Action puts Bolsonaro’s arrest in the realm of the possible – 03/05/2023 – Politics

Never has the meme “What a week!/It’s only Wednesday” made so much sense in Brazilian politics.

The Federal Police operation against Jair Bolsonaro (PL) interrupted a sequence of good news for the former president since last Monday (1), when he was received by a crowd at the Agrishow, in Ribeirão Preto, re-editing the golden moments of its 2018 campaign.

The next day, a new victory, this time demoralizing for the government Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and Minister Alexandre de Moraes (STF), with the withdrawal of the PL from Fake News after intense mobilization of big techs and the right .

The attack on Bolsonarism when the week is not even halfway through brings together several symbolic and potentially explosive elements.

The most obvious, revives the discourse that there would be a political and legal collusion against the former president, which would be the continuation of an alleged persecution that occurred in the electoral campaign.

Bolsonarism does not reach the level of Trumpism in denouncing that the election was stolen, but there is a latent feeling even among moderate allies of the former president (if that exists) that the rules were biased to elect Lula.

That vision, which had been dormant, now returns with force. As an ally said, it had been a long time since Bolsonaro had amended such a positive sequence, and the response was retaliation by the PF and Moraes.

The operation brings yet another trigger, this time quite negative for the former president, the pandemic. It is a subject that will haunt Bolsonaro for years to come, in a field in which he finds it difficult to justify himself even to his closest allies.

Pandemic is poison for Bolsonaro’s image and makes him more politically vulnerable to judicial offensives.

The impression that remains is that the ground is slowly being prepared for a definitive siege of the former president, which leads to the most serious consequence of the operation: the end of the fantasy that his arrest is a complete impossibility.

It was always known, including among advisers and lawyers, that Bolsonaro would face a heavy judicial offensive in 2023, on several fronts. The ineligibility by the TSE (Superior Electoral Court), which was already probable, is now consolidated as an almost certainty.

Already sending him to jail remains a less likely scenario than the opposite. But the presence of the feds in his home, the seizure of cell phones and the arrest of aides make the hypothesis plausible.

Interestingly, the steps taken against Lula in Lava Jato can serve as a script. In March 2016, he was visited by the PF in his apartment in São Bernardo do Campo. At the time, PT members warned that arresting the former president would be playing with fire, even in the language of Bolsonarists now. The rest is history.

There is a possibility that the movement against the former president will boost his political capital and put him in a position that he has always liked, that of being persecuted by the “system”.

There are so many political and judicial fronts against Bolsonaro, however, that it’s hard to see how he could come out politically stronger. Rather, the more likely scenario is that there will be other weeks that appear to be longer than seven days.