Brazil’s electoral court voted to ban Jair Bolsonaro from office for eight years for making false claims about last year’s election, a ruling that could effectively end the right-wing former president’s political career.
Five of the court’s seven judges agreed Friday that Bolsonaro had abused the powers of his office by using a meeting with foreign ambassadors to cast doubt on the country’s electronic voting system just months before his defeat to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The decision will render him ineligible to hold or seek office until 2030, when he will be 75, and rule him out of the next presidential election three years from now.
But the former army captain whose improbable rise to the presidency in 2018 unleashed a coarser, more radical version of conservativism in Latin America’s largest nation is poised to retain influence over a movement known commonly as Bolsonarismo.