Brasilia.- Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) was stripped of his political rights this Friday by the electoral Court, which found him guilty of “abuses of power” during the campaign that last year brought progressive Luiz to the Presidency Inacio Lula da Silva.
With this decision, adopted by five votes to two in the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE), the 68-year-old far-right leader will not be able to run for elective positions or hold positions in the public administration for a period of eight years. counted from October 2022, when the elections won by Lula were held.
The last vote was cast by the president of the TSE, Judge Alexandre de Moraes, who was the target of virulent and permanent attacks by Bolsonaro before and during the electoral campaign, in which he was accused, without any evidence, of “maneuvering” to ” favor” Lula.
According to De Moraes, the sentence is a response to “degrading populism born of hate and anti-democratic speech, which spreads disgusting disinformation” not only in Brazil, but “all over the world”, with the “sole objective” of “misleading » to the voters.
Five of the seven members of the TSE supported the position of the rapporteur of the process, Benedito Gonçalves, who considered Bolsonaro guilty of “abuses of power” during the campaign for the October elections of last year.
The accusation had as its axis a meeting that Bolsonaro convened with fifty foreign ambassadors at the official residence of the Presidency, on July 18, 2022, to once again disqualify the transparency of the electoral system and democracy itself.
This fact, according to the sentence, configured an “abuse of political power, prohibited conduct and information disorder” and also an “improper use of public property and the media”, since Bolsonaro ordered public television to broadcast the event.
The considerations of the majority of the judges went even further and framed that meeting in a “systematic campaign of disinformation” that Bolsonaro maintained against the electoral Justice and all the democratic institutions of the country.
“They were not personal opinions,” as the defense maintained, said Judge De Moraes, who emphasized that they were “permanent and fraudulent lies” that aimed to “subvert and pervert” the electoral process and with that, “democracy itself ».
He added that “freedom of expression” is not “freedom of aggression”, of “lies”, of “misinformation” and “fraud”, nor a tool for “populist and extremist leaders to conquer the voter” with “hate speech and undemocratic” spread on social networks “with a false veneer of truth.”
That campaign included sowing doubts about the electronic voting system that Brazil has been using since 1996 without a single fraud being proven since then, and insults of all caliber launched for months against the TSE, about which Bolsonaro said time and again that there had been decided to “make Lula president”.
Bolsonaro’s speech, according to some judges, could even incite the assault on the headquarters of the three powers on January 8, when a horde of Bolsonaro sowed chaos with the intention of leading the Armed Forces to overthrow Lula.
In fact, the former president is still responding to the courts in a dozen cases, one of which, which is being processed in the Supreme Court, has him as “suspected” of having encouraged that failed coup attempt.
