The conviction of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro earlier this month on coup-plotting charges captures both the strengths and the limits of Brazil’s democracy. Since the fall of the monarchy in 1889, Brazil has experienced at least fifteen coups or coup attempts. Until this month, no coup leader had ever been convicted. The country’s courts have thus demonstrated their capacity to hold the powerful accountable.
The decision prompted foreign observers to commend Brazil’s democratic resilience, but this is far from the end of the story. Legal avenues for Bolsonaro’s appeal remain open, and the case has deepened the country’s already severe polarization. It also exposed Brazil’s heavy reliance on the judiciary to resolve political disputes, raising concerns about judicial overreach and politicization.
Born in São Paulo in 1955, Bolsonaro was nine years old when officers of Brazil’s armed forces seized power in a coup. During the subsequent twenty-one-year military dictatorship, Bolsonaro joined the army and served for fifteen years before leaving to pursue a political career. For three decades, he represented a congressional district in Rio de Janeiro, leaving behind little legislative legacy. In 2018, he rode a wave of right-wing populism to the presidency and governed through the COVID-19 pandemic, during which more than 700,000 Brazilians died.
Bolsonaro lost his bid for a second term in the 2022 election. Days after the inauguration of his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in January 2023, a mob of Bolsonaro’s supporters attacked federal buildings in Brasília in a last-ditch effort to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power. A subsequent investigation found evidence that Bolsonaro had used his official powers and military connections to plot an assassination against Lula and to persuade elements of the armed forces to stage a coup.
This led Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (STF) to charge and convict him—along with seven co-conspirators—of criminal organization, attempted violent abolition of the democratic state, damage to federal property, and destruction of protected heritage. For these crimes, Bolsonaro was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison.
As this case illustrates, the Supreme Court serves as an institutional backstop, stepping in to check executive overreach when Congress will not. Yet its record has not always been consistent. Even after Brazil’s transition to democracy and the adoption of a new constitution in 1988 that granted the court sweeping powers, it often avoided direct confrontation. On paper, the justices appeared powerful; in practice, they were hampered by infighting and opaque backroom maneuvering in the face of executive dominance. Many Brazilians remain haunted by former President Fernando Collor de Mello’s drastic economic stabilization plan in the early 1990s, which attempted to combat hyperinflation through extreme measures—including the confiscation of 80 percent of all bank deposits—and which the Supreme Court failed to block.
In recent years, the court has sent mixed signals that undermined its image as a neutral arbiter of the law. From 2013 to 2016, it took on a central role in the sweeping, multi-year corruption probe known as Operation Car Wash, only to curtail the investigation’s scope once it expanded beyond Lula—then in his first presidential term—and his Workers’ Party. The court also showed uneven attention to issues such as mass incarceration and gender equality, alienating different parts of the political spectrum at different times. The justices began televising their sessions and engaging more actively with the media, exposing their internal rifts and heightening the perception of politicization.
Then came Bolsonaro. Sensing the court’s vulnerabilities, he sought to exploit them by attacking and delegitimizing it in the public eye. Even before his inauguration, his son Eduardo Bolsonaro declared that “a soldier and a corporal” would be enough to shut down the court. In April 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Bolsonaro flouted lockdown rules and joined a pro-dictatorship rally where he demanded the closure of both Congress and the Supreme Court. A year later, he ordered fighter jets to fly over the court building in a symbolic act of intimidation. These gestures were amplified by a coordinated disinformation campaign that eroded public trust in the judiciary.
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