A seven-judge panel in Brazil on Friday barred former president Jair Bolsonaro from running for office until 2030, effectively ending his hopes for a political comeback after narrowly losing to left-wing Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was himself convicted of taking bribes in 2017.
Lula’s conviction was annulled by the Brazilian Supreme Court in March 2021, clearing the way for him to launch his ultimately successful campaign to unseat Bolsonaro and return to the presidency, an office he held from 2003 to 2010.
The panel of judges from Brazil’s electoral court on Friday ruled that Bolsonaro violated election laws by spreading “misinformation” about rigged voting machines in July 2022. Bolsonaro claimed voting machines automatically filled out ballots for Lula’s left-wing Workers’ Party in 2018 and also claimed the election system was penetrated by hackers.
Bolsonaro won the 2018 election despite these alleged misdeeds, and while he said he did not question the integrity of the then-upcoming 2022 presidential election in the meeting with foreign diplomats at his presidential residence where he repeated his vote-rigging allegations, he said on other occasions that he might not accept the outcome.
Another left-wing party, the Democratic Labor Party (PDT), filed suit against Bolsonaro over the July 2022 meeting and asked the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) to bar him from running for office again.
The court agreed on Friday, making Bolsonaro the third Brazilian president to be barred from running again — the other two being Lula, whose ban was overturned, and Fernando Collor de Mello, who was impeached on corruption charges and resigned three years after becoming Brazil’s first democratically-elected president in 1989. Collor, incidentally, was sentenced to eight years and ten months in prison on May 31 of this year for taking bribes from Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company.
“This is an injustice against me, my God in heaven! Show me something concrete I have done against democracy. Perhaps my crime was doing the right thing for four years,” Bolsonaro exclaimed during the TSE’s deliberations on Thursday.
Bolsonaro could appeal his election ban to the Brazilian Supreme Court, but his chances there would appear poor, as he clashed with the court many times during his presidency and has accused it of trying to sway the election against him. Also, there are 15 more cases pending against Bolsonaro at the TSE, any of which could result in another election ban.
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