Justices on Brazil’s top court are debating whether former President Jair Bolsonaro should stand trial for allegedly attempting to stage a coup against the current President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
A five-member panel of the Supreme Court will weigh up evidence presented by the chief prosecutor, who accuses Bolsonaro of leading a plot to prevent his rival Lula from taking office after the latter won the 2022 election.
Bolsonaro, 70, says he is the victim of “political persecution” aimed at preventing him from running again for president in 2026.
The judges are expected to decide before the end of Wednesday whether there is enough evidence for the case to go to trial.
Bolsonaro is already barred from running for public office until 2030 for falsely claiming that Brazil’s voting system was vulnerable to fraud, but he has declared his intention to fight that ban so he can run for a second term in 2026.
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 – one of the five Supreme Court justices now tasked with deciding whether the case should proceed to trial.
The five-member panel will now have to determine if there is enough evidence to put Bolsonaro and seven others accused of being his co-conspirators on trial.
Bolsonaro has denied any wrongdoing all along and on Monday he again maintained he was innocent.
Speaking on a radio podcast, the ex-president said that he was “not at all worried about the accusations” and that he had “good lawyers” representing him.
