Bolsonaro indictment leaves Brazil’s tropical Trump staring at prospect of jail

At the height of Jair Bolsonaro’s haywire presidency, Brazilian activists projected their deepest desire on to the Tower of London, where Guy Fawkes once languished after plotting to blow up parliament and assassinate the king.

“Jail Bolsonaro,” their wordplay read.

This week, after Brazil’s ex-president was formally accused of masterminding a murderous conspiracy of his own – to allegedly overthrow the government and assassinate foes with bullets and poison – his critics felt that day was finally drawing near.

“I’d be extremely worried if I were in his shoes,” said Cesar Calejon, the author of several critical books about Bolsonaro and his radical political project.

“I think it’s highly unlikely this process won’t end with Jair Bolsonaro in jail,” Calejon said, celebrating a momentous “inflection point” he believed would seal Bolsonaro’s demise and dramatically “dehydrate” his movement.

Bolsonaro’s political future looked bleak even before this week’s accusations, which the ex-president denies. In 2023, one year after he lost power to his leftwing rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro was banned from seeking office for eight years for peddling disinformation about Brazil’s electronic voting system. That decision by electoral authorities scuppered Bolsonaro’s plans for a Donald Trump-like revival in the next presidential election, in 2026, and has already sparked a slow-burn war of succession between rightwing pretenders jostling to claim his crown.

Potential heirs include the governors of two of Brazil’s richest states, São Paulo and Minas Gerais, Tarcísio de Freitas and Romeu Zema; a country singer with 45 million followers on Instagram called Gusttavo Lima; and Bolsonaro’s wife, the photogenic evangelical Christian Michelle Bolsonaro.

Bolsonaro’s politician son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon recently hailed as “the future president of Brazil”, has also thrown his hat into the ring.

Calejon believed the accusations against Bolsonaro would accelerate that succession struggle, as conservative voters and leaders accepted that the future of Brazil’s most influential rightwing leader almost certainly lay behind bars. If convicted, the 69-year-old politician could face a jail sentence of more than 40 years.

Brazil’s former secretary of justice, the lawyer Augusto de Arruda Botelho, believed the charges against the ex-president were “very robust” and clearly placed Bolsonaro in “a leadership position” of the alleged plot to stop Lula taking power after his election win by staging a coup.

The supreme court will now consider whether to accept the charges – something widely seen as a foregone conclusion – and whether to launch criminal proceedings that would see Bolsonaro stand trial. Botelho said the case was likely to be heard by a group of five supreme court judges although it was hard to predict how long the whole process might take. “This isn’t something that’s going to be over and done with in the next few months … In my experience, it’s unlikely this will all be finished in 2025,” Botelho said.

However long the process takes, there is a striking contrast between Bolsonaro’s miserable outlook and the triumphant political fightback of his ally Trump, who shrugged off allegations that he conspired to overturn the 2020 US election – and last month reclaimed power.

Camila Rocha, a political scientist from the Brazilian research center Cebrap, believed part of the explanation for their drastically different fates was that Brazil’s judiciary had “truly managed to act in defense of democracy”, through the supreme court’s pursuit of those involved in anti-democratic acts. In the US, Rocha argued, “the institutions failed to prevent a politician who openly supported an insurrection from moving forwards with his [presidential] candidacy”.

Botelho believed Brazil’s judiciary had shown itself to be more “solid” and “reliable” than the US system, which was “more susceptible to the political zeitgeist”. “The [Brazilian] supreme court has sought to punish coup plotters and in doing so to defend the democratic rule of law – and it has done a very good job of this,” he said.

With Trump back in the White House, some fear the US president may seek to pressure Brazilian authorities over Bolsonaro. “I can’t say exactly how, or exactly when. But it’s safe to say that Trumpism will try to push for Jair Bolsonaro’s situation to be reversed,” said Calejon.

On Wednesday morning, just hours after charges against Bolsonaro were announced, there was the first hint of possible retaliation from Trump’s camp. The New York Times reported that the US president’s media company was suing the supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes – one of the authorities pro-Bolsonaro plotters stand accused of plotting to assassinate – for alleged acts of censorship against rightwing social media networks.

Some wonder whether the US might offer Bolsonaro sanctuary at its embassy in the capital, Brasília. Others suspect, given Bolsonaro’s ties to Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, that the ex-president might try to hide in Hungary’s diplomatic compound in the hope that an ally wins the 2026 election and offers him a get-out-of-jail card in the form of amnesty.

“Trump is so completely unpredictable and behaves like a lunatic with such frequency that I just don’t know if he’d be capable of offering shelter to someone who has been formally accused of a crime and whose name … should be on Interpol’s wanted list,” said Calejon.

For now though one thing was certain: Bolsonaro had taken a major step towards jail. “What has happened is utterly historic,” Calejon said, “and has the potential to be a watershed moment in Brazilian politics.”

Additional reporting by Tiago Rogero