasury Department placed sanctions and visa restrictions on Moraes and other justices involved in the trial – under the auspices of the Global Magnitsky Act. Less than two weeks after the Supreme Court judgment, the Treasury said it had also sanctioned Moraes’ wife and declared it would target more individuals ‘if necessary’.

Matt Kaiser, Co-Chair of the IBA Criminal Law Committee, says such actions are perturbing. ‘It does seem of a piece with the sanctioning of judges at the ICC [the International Criminal Court],’ he says. ‘That’s a dangerous thing that we shouldn’t be doing for rule of law reasons.’

Many comparisons have been drawn between events in Brazil and the US Capitol attack on 6 January 2021. More than four years on from the latter, Kaiser – who’s a partner at law firm Kaiser in Washington, DC – says the riots, their aftermath and the subsequent acquittal of President Trump of allegations in connection with the Capitol attack have left indelible divisions in American society. ‘There are certainly supporters of our current president who think that the January 6 prosecution and other actions against Trump were completely unjustified and divorced from fact and totally political exercises,’ he says. There are also, he adds, many opponents of President Trump who believe that the Department of Justice should have been more aggressive in conducting the prosecution. President Trump denied all allegations in relation to the Capitol attack.

Democratic resilience

Prosecuting former political leaders will always pose huge challenges for the rule of law and democracy. However, Brazil’s Supreme Court has considerable form when it comes to ruling on cases that are highly sensitive politically. In 2021 the Court annulled corruption convictions against Lula, ruling that Sergio Moro – the judge who presided over the investigation that put Lula in prison and who also served as Bolsonaro’s justice minister – was not impartial.

The ruling, which ultimately paved the way for Lula to challenge Bolsonaro at the ballot box in 2022, was highly controversial inside Brazil. However, the UN Human Rights Committee also later found against Lula’s original trial, concluding that it had violated due process.

In Bolsonaro’s trial, Vilhena Vieira believes the Supreme Court once again displayed the strength and democratic resilience typical of Brazil’s institutions today. ‘The Supreme Court [has been] a key player in defending democracy in recent years,’ he says. ‘It is hard to imagine Brazilian democracy surviving without the combined actions of Congress, civil society and the Court itself. It could only occupy this role because it is a strong institution, which over the last decades has exercised constitutional jurisdiction prominently, being called upon to give the final word on matters of the highest political, economic and social relevance.’

Siqueira Castro says that both the attack on the US Capitol by rioters and the events of January 2023 in Brazil were ‘marked by disrespect for constitutional provisions and for the results of legitimate and democratic elections’. He adds that ‘after the savagery, each country chose its own way of dealing with responsibility and accountability for these attacks on democratic institutions’.

For Vilhena Vieira, Brazil’s 1988 Constitution built ‘a highly defensive model of democracy’ and positioned the Supreme Court as an effective bulwark against presidential power. But this trial, he says, has illustrated just how effectively other parts of Brazilian society have also contributed to holding power to account. ‘Politically, part of Brazil’s conservative camp recognised the risks posed by Bolsonaro’s government and resisted his authoritarian impulses,’ he says. ‘On the civil society side, it was possible to build a broad coalition that united business leaders and grassroots movements in defense of democracy. All of this contributed to Brazil’s democracy withstanding Bolsonaro’s attacks.’

Trajber Waisbich says Brazil’s experience could give other countries hope. ‘It’s important to have countries with the complexities of Brazil showing that it is possible to keep rebuilding democracy,’ she says. ‘We never project our democracy as being perfect, but I think the fact that our institutions are somehow able to show robustness is important to the world.’

As similar attacks on democracy continue worldwide, she believes Brazil’s resistance on this occasion will be pivotal as it enters its next election cycle. ‘It has implications for how we think about resistance to democratic erosion and how we think about these new cycles that we’re going to be facing in Brazil, as well as in the US, Latin America and in Europe,’ she says.

Ruth Green is a freelance journalist and can be contacted at ruthsineadgreen@gmail.com

Header image: Supreme Federal Court Palace, Brasília. CC BY-SA 3.0/Wikipedia