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      Why Trump and Bolsonaro Cases Were Handled Differently

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      In both the United States and Brazil, former presidents made baseless claims of fraud, and their supporters stormed government buildings.Down in the polls, the far-right president warned of voter fraud, despite no evidence. After losing, he claimed the vote was rigged. Thousands of his supporters — draped in the national flag and misled by conspiracy theories — then stormed Congress in a bid to overturn the results.That scenario describes the latest elections in the Western Hemisphere’s largest democracies: the United States and Brazil.But while the behavior of the two former presidents — Donald J. Trump and Jair Bolsonaro — was remarkably similar, the political aftermath has been drastically different.While Mr. Trump faces federal and state charges that accuse him of paying off a porn star and mishandling classified documents, he remains the most influential figure on the American right. More than two years after leaving the White House, he again appears poised to become the Republican nominee for president, with a wide lead in the polls.In Brazil, Mr. Bolsonaro has faced much swifter and fiercer blowback. He, too, faces numerous criminal investigations. The authorities have raided his house and confiscated his cellphone. And on Friday, less than six months after he left power, Brazil’s electoral court voted to block Mr. Bolsonaro from political office for the rest of the decade.The aftermath of a riot at the Brazilian government office complex by supporters of Mr. Bolsonaro in January.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesThe court ruled he had abused his power when he made baseless claims about the integrity of Brazil’s voting systems on state television. His next shot at the presidency would be in the 2030 election, when he is 75.Mr. Trump, even if he is convicted in a case before next year’s election, could still potentially run.The contrasting fallout for the two men reflect key differences in the two countries’ political and governing structures. The U.S. system has left Mr. Trump’s fate up to voters and the slow, methodical process of the justice system. In Brazil, the courts have been proactive, fast and aggressive in snuffing out anything they see as a threat to the nation’s young democracy.U.S. elections are run by the states, with a patchwork of rules across the country on who is eligible to run and how. In many cases, one of the few hurdles to appearing on a ballot is collecting enough signatures from eligible voters.In Brazil, elections are governed by a federal electoral court, which, as part of its duties, regularly weighs in on whether candidates have the right to seek office.“The mayor, governor or president tend to abuse their power to be re-elected. So we created the law of ineligibility,” said Ricardo Lewandowski, a retired Brazilian Supreme Court justice and former head of the electoral court.Brazilian law states that politicians who abuse their positions are temporarily ineligible for office. As a result, the electoral court has routinely blocked politicians from running, including, with Mr. Bolsonaro, three former presidents.“What our system has tried to do is protect the voter,” Mr. Lewandowski said. “Those who committed crimes against the public have to stay out of the game for a certain amount of time until they rehabilitate.”The approach has also put what some analysts say is too much power in the hands of the electoral court’s seven judges, instead of voters.“It’s a structural difference between the two countries,” said Thomas Traumann, a political analyst and former press secretary for a leftist Brazilian president. Politicians in Brazil know the rules, he said, and the system has helped keep some corrupt politicians from power. “On the other hand, you are preventing the people from deciding,” he said.Brazil’s centralized electoral system also thwarted Mr. Bolsonaro from waging as protracted a fight over the election’s results as Mr. Trump did.In the United States, a slow vote count delayed the declaration of a winner for a week, and the Electoral College process then took several more months. Each state also ran its own election and audits. That gave Mr. Trump and politicians and groups supporting him time and various fronts to mount attacks against the process.In Brazil, a nation of 220 million people, the electronic voting system counted the ballots in two hours. The central electoral authority, not the news media, then declared the winner that night, in a ceremony involving leaders of Congress, the courts and the government.Brazil’s electronic voting system counted the ballots in two hours. Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesMr. Bolsonaro remained silent for two days but, with few options, eventually stepped aside.But that approach also carries risks.