Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro will face trial for allegedly attempting to orchestrate a coup against current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, according to a verdict by the country’s highest court.
The Supreme Court’s five-member panel voted unanimously in favour of the trial continuing.
It could begin as early as this year, and if proven guilty, Bolsonaro, 70, could face years in prison.
Bolsonaro told a press conference following the court’s conclusion that the charges against him were “grave and baseless”. He has consistently denied attempting to disrupt Lula’s inauguration.
“It seems they have something personal against me,” he added in a post on X, referring to the judges.
Bolsonaro claims he is the target of “political persecution” designed to keep him from standing for president again in 2026.
The panel was tasked with deciding if there was sufficient evidence to put Bolsonaro on trial.
Alexandre de Moraes, the panel’s head judge, was the first to vote on Wednesday.
He proposed that Bolsonaro, as well as seven other former government officials classified as “co-conspirators” by the attorney general, face trial for the events that led to his followers seizing government facilities on January 8, 2023, a week after Lula’s inauguration.
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; and Gen Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira, former defence minister.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain and supporter of US President Donald Trump, governed Brazil from January 2019 to December 2022.
In October 2022, he narrowly lost a presidential election run-off against Lula, his left-wing rival.
Bolsonaro never officially conceded defeat. Many of his supporters spent weeks camped outside army bases in an attempt to persuade the military to prevent Lula from being sworn in as president on January 1, 2023.
On January 8, 2023, a week after Lula’s inauguration, thousands of Bolsonaro supporters assaulted government facilities in Brasilia, allegedly in an attempt to overthrow him.
Parts of the buildings were looted, and police arrested 1,500 people.
Bolsonaro was in the United States at the time and has consistently denied any connection to the rioters.
A federal police investigation into the riots and the circumstances leading up to them has begun.
The investigators stated that they had evidence of a “criminal organisation” that had “acted in a coordinated manner” to retain then-President Bolsonaro in office.
Their 884-page report, unsealed in November 2024, claimed 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’état and eliminate the democratic rule of law.”
Brazil’s Attorney General, Paulo Gonet, went even further in his report published last month, accusing Bolsonaro of not only being aware of but also leading the criminal organisation that he claims sought to overthrow Lula.
According to Gonet’s investigation, the alleged scheme included plans to poison Lula and assassinate Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court justice who led the panel that concluded the case should go to trial.
Bolsonaro has consistently denied the allegations, claiming they are politically motivated and aimed to prevent him from running for president again.
While he is already forbidden from running for public office until 2030 for falsely alleging that Brazil’s voting system was open to fraud, he has proclaimed his desire to challenge the prohibition and seek a second term in 2026.
However, the Supreme Court’s ruling on Wednesday has put him at a significant disadvantage in terms of a possible candidature.
