On had decried it so much, this Brazilian democracy. Corrupt, violent, unstable, crooked, able to bring out figures as dangerous and eccentric as Jair Bolsonaro, who remained in power until the 1er January. In recent years, it is an understatement to say that the Latin American giant had disappointed and worried, ranked by many as a vulgar banana republic.
But on June 30, the situation changed. Jair Bolsonaro was finally sentenced to eight years of ineligibility for “abuse of power” and “misuse of the means of communication” after his attacks against Brazilian democracy and its system of electronic ballot boxes. At 68, the former president, at the head of one of the most powerful far-right movements on the planet, is therefore deprived of the ballot until 2030. A real political death sentence.
For the captain, the legal troubles are just beginning. Jair Bolsonaro is prosecuted in several dozen cases (up to 600, according to his own party, the Liberal Party). Environmental crimes, inaction in the face of Covid-19, falsification of vaccination certificates, corruption, nepotism, preparation for a coup d’etat… The former far-right president has every chance of ending his political career behind bars.
Is this the end of impunity in Brazil, a country that has seen generations of criminal leaders escape conviction? It is in any case the wish of the judges, and in particular of the most important of them: Alexandre de Moraes, member of the Federal Supreme Court and current head of electoral justice. Privileged target of the far right, he was the thinking head of the conviction of Jair Bolsonaro.
Heavy artillery against bolsonarists
But this ineligibility is far from being the only initiative taken to counter the extreme right. Investigations, searches, censorship of bills, very heavy fines, blocking of hundreds of accounts on social networks, dismissal of public officials, prison sentences… For four years, the Brazilian justice system has used heavy artillery against the Bolsonarists. The most spectacular operation remains the express arrest of more than 2,000 supposed rioters, suspected of having ransacked the institutions of Brasilia, on January 8th.
Some then cried out against the abuse of power, authoritarianism or even a “dictatorship of judges”. This was the case within the American media, with several figures of the libertarian movement, defenders of unlimited freedom of expression. Among them are Twitter boss Elon Musk and journalist Glenn Greenwald. The latter went so far as to accuse Alexandre de Moraes of establishing a real “censorship regime”. To read it, his action would represent an even more serious threat to democracy than Bolsonaro.
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