“You can argue that being that centralized is also prone to more abuse than the American system, which is more decentralized and allows for basically local supervision,” said Omar Encarnación, a Bard College professor who has studied the democratic systems in both countries.Yet in the United States, several states have recently passed restrictive voting laws, he added. “So clearly, these are two very different models, and one can argue in either direction, which one is best or worst for democracy.”In the run-up to the election, Brazil’s system also allowed it to fight far more aggressively against any anti-democratic misinformation or plotting. The nation’s Supreme Court ordered raids and arrests, blocked members of Congress from social networks and moved to ban tech companies in Brazil that did not comply with court orders.The result was a sweeping and unrelenting campaign aimed at fighting election misinformation. But the moves also drew widespread claims of overreach. Some raids targeted people just because they were in a WhatsApp group that had mentioned a coup. Some people were temporarily jailed without a trial for criticizing the court. A congressman was sentenced to prison for threatening judges on a livestream.Such stringent actions by the courts extends their outsized influence in Brazilian politics in recent years, including their central role in the so-called Car Wash investigation that sent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to prison.“The boldness, the fearlessness in which the courts have acted, not just against Bolsonaro, but even toward Lula, would suggest that the courts are behaving in a somewhat — I hate to use the word reckless — but perhaps even in a repressive mode,” Mr. Encarnación said.Yet regardless of the court’s efforts, thousands of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters still raided and ransacked the nation’s halls of power a week after Mr. Lula’s inauguration in January.While the scenes were eerily similar to the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the roles of the two ex-presidents were different.Hundreds of Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters were temporarily detained after the riot in January.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesBoth had fanned the flames, convincing their followers there had been fraud, but Mr. Trump explicitly directed his supporters to march to the Capitol during a speech nearby.When Mr. Bolsonaro’s supporters formed their own mob, Mr. Bolsonaro was thousands of miles away in Florida, where he remained for three months.In both countries, hundreds of trespassers were arrested and charged, and congressional investigations are digging into what happened. Otherwise the aftermath has been different.Like Mr. Trump, Mr. Bolsonaro has also defended his supporters.Mr. Bolsonaro said on Friday that the riot was not an attempted coup, but instead “little old women and little old men, with Brazilian flags on their back and Bibles under their arms.”But the political reverberations have differed.In the U.S., much of the Republican Party has embraced the baseless claims of election-fraud, states have passed laws that make it harder to vote, and voters have elected election-denying candidates to Congress and state legislatures.In Brazil, the political establishment has largely moved away from talk of election fraud — and from Mr. Bolsonaro himself. Conservative leaders are now pushing a more moderate governor as the new standard-bearer of the Brazilian right.Mr. Encarnación said that, despite its problems, Brazil’s democratic system can provide a model on how to fight new anti-democratic threats.“Democracies basically are fighting misinformation and God knows what else with very antiquated institutions,” he said. “We do need to upgrade the hardware. I don’t think it was designed for people of the likes these countries are facing.” More

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      Brazil’s Bolsonaro Blocked From Office for Election-Fraud Claims

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      Brazil’s electoral court banned former President Jair Bolsonaro from seeking office until 2030 for spreading false claims about the nation’s voting system.Brazilian election officials on Friday blocked former President Jair Bolsonaro from seeking public office until 2030, removing a top contender from the next presidential contest and dealing a significant blow to the country’s far-right movement.Brazil’s electoral court ruled that Mr. Bolsonaro had violated Brazil’s election laws when, less than three months ahead of last year’s vote, he called diplomats to the presidential palace and made baseless claims that the nation’s voting systems were likely to be rigged against him.Five of the court’s seven judges voted that Mr. Bolsonaro had abused his power as president when he convened the meeting with diplomats and broadcast it on state television.“This response will confirm our faith in the democracy,” said Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice who leads the electoral court, as he cast his vote against Mr. Bolsonaro.The decision is a sharp and swift rebuke of Mr. Bolsonaro and his effort to undermine Brazil’s elections. Just six months ago, Mr. Bolsonaro was president of one of the world’s largest democracies. Now his career as a politician is in jeopardy.Under the ruling, Mr. Bolsonaro, 68, will next be able to run for president in 2030, when he is 75. The next presidential election is scheduled for 2026.Mr. Bolsonaro said Friday that he was not surprised by the 5-to-2 decision because the court had always been against him. “Come on. We know that since I took office they said I was going to carry out a coup,” he told reporters (though he, too, had hinted at that possibility). “This is not democracy.”His lawyers had argued that his speech to diplomats was an “act of government” aimed at raising legitimate concerns about election security.Mr. Bolsonaro appeared to accept his fate, saying Friday that he would focus on campaigning for other right-wing candidates.Yet he is still expected to appeal the ruling to Brazil’s Supreme Court, though that body acted aggressively to rein in his power during his presidency. He has harshly attacked the high court for years, calling some justices “terrorists” and accusing them of trying to sway the vote against him.Judge Alexandre de Moraes, center, a member of Brazil’s Supreme Court, used the court to curb Mr. Bolsonaro’s power during his administration.Dado Galdieri for The New York TimesEven if an appeal is successful, Mr. Bolsonaro would face another 15 cases in the electoral court, including accusations that he improperly used public funds to influence the vote and that his campaign ran a coordinated misinformation campaign. Any of those cases could also block him from seeking the presidency.He is also linked to several criminal investigations, involving whether he provoked his supporters to storm Brazil’s halls of power on Jan. 8 and whether he was involved in a scheme to falsify his vaccine records. (Mr. Bolsonaro has declined the Covid-19 vaccine.) A conviction in any criminal case would also render him ineligible for office, in addition to carrying possible prison time.Mr. Bolsonaro was a shock to Brazil’s politics when he was elected president in 2018. A former Army captain and fringe far-right congressman, he rode a populist wave to the presidency on an anti-corruption campaign.His lone term was marked by controversy from the start, including a sharp rise in deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, a hands-off approach to the pandemic that left nearly 700,000 dead in Brazil and harsh attacks against the press, the judiciary and the left.Mr. Bolsonaro in 2017, when he was a member of congress.Lalo de Almeida for The New York TimesBut it was his repeated broadsides against Brazil’s voting systems that alarmed many Brazilians, as well as the international community, stoking worries that he might try to hold on to power if he lost last October’s election.Mr. Bolsonaro did lose by a slim margin and at first refused to concede. Under pressure from allies and rivals, he eventually agreed to a transition to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.Yet, after listening to Mr. Bolsonaro’s false claims for years, many Bolsonaro supporters remained convinced that Mr. Lula, a leftist, had stolen the election. On Jan. 8, a week after Mr. Lula took office, thousands of people stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices, hoping to induce the military to take over the government and restore Mr. Bolsonaro as president.Mr. Bolsonaro said on Friday that the riot was not an attempted coup, but instead “little old women and little old men, with Brazilian flags on their back and Bibles under their arms.”Since then, more evidence has emerged that at least some members of Mr. Bolsonaro’s inner circle were entertaining ideas of a coup. Brazil’s federal police found separate drafts of plans for Mr. Bolsonaro to hold on to power at the home of Mr. Bolsonaro’s justice minister and on the phone of his former assistant.Mr. Bolsonaro’s attacks on the voting system and the Jan. 8 riot in Brazil bore a striking resemblance to former president Donald J. Trump’s denials that he lost the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol.The aftermath of the riot at the Brazilian government complex in Brasília in January.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesYet the result for the two former presidents has so far been different. While Mr. Bolsonaro has already been excluded from the next presidential race, Mr. Trump remains the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Trump could also still run for president even if he is convicted of any of the various criminal charges he faces.The ruling against Mr. Bolsonaro upends politics in Latin America’s largest nation. For years, he has pulled Brazil’s conservative movement further to the right with harsh rhetoric against rivals, skepticism of science, a love of guns and an embrace of the culture wars.He received 49.1 percent of the vote in the 2022 election, just 2.1 million votes behind Mr. Lula, in the nation’s closest presidential contest since it returned to democracy in 1985, following a military dictatorship.Yet conservative leaders in Brazil, with an eye toward Mr. Bolsonaro’s legal challenges, have started to move on, touting Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas, the right-wing governor of Brazil’s largest state, São Paulo, as the new standard-bearer of the right and a 2026 challenger to Mr. Lula.“He is a much more palatable candidate because he doesn’t have Bolsonaro’s liabilities and because he is making a move to the center,” said Marta Arretche, a political science professor at the University of São Paulo.The Brazilian press and pollsters have speculated that Mr. Bolsonaro’s wife, Michelle, or two of his sons would run for president. Mr. Bolsonaro said recently that he told Ms. Bolsonaro she doesn’t have the necessary experience, “but she is an excellent campaigner.”Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas, the right-wing governor of São Paulo state, is emerging as a new standard-bearer of the Brazilian right.Adriano Machado/ReutersFriday’s decision is also further proof that Mr. Moraes, the head of the electoral court, has become one of Brazil’s most powerful men.During Mr. Bolsonaro’s administration, Mr. Moraes acted as the most effective check on the president’s power, leading investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies, jailing some of his supporters for what he viewed as threats against Brazil’s institutions and ordering tech companies to remove the accounts of many other right-wing voices.Those tactics raised concerns that he was abusing his power, and Mr. Bolsonaro and his supporters have called Mr. Moraes an authoritarian. On the left, he has been praised as the savior of Brazil’s democracy.Mr. Bolsonaro’s case before the electoral court stemmed from a 47-minute meeting on July 18 in which he called dozens of foreign diplomats to the presidential residence to present what he promised was evidence of fraud in past Brazilian elections.He made unfounded claims that Brazil’s voting machines changed ballots for him to other candidates in a previous election and that a 2018 hack of the electoral court’s computer network showed the vote could be rigged. But security experts have said the hackers could never gain access to the voting machines or change votes.The speech was broadcast on the Brazilian government’s television network and its social media channels. Some tech companies later took the video down because it spread election misinformation.As for Mr. Bolsonaro’s future plans? He told the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo that during the three months he spent in Florida this year after his election loss, he was offered a job as a “poster boy” for American businesses wanting to reach Brazilians.“I went to a hamburger joint and it filled with people,” he said. “But I don’t want to abandon my country.”Ana Ionova More

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      Berlusconi’s Legacy Lives On Beyond Italy’s Borders

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      Silvio Berlusconi rose when political parties were weakened and carried on through a cascade of scandals. Leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro have had similar trajectories.In a strange bit of synergy, both the indictment of former U.S. President Donald Trump and the death of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy took place this week. Berlusconi, arguably, was the O.G. of populist leaders whose political careers carried on through a cascade of scandals and criminal cases.Both are examples of how the weakening of mainstream political parties can open the field for charismatic outsiders with a populist bent.In the early 1990s, Italy’s national “clean hands” investigation revealed that wide-ranging corruption had infected business, public works and politics, and found that the country’s political parties were largely financed by bribes. The two parties that had dominated Italian politics since the fall of fascism, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, collapsed after a wave of indictments. So did nearly every other established political party.“The party system that was the anchor of the democratic regime in the postwar period basically crumbled,” Ken Roberts, a Cornell University political scientist, told me a few years ago. “What you end up with is a political vacuum that gets filled by a populist outsider in Berlusconi.”That 2017 conversation with Roberts, notably, was focused on another country, where another corruption scandal was opening the path to power for another right-wing outsider: Brazil, where an obscure lawmaker named Jair Bolsonaro was just starting to gain national traction in the wake of the Carwash corruption investigation.“I really worry that in cleaning it up, the whole system is going to crumble,” Roberts said at the time. “I really fear what a Brazilian Berlusconi is going to look like.”In another conversation this week, Roberts recalled that back then, most analysts did not yet take Bolsonaro seriously. “But he was beginning to stir, and my quote to you was in anticipation of his rise,” he said.“I think it holds up pretty well over time,” he added.A year after Roberts and I first spoke, Bolsonaro was elected president after running on a far-right platform that included opposition to same-sex marriage and fulsome praise for Brazil’s former military dictatorship.As his term neared its close, he spent more than a year warning that he might not accept the results of the 2022 election if he failed to win. When he lost, he made baseless claims of fraud. A mob of his supporters eventually overran federal buildings in Brasília, the capital, in a failed effort to prevent the candidate who won the vote, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office.Bolsonaro is now set to face trial next week over his electoral fraud claims.Other examples of this pattern aren’t hard to find. In Venezuela, a series of corruption scandals opened a power vacuum that Hugo Chávez easily filled with populist appeals, leading to to an authoritarian government that, by the time of his death, oversaw a country racked by crises. In Guatemala, after a corruption investigation forced President Otto Pérez Molina out of office in 2015, he was replaced by Jimmy Morales, a charismatic television comedian with no political experience who ran on the slogan “not corrupt, nor a thief,” as president. When the U.N.-backed group that had investigated Molina began looking into Morales as well, he expelled it from the country.The United States has not had a massive corruption scandal that sent politicians to courtrooms and jail cells and decimated faith in its political parties. But, as I discussed in columns in April and May, Trump rose to power after the Republican Party was profoundly weakened by other factors, including campaign finance laws that allowed big-money donors to circumvent the party, and the rise of social media that meant the party was no longer a gatekeeper for press and messaging access.That kind of institutional weakness creates an opening for outsider politicians who might once have been kept out of politics by robust political parties. But more specifically, it also privileges a certain type of candidate, who has celebrity name recognition (perhaps a celebrity entertainer like Morales, a famous businessman like Berlusconi, or one like Trump, who bridges both worlds), charisma, and a willingness to win votes and headlines by embracing positions that would be taboo for mainstream candidates.Unfortunately, it is rare for such politicians to also be good at building new, strong institutions to replace those whose decay enabled their rise to power.In Italy, Berlusconi presided over and helped maintain decades of weak coalition governments and political turmoil, not to mention the multiple corruption scandals he landed in. And that chaos looks set to outlive him.“Even in death,” my colleague Jason Horowitz, the Rome bureau chief of The Times, wrote this week, “Berlusconi had the power to potentially destabilize the political universe and Ms. Meloni’s governing coalition, of which his party, Forza Italia, is a small but critical linchpin.”Thank you for being a subscriberRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to interpreter@nytimes.com. You can also follow me on Twitter. More

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      Bolsonaro to Face Trial Over Electoral Fraud Claims

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      Brazil’s former president is accused of spreading false information about the nation’s election systems. A conviction would block him from office for eight years.The NewsBrazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, is scheduled to go on trial this month on charges that he abused his power as president to make baseless attacks against Brazil’s election systems. If convicted, he would be ineligible to run for office for eight years.A panel of seven judges in Brazil’s electoral court will decide the case, which is scheduled to start on June 22. The court aims to reach a decision this month, though the case could be delayed if any judge requests more time.A rival political party has accused Mr. Bolsonaro of abusing the office of the presidency when, less than three months ahead of Brazil’s elections last year, he summoned foreign diplomats to a meeting, made false claims about the country’s voting systems and broadcast the remarks on state television.Brazil’s top prosecutor for electoral cases recommended that Mr. Bolsonaro be blocked from running for office because his speech to diplomats was intended to undermine the public’s confidence in Brazil’s elections. The sole punishment prosecutors are seeking is making Mr. Bolsonaro ineligible to run for office, which is the typical punishment for abuse of power in such cases.“As the head of state making public critiques, it could only be understood as a warning to Brazilians and the world that the election results could not be seen as reliable and legitimate,” said the prosecutor, Paulo Gonet Branco, in a legal filing that is sealed but was viewed by The New York Times.Former President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil speaking in March, after his loss, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March in National Harbor, Md.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesWhy it Matters: A conviction could end Bolsonaro’s political career.The trial could upend Brazilian politics by removing Mr. Bolsonaro, the standard-bearer of Brazil’s conservative movement, from contention for the next two presidential elections.Mr. Bolsonaro, 68