Jair Bolsonaro runs the risk of becoming ineligible or even being detained for participating in the attacks on the 8th in Brasília, among other processes. But, even if he escapes justice, allies and opposition agree that he has lost electoral capital, by revealing himself to be politically silent, since the October suffrage, and physically absent, since the inauguration of rival Lula da Silva. In Florida, on vacation, he witnessed the international shock caused by the invasions, he saw a minister arrested, the millionaire expenses with the presidential card disclosed and the hunger in indigenous reserves, which he ignored, wide open.
With the former president predictably out of action in 2026, where could the 58 million votes he won in 2022 go?
The right, sensing the vacuum, moves to fill it. For the social scientist Jorge Chaloub, who studies the Brazilian post-war right, “Bolsonaro did not create a party nor did he manage to completely dominate a party, so the tendency now is for his field to pulverize”. Anthropologist Letícia Cesarino, from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, stressed that “the extreme right in Brazil is not just Bolsonarism”, in a conversation with the Brazilian edition of the newspaper Deutsche Welle.
“Bolsonaro’s lethargy, since his defeat in October, has opened up a giant space in the race for leadership of the opposition to the Lula government,” opined Thomas Traumann, a researcher at Faculdade Getúlio Vargas, in a column on the website Poder360. “And the real threat that the Federal Supreme Court inquiry into the January 8 attempt ends with the suspension of their political rights made the dispute public”.
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