Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, will face trial on charges that he oversaw a vast scheme to cling to power after losing the 2022 elections, including an attempt to overturn the vote and a plot to assassinate the nation’s president-elect, the country’s Supreme Court decided on Wednesday.
The ruling marks a significant effort to hold Mr. Bolsonaro accountable for accusations that he sought to effectively dismantle Brazil’s democracy by orchestrating a broad plan to stage a coup.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who is overseeing the case, said in explaining his decision that there was no doubt Mr. Bolsonaro “knew, handled and discussed” plans for a coup.
Mr. Bolsonaro and seven members of his inner circle, including his running mate and a former spy chief, will be tried on charges filed by prosecutors last month of “violent abolition of the democratic rule of law” and “coup d’état,” among other crimes.
In a surprise move, Mr. Bolsonaro attended the first day of the two-day hearing alongside his lawyers but remained silent.
Mr. Bolsonaro, in a statement, said the court’s decision was politically motivated, calling it an attempt to “silence the opposition.”
Mr. Bolsonaro, who has been barred from running for office until 2030, added that the president should be chosen by Brazilians “at the ballot box, not a handful of judges in a courtroom.”
Celso Sanchez Vilardi, one of Mr. Bolsonaro’s lawyers, did not deny the existence of a coup plot, calling the details of the plan “very serious” in his argument before the high court. But he insisted that there was no link between Mr. Bolsonaro and the scheme.
“Bolsonaro is the most investigated president in the country’s history,” Mr. Vilardi told the court. “Absolutely nothing has been found.”
The five-justice Supreme Court panel voted unanimously to move forward with a trial.
The trial, which has yet to be scheduled, is the fruit of a sweeping two-year investigation in which the police raided homes and offices, arrested people close to Mr. Bolsonaro and secured a key confession from a senior aide to the former president.
In a 884-page report unsealed last November, investigators accused Mr. Bolsonaro of directing and approving a detailed plot, which included plans to annul the election results, disband courts, grant special powers to the military and poison President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva days before he was to take office.
Justice Moraes, who is seen by the far-right as an opponent of Mr. Bolsonaro, was himself the target of assassination plans revealed by the coup probe.
The investigation revealed how close Brazil came to returning to a military dictatorship nearly four decades into its history as a modern democracy.
The scheme, according to prosecutors, also included sowing unfounded doubts about the reliability of Brazil’s electronic voting machines in the months leading up to the 2022 vote. Mr. Bolsonaro claimed he could only lose if the election were rigged in his opponent’s favor.
After Mr. Bolsonaro lost, he and his allies encouraged right-wing protesters to camp out in front of military barracks across the nation, demanding that the army overturn the results. A week after Mr. Lula took office, many of those protesters stormed Brazil’s halls of power in an episode that echoed the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by supporters of President Trump.
Experts say it is unlikely that Mr. Bolsonaro will be arrested ahead of his trial, unless Justice Moraes deems him to be a flight risk.
After the police searched Mr. Bolsonaro’s home and seized his passport last year, he spent two nights in the Hungarian Embassy in Brazil, raising questions over whether he had sought to use his ties with a fellow right-wing leader as leverage to evade possible arrest.
If convicted, Mr. Bolsonaro could face 12 to 40 years in prison, according to the indictment, though political analysts expect any sentence to be shorter. A conviction would also make him permanently ineligible to run for office under current law.
In an attempt to save Mr. Bolsonaro’s political future, lawmakers allied with the former president have tried to amend a Brazilian law that prohibits convicted criminals from running for office.
They have also pushed for a new bill that would pardon those convicted over the Jan. 8, 2023 insurrection in Brazil’s capital, which could also benefit Mr. Bolsonaro’s efforts to run again.
Mr. Bolsonaro also appears to be placing a bet on support from Mr. Trump. Last week, one of Mr. Bolsonaro’s sons said that he plans to seek political asylum in the United States and lobby the Trump administration to pressure Brazilian authorities to halt what he calls the unjust pursuit of his father.
Last month, just hours after Brazilian prosecutors indicted Mr. Bolsonaro, Mr. Trump’s media company sued Justice Moraes, the judge overseeing the case, in U.S. federal court, accusing him of illegally censoring right-wing voices on social media.
