Five of the seven judges on the TSE voted in favor of suspending Bolsonaro, while two opposed the idea.

Bolsonaro called the decision a “stab in the back” and said he planned to appeal the ruling at the Supreme Court.

“I’m not dead, we’re going to keep working,” he told journalists.

Bolsonaro is accused of creating a nationwide movement seeking to overturn last October’s narrow election defeat to his leftist rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro’s campaign culminated in the January 8 invasion of government buildings in Brasília by thousands of his supporters.

At the time of the unrest, Bolsonaro was in Florida, but prosecutors link his earlier comments about the vote to his supporters’ later actions.

Particularly at issue was a July meeting, before the vote, when Bolsonaro summoned foreign ambassadors to vent unfounded claims about Brazil’s voting machines being prone to fraud, as he embarked on a campaign first undermining the election and then questioning the validity of his defeat that would prove eerily reminiscent to that of Donald Trump in the US roughly a year before.

The lead justice in the case, Benedito Gonçalves, voted earlier in the week to make the former army captain ineligible for political office for eight years, saying that he had “used the meeting with ambassadors to spread doubts and incite conspiracy theories” ahead of the vote.

The Brazilian ex-president trod a slightly more fine line than Trump did after his election defeat in 2020, not explicitly claiming to be the rightful winner in quite the same manner, but also refusing to congratulate Lula or to concede defeat. He left for Florida two days before his term ended, skipping Lula’s inauguration.

He returned to Brazil in March after his self-imposed transitional exile, but has been keeping a comparatively low profile since then.

It’s not the only legal difficulty the former president is caught up in. He also faces five Supreme Court investigations, including for allegedly inciting the January 8 attacks.

Brazilian federal police are also investigating allegations that an aide faked a COVID immunization certificate for the vaccine-skeptic Bolsonaro, and that Bolsonaro tried to illegally take possession of jewelry worth millions given as a gift to his wife by Saudi Arabia in 2021.

DW

The magistrate Luis Barroso, who was leading the case, was the first to vote against Lula’s right to postulate late Friday, arguing respect for Brazil’s constitution.

Minister Edson Fachin later voted in favor of Lula, on the grounds of the UN Human Rights Committee’s legally binding demand to guarantee political rights for Lula, let him run in the elections and even campaign from prison if necessary.

Fachin said an international agreement couldn’t be violated by a court. Barroso, on the other hand, decided to dismiss it. Fachin was the only one to vote in Lula’s favor.

Judge Admar Gonzaga, who as a lawyer worked for Lula’s handpicked successor Dilma Rousseff during her 2010 election, cast the decisive vote in the 6-1 decision that sealed the leftist icon’s ejection from the presidential election.

“What is at stake here today is the equality of all citizens before the law and the Constitution,” Judge Og Fernandes told the court in his vote to declare Lula ineligible.

The trial was brought forward more than two weeks at the request of Barroso, who said he preferred “the list of candidates to be defined before the beginning of the cost-free propaganda period.”

Barroso also said Lula’s sentence is not based on innocence or guilt, but rather on the fact that he was convicted of a crime – unjustly or not –which legally prevents him from running in the elections.

But it’s not all over for Lula. The Workers’ Party (PT) and the former president’s defense team can still appeal to the Supreme Court. Another alternative is to postulate an alternate president and vice-president formula, but that could limit PT’s chances.

Lula enjoys about 39 percent of the vote intention in most polls, the most recent by Datafolha, leaving far behind right-wing Jair Bolsonaro with 19 percent.

Lula has been associating his name with Fernando Haddad, who is currently the vice-presidential candidate and would replace Lula if the need ultimately arose to transfer the vote intention.

The party has until Sept. 17 to change the names on the ballot, but the court has given it just 10 days to make the alteration.

Ads by the Workers Party calling on Brazilians to vote for Lula began to appear on social media on Friday, and will be shown on television as of Saturday when the race enters its final 35 days of campaigning.

The court also ruled that Lula should not appear in Workers Party television and radio ads campaign until the ticket has been officially altered to remove him.

The court on Thursday had rejected another request by opponents of Lula to exclude his name from opinion polls.

teleSUR

Will the shared election campaign the two ran in 2016 be retroactively invalidated due to accusations that it was financed with undisclosed campaign donations?

That is exactly the question that the seven judges of Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) now have to answer. Their decision will present a serious test for Brazilian democracy.

For the trial, which began Tuesday, is taking place at a particularly touchy moment: The Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) corruption investigations that have been rocking the country for the last four years have finally reached President Temer himself.

Former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in a guest editorial in the Spanish daily newspaper El País, appealed to representatives to uphold the country’s constitution: “The greater the uncertainty, the more important it is to remain true to the constitution.”

Politicians, Cardoso wrote, must realize that the people could no longer accept systematic party, government and business corruption.

Brazil’s justice system has been terrifying politicians and businessmen since the 2014 election campaign. Initially, their Lava Jato investigations centered on bribes paid by major companies to representatives of the ruling Workers’ Party (PT). Since then, it has expanded to include all parties.

This rigorous elucidation by Brazil’s justice system, whose judges and prosecutors are viewed as rock stars these days, is new. The implementation of a leniency program, introduced in 2013, which has made many accused willing to cooperate with the courts in return for reduced sentences, has exposed long-running channels of corruption.

To date, a total of 82 persons have been formally charged, and 11 have been sentenced to jail. Among those forced to vacate their posts so far: Eduardo Cunha, former speaker of Brazil’s lower house of congress, the Chamber of Deputies; Marcelo Odebrecht, CEO of the Brazilian construction conglomerate Odebrecht; as well as nine ministers in the Temer administration. Investigations of ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are ongoing.

The current investigations are also putting increased pressure on President Temer. He is accused of having consented to providing hush money payments to imprisoned Chamber of Deputies President Cunha. According to Joesley Batista, billionaire chairman of JBS, the world’s largest meat processing company, President Temer accepted US$ 4.6 million in bribes in 2014.

Temer’s Trump Card

Now, in the heat of the corruption investigation, comes the new trial at the Superior Electoral Court. “Temer is still in power because there is no consensus about who could replace him. That is his trump card,” said Brazil expert Oliver Stuenkel, a professor for international relations at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in São Paulo.

Stuenkel also offered a prediction: “The TSE is responsible for the political stability of the country. It is very unlikely that judges will declare Rousseff and Temer’s candidacy invalid if it would threaten Brazil’s political institutions.”

But should they do so, would Brazil descend into political chaos if faced with its second impeachment of a sitting president in 10 months?

Stuenkel believes it might: “It would be the first time since the end of the military dictatorship that a vice president had taken over and then been forced from office,” he explained. “That would be a massive stress test for the constitution.”

New Elections?

The Brazilian constitution dictates that when a president dies, resigns or is impeached, he or she must be replaced by the president of the Chamber of Deputies if there is no sitting vice president. Then new elections must be held.

If the next regularly scheduled election is less than two years away, the president must be elected by parliament. If it is more than two years away, then the new president must be elected by the people in a general election.

At first glance, it would seem that the path to crisis is clear, The next regularly scheduled election is to be held in October 2018. Thus, until then, Temer will have to remain in power or congress must appoint a replacement.

Nevertheless, following through with that process could prove to be politically infeasible. “An indirect election would be constitutionally correct, but the resulting administration would have even less legitimacy than the current Temer government does,” says Stuenkel.

“Most Brazilians want to have a direct election, but the constitution would have to be changed in order for that to happen.”

Regardless of the TSE’s verdict, which will come Friday at the earliest, but may also take months if the decision is contested, several potential presidential candidates are already warming up on the sidelines. And the campaign has already begun in earnest on social media.

One of the favorites, according to opinion polls, is former environmental minister Marina Silva, who ran for the presidency in 2010 and 2014. “The Temer administration has lost all political support. We need new elections,” she told the internet portal InfoMoney. “We have no need to fear the sovereign decision of the people.”

DW

The case in the Supreme Electoral Tribunal or TSE was long considered a slow-burning sideshow to the developments in Brazil’s corruption revelations, which have now reached the top.

The TSE case alleges that the reelection victory in 2014 of president Dilma Rousseff and her then vice president Temer was fatally tainted by illegal campaign funds and other irregularities and therefore should be annulled.

In other words, if the TSE – due to hold four sessions between late Tuesday and Thursday – rules against Rousseff and Temer, his mandate could be ended.

Until recently the trial was seen as somewhat obscure, with a result at worst leading to a conviction of Rousseff while letting off Temer.

However, since Temer became embroiled in an investigation into crimes including his alleged attempt to pay hush money to a corruption witness, pressure has been building on the TSE to take the opportunity to bring Temer down.

“There is strong and very serious proof,” prosecutor Silvana Batini said. Like many others, she suggested that using the TSE to push Temer aside would be the least traumatic way to end the scandal created by the corruption allegations.

That’s because despite calls for his resignation, Temer is vowing to fight on, while an impeachment procedure in Congress would take months to complete.

The TSE is “a possible alternative for a legitimate, calm exit,” Batini said. However others urge caution, saying the TSE cannot be pressured.

“The TSE ruling is not political. It’s a mistake to think that,” said Fernando Schuler, a political analyst at the Institute of Investigation and Education.

“The political system would like it to happen that way, but the (judges) are basically technical and they will react strongly against any kind of interference. It’s not an impeachment.”

Nevertheless, all eyes are now on the court, given that a guilty verdict that included Temer would leave him hanging by the thinnest of threads.

The president would be able to appeal before the TSE itself and before the Supreme Court. However, the TSE would first have to decide whether he was allowed to remain in office during that period – or be suspended immediately.

Should he be definitively removed from office, Brazil’s Congress, which is likewise mired in corruption scandals, would choose an interim president to serve the rest of Temer’s term until the end of 2018.

Temer, a conservative, only took over last year after the leftist Rousseff was impeached for breaking budgetary rules. Rousseff served as president of Brazil from 2011 until her impeachment and ouster from office on August 31, 2016.

President Temer has proved adept so far at trying to stave off the corruption scandal, which centers on a secret audio recording in which he is heard allegedly blessing a hush money deal.

But when it comes to the STF ruling, his best ally may be one of the judges asking for an adjournment – a frequent occurrence in big trials in Brazil.

But TSE chief justice, Gilmar Mendes, responded to growing chatter about the possibility saying that an adjournment “would not be because the presidency asked for it… The TSE is not the government’s playmate”.

Mercopress

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) decided to postpone a verdict until at least May to hear additional witnesses, including former finance minister Guido Mantega, which plays into Temer’s defense strategy of dragging out the case so he can stay in office.

It is the first time the TSE will decide on the mandate of a sitting president. If the seven-justice tribunal decides that Rousseff and Temer, her running mate, used illegal donations to fund their 2014 campaign, it could annul the election result and remove the conservative president from office.

Congress would then have 30 days to elect a successor, plunging Latin America’s largest nation deeper into the political instability that has prolonged its worst recession on record.

The court granted a request by Rousseff’s defense team for Mantega to defend himself before the tribunal against allegations he raised illegal funds for her 2014 campaign.

It also granted a prosecutor’s request to call Rousseff strategist João Santana as a witness, following allegations that 20 million reais (US$ 6.4 million) of his fees were paid offshore by engineering conglomerate Odebrecht.

The three political parties involved – the Workers Party (PT), the PMDB and PSDB – were also given another five days to present their arguments.

“With the new proceedings, there is no way of knowing when this trial will be over,” said Temer lawyer Gustavo Guedes. The strategy of Temer’s legal team is to delay proceedings as long as possible and appeal any adverse ruling to the Supreme Court so the case is not decided until after the next presidential election in October 2018, sparing his removal from office.

The TSE judge given the task of studying the case, Herman Benjamin, is expected to seek to annul the 2014 election. He criticized the delay in a case that was opened two-and-a-half years ago.

“The 2014 election will go down as the longest in Brazilian history,” Benjamin told the court. “We can’t turn this into an endless trial. We can’t hear everybody. We can’t hear Adam and Eve and the serpent.”

However the prospect of removing a second president in less than a year is sure to stir political turbulence, just as Brazil’s economy is showing tentative signs of emerging from its worst recession on record.

“It would create more confusion,” ex president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, of the PSDB party, warned in a radio interview on Monday, urging the court not to make a decision that would scare off investment.

Among possible outcomes, the court could decide to throw out the case because Rousseff is no longer in office or declare her election victory void but decide that Temer had no responsibility in the illegal funding.

Temer is currently serving the third year of Rousseff’s second four-year term. If a president is removed in the last two years of a four-year term, Congress would get to pick the successor rather than via a popular vote. His coalition hold a majority in Congress, which would enable him to stay in office.

Not Too Worried

Temer is widely expected to find a way to escape this. But the mere fact that a court is considering such a thing shows the depths of uncertainty in Latin America’s biggest country as it tries to survive in a huge corruption scandal, a two-year recession and record unemployment.

The issue dates back to 2014 when Temer was vice president on the winning ticket of Dilma Rousseff’s reelection to the presidency. They are accused — as are swaths of other politicians – of taking undeclared campaign funds from corrupt donors.

The Supreme Electoral Court’s job is to rule on whether the election was fatally compromised. The case highlights the dizzying fall of Brazil from its days as an emerging markets powerhouse and increasingly respected international player up until around 2010.

Brazil is still traumatized by last year’s impeachment of Rousseff for illegal government accounting practices, bringing Temer, her conservative coalition partner, to power.

Since he took over, Temer has been plagued by rock-bottom approval ratings and a wave of corruption allegations against his allies.

Despite his unpopularity, Temer says he will push through far-reaching austerity reforms to fix the broken budget and serve out the rest of Rousseff’s original term until scheduled elections at the end of 2018. First he has to survive this trial. Many think he will manage.

“There’s total calm. The president has time on his side, because there are many legal options,” said a government source. Temer’s center-right PMDB party and allied parties control Congress and they have the backing of big business.

There is little appetite for yet another abrupt change of president just when economic reforms are underway.

Mercopress

A total of 501,923 electronic voting machines will be operating in Brazil’s 5,568 municipalities this Sunday (October 7) when approximately 140 million Brazilians vote for mayors, vice mayors and local legislators (“vereadores”).

In a pilot program, around 7.5 million of those voters will use biometric machines that will identify them by scanning fingerprints.

Brazil’s Federal Election Court (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral – TSE) says it intends to have every voter in the country use biometric machines by 2018. However, experiments with the machines have found that the machines have difficulty registering some people’s fingerprints.

The TSE has announced that it will send federal troops to 268 locations in 10 different states to ensure that the elections are peaceful.

In related new, although, Brazilians will not be voting for senator this coming Sunday, some information that sheds some light in the way Brazil’s politics works.

Out of the 81 senators in the Brazilian Senate, 19 of them are so-called “suplentes,” who presently occupy seats temporarily or permanently.

When a senator runs for a seat in the Senate, he or she runs with a kind of running mate; they form a ticket, so to speak. Suplentes tend to be relatives, friends or financial donors. But sometimes a suplente can be someone to balance a ticket; he or she can even be someone with very different political ideas.

These suplentes are unknown to most voters; nobody votes for a suplente. But they are an important element in the Brazilian political landscape because it is very common for elected members of the Congress to leave to occupy posts in local, state or the federal government.

Here’s the catch: when they do so, they do not lose their seat. It goes to the suplente. And should the elected member decide to return, the suplente leaves and the seat goes back to the original elected member.

During election cycles, it is common for members to take a leave of absence so they can hit the campaign trail. Two recent cases of senators who are on temporary leave to work with candidates in this year’s municipal elections are Valdir Raupp (Roraima), the president of the PMDB, and Katia Abreu (PSD, Tocantins).

Here is a look at the other ways a suplente can get a seat in the Senate. The elected member becomes a minister in the federal government. There is Edson Lobão (PMDB, Maranhão), the long-serving minister of Mines of Energy, whose seat is occupied by his son, Lobão Filho.

And Gleisi Hoffman, a PT senator from Paraná, who is the presidential Chief of Staff (“Casa Civil”) and Garibaldi Alves Filho, minister of Social Security.

Then there is Rosalba Ciarlini (DEM), who left her seat in the Senate after she was elected the governor of the state of Rio Grande do Norte, and Marconi Pirelli (PSDB), elected the governor of Goiás.

Different paths to a seat in the Senate for suplentes are possible:  Joaquim Roriz (PSC – Federal District) was expelled for misconduct (“quebra de decoro”) and Eliseu Rezende (DEM, Minas Gerais), a senator who died in January 2011.

An interesting case of how a suplente can rise in the Senate is Anibal Diniz who was the suplente of senator Tião Viana (PT, Acre), elected in 2007.

Then, in 2010, Viana was elected governor of Acre and Diniz took his seat for a term that runs to 2015. Just recently Diniz was elected vice-president of the Senate, substituting Marta Suplicy (PT, São Paulo) who just became minister of Culture.

Marta is a psychologist, television personality and former mayor of São Paulo who has progressive opinions on social issues and is in favor of gay marriage, for example. Her suplente, Antonio Carlos Rodrigues, has strong ties with the Catholic church and opposes gay marriage).

In the Chamber of Deputies the system is different. Suplentes come from a list of the next-most-voted-for. But deputies, like senators, also play political musical chairs so there are more than 30 suplentes serving in the lower house at the moment.

ABr

2,776 is more than 10% of the estimated 21,500 politicians who attempted to register as candidates. Many of the challenges are bureaucratic – problems with the paperwork, so to speak.

But, on the other hand, this time something has changed the situation on the ground. It is the Ficha Limpa (Clean Criminal Record) law that makes politicians with certain types of convictions ineligible to run for office. The overwhelming majority of challenges are based on Ficha Limpa.

The head of the Federal Election  Board (Tribunal Superior Eleitoral – TSE”), Ricardo Lewandowski, who has another job as a Supreme Court justice, says that rigid, strict and detailed Brazilian election laws will be followed.

That means that the 27 regional electoral boards (“TREs”) around the country, after receiving the 2,776 challenges by the deadline on July 14, will now have until August 5 to examine them. After that, according to Lewandowski, the TSE will examine all the cases that have not been resolved until another deadline on August 19. 

“We expect that we will be capable of handling this because as soon as the TSE and the Supreme Court (“STF”) define the parameters, the judgments will be speeded up,” declared Lewandowski.
There are still serious questions about all this. Ficha Limpa was approved by Congress on May 19 and signed into law by president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on June 4.

However, while the rejection of a candidate will be based on the Ficha Limpa law and the law is backed by popular outrage at the generalized lack of ethics in politics around the country, it is certain that challenges accepted by the TREs, and then by the TSE, will create a tidal wave of appeals to the Supreme Court.

And those appeals will be based on questions regarding the constitutionality of the Ficha Limpa law itself. In other words, no one knows how the parameters will be defined.

Meanwhile, election lawyers are complaining loudly about the uncertainties their politician/clients face. And if this is not resolved soon, they point out, all the uncertainties will fall into the laps of the voters.

ABr

The vote happened in response to an appeal filed by the opposition against the decision of assistant minister Joelson Dias who had rejected the initial charge. The trial, however, was not completed since minister Fernando Gonçalves has requested the whole case for examination .

The political parties PSDB, DEM and PPS, all from the opposition, based their charges of propaganda in advance on speeches made by Lula and Dilma Rousseff at the inauguration of the Setúbal dam, in Minas Gerais, on January 19, 2010.

Brazil’s electoral law establishes that electioneering for the October general election can only start on July 5. Several previous charges of illegal propaganda against Lula and his pick for president were dismissed by the electoral justice. This is the first one that has some chance of sticking.

According to the lawsuit, the president said in his speech, that it’s  important that the government inaugurate the “largest possible number of public works” until the end of March to “show who were the people who helped make things in this country.”

The vote of the Minister Joelson Days refusing the initial charges had been supported by ministers Ricardo Lewandowski and Carmen Lucia. Felix Fischer, in turn, asked to examine the case and presented this Thursday his dissenting opinion.

His argument: “Up to three months before the election, officials can participate in inaugurations, but they cannot instill a candidate in the minds of voters. Even if there is no explicit request of vote, it is disguised propaganda.”

ABr

The documents – an administrative order and a normative instruction – will be signed by the president of the TSE, Carlos Velloso, and the head of the SRF, Jorge Rachid.

The administrative order provides for a greater exchange of information between the two institutions.

It also stipulates that any citizen may submit charges to the SRF about improper use of funds in electoral campaigns or other political party activities.

The normative instruction deals with, among other items, the requirement that candidates to elective office and political party financial committees must be listed on the National Registry of Legal Entities (CNPJ).

ABr

"We are convinced that expensive campaigns abet the ‘caixa 2,’ (double accountancy)" he said, referring to unreported campaign contributions.

According to Velloso, televised campaign spots are expensive and end up "masking" the truth from the viewers, transforming candidates into kind of "prettified soap commercials."

The TSE president affirmed that "we want candidates to appear on TV and state what they’re all about."

Minister Velloso expressed his total opposition to direct public funding of election campaigns.

"First, because we already have public funding in the form of free television and radio air time."

He pointed out that this air time is free for the parties and the candidates but not for the federal government.

"The radio and TV stations receive tax incentives in compensation," he revealed.

According to TSE estimates, publicly funded election campaigns would cost between US$ 317.3 million (700 million reais) and US$ 362.63 million (800 million reais), while an election itself runs around US$ 266.64 million (500 million reais).

Since there are elections every two years, that would imply an expense on the order of US$ 589.28 (1.3 billion).

"Have you ever imagined how many mass housing units could be put up, how many hospitals could be built?" he asked. In Velloso’s judgment, Brazil has other priorities.

Agência Brasil