Four years have passed since Jair Bolsonaro laid out three possible denouements for his extraordinary political career, during which the oft-ridiculed fringe politician rose to become one of leading lights of the global populist right alongside Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump.
“Going to jail, being killed or victory,” predicted Brazil’s then president as he grappled with a deluge of political crises in August 2021.
Bolsonaro was right. A majority of Brazil’s supreme court judges found the 70-year-old guilty on Thursday of masterminding a failed military coup designed to stop the leftwing winner of the 2022 election, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, taking office.
“Nowhere in the world … has complete immunity against the virus of authoritarianism that creeps in insidiously, distilling its poison to contaminate freedoms and human rights,” Justice Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha told a courtroom in the capital, Brasília, as she cast the deciding vote.
Bolsonaro was sentenced to more than 27 years in prison. Seven co-conspirators were also convicted, including the former head of the navy, Adm Almir Garnier Santos, three four-star army generals, and the former head of Brazil’s answer to MI6.
The historic verdict – the first time a former Brazilian president has been found guilty of trying to overthrow the country’s democracy – appears to have extinguished Bolsonaro’s hopes of one day reclaiming the presidency of South America’s largest democracy.
But experts and politicians from across the spectrum agree the former paratrooper’s political movement, Bolsonarismo, will continue to thrive despite the incarceration of its creator. Bolsonaro received more than 58m votes in the 2022 election and, despite his conviction, remains wildly popular with certain sectors of society, including the fast growing evangelical community, in Brazil’s agricultural heartlands and among members of the security forces and well-educated middle-class conservatives who loathe the left. Pro-Bolsonaro protests still draw tens of thousands of citizens on to the streets.
“It might be the end of Bolsonaro but it is not the end of Bolsonarismo … Bolsonarismo will live on with or without Bolsonaro,” predicted Thaís Oyama, a columnist for O Globo newspaper and the author of a book about the former president.
Guilherme Boulos, a leading leftwing congress member, said Bolsonaro’s downfall was an undeniable blow to the Brazilian right ahead of next year’s presidential election in which Lula will seek a fourth term.
But would it snuff out Bolsonaro’s movement?
“No,” Boulos replied emphatically during an interview in his congressional office overlooking some of the buildings vandalised by Bolsonaro supporters during their January 2023 rampage through Brasília. “The far right – in Brazil and around the world – has built a solid social base which goes well beyond the figure of Bolsonaro.
“Bolsonaro is the leader of this movement in Brazil. But to claim his imprisonment will put an end to a certain kind of fascism of the masses that has been built on the defence of authoritarian, prejudiced, intolerant, xenophobic ideas, wouldn’t be true. That wouldn’t be reading the Brazilian reality as it is.”
Boulos, 43, is widely viewed as an heir to the 79-year-old Lula.
Bolsonaro is unlikely to be taken into custody for several weeks. It is unclear whether he will be sent to a regular prison or be jailed in a police or military installation.
Already, though, minds are turning to which politician will inherit his votes in next year’s presidential election. Contenders include his senator son, Flávio Bolsonaro, and the former first lady, Michelle Bolsonaro, a charismatic born-again Christian popular with evangelical voters and conservative women.
“People were electrified when Michelle came out to speak [at a recent rally in São Paulo]. She’s already a political celebrity,” said Camila Rocha, a political scientist who studies Brazil’s new right. “I’d say Michelle could turn out to be an Evita Perón of the Brazilian extreme right. She has the potential.”
Others believe the smart money is on São Paulo’s rightwing governor, Tarcísio de Freitas, a former army captain who was infrastructure minister in Bolsonaro’s 2019-2023 administration. On the eve of this week’s verdict, Freitas lashed out at the judicial “tyranny” of the supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes – a move clearly designed to appeal to orphaned Bolsonaro voters seeking a new leader.
Oyama said that by radicalising his rhetoric, Freitas was trying to seduce those orphans and stop the right fragmenting after Bolsonaro’s incarceration, with hardcore Bolsonaristas siding with one of his relatives or another populist successor, and members of the conservative establishment backing another, less radical name. “Lula will without doubt win re-election if the right splits,” he predicted.
Whoever emerges as Bolsonaro’s successor, Boulos expects next year’s election to be a gruelling battle for the left against a rightwing movement he believes will receive support from Donald Trump and US big-tech firms.
Trump unsuccessfully tried to influence the outcome of Bolsonaro’s trial, claiming the prosecution was “a political execution” and a “witch hunt” designed to destroy his ally’s career.
In the lead-up to this week’s judgement, Trump hit Brazilian imports with 50% tariffs and sanctioned Moraes. Asked about the situation in Brazil on Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters Trump was “unafraid to use the economic might, the military might of the United States of America, to protect free speech around the world”.
Boulos believes US pressure will continue in the lead-up to the 2026 vote, even with Bolsonaro behind bars. “We’re talking about the richest companies on the planet, the planet’s biggest billionaires, and the president of the most powerful nation on earth taking direct action in Brazil to favour the extreme right,” he said. “It’s going to be war.”
