Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro will stand trial for allegedly attempting to stage a coup against current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after a ruling from the country’s top court.
The Supreme Court’s five-member panel voted unanimously in favour of the trial going ahead.
Bolsonaro, 70, denies the charges and says he is the victim of “political persecution” aimed at preventing him from running for president in 2026.
The trial could go ahead as early as this year. If found guilty, Bolsonaro could face years in prison.
The panel was tasked with determining whether there was enough evidence to put Bolsonaro on trial.
The first to cast his vote on Wednesday was the judge heading the panel, Alexandre de Moraes.
He recommended that Bolsonaro, as well as seven other former government officials described by the attorney-general as “co-conspirators”, stand trial over the events which led up to the storming of government buildings by his supporters on 8 January 2023.
The seven men accused of being co-conspirators are:
- Alexandre Ramagem, former spy chief
- Adm Almir Garnier Santos, former navy commander
- Anderson Torres, former security minister
- Gen Augusto Heleno, former minister for institutional security
- Mauro Cid, Bolsonaro’s former assistant
- Gen Walter Braga Netto, former defence minister
- Gen Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira former defence minister
The other justices also voted in favour of Bolsonaro and the seven others going on trial.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain and admirer of US President Donald Trump, governed Brazil from January 2019 to December 2022.
He narrowly lost a presidential election run-off in October 2022 to his left-wing rival, Lula.
Bolsonaro never publicly acknowledged his defeat. Many of his supporters spent weeks camping outside army barracks in an attempt to convince the military to prevent Lula from being sworn in as president as scheduled on 1 January 2023.
A week after Lula’s inauguration, on 8 January 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters stormed government buildings in the capital, Brasilia, in what federal investigators say was an attempted coup.
Parts of the buildings were ransacked and police arrested 1,500 people.
Bolsonaro was in the United States at the time and has always denied any links to the rioters.
A federal police investigation into the riots and the events leading up to them was launched.
The investigators said they had found evidence that there was “a criminal organisation” which had “acted in a coordinated manner” to keep then-President Bolsonaro in power.
Their 884-page report, which was unsealed in November 2024, alleged that “then-President Jair Messias Bolsonaro planned, acted and was directly and effectively aware of the actions of the criminal organisation aiming to launch a coup d’etat and eliminate the democratic rule of law”.
Brazil’s Attorney-General, Paulo Gonet, went even further in his report published last month, in which he accused Bolsonaro of not just being aware but of leading the criminal organisation that he says sought to overthrow Lula.
According to Gonet’s report, the alleged plot included a plan to poison Lula and shoot dead Alexandre de Moraes – the Supreme Court justice who headed the panel which has now decided that the case should proceed to trial.
Bolsonaro has always denied the allegations which he says are politically motivated and designed to stop him from running for president again.
While he is already barred from running for public office until 2030 for falsely claiming that Brazil’s voting system was vulnerable to fraud, he had declared his intention to fight that ban so he could run for a second term in 2026.
However, Wednesday’s decision by the Supreme Court has placed a very high hurdle in his way to a possible candidacy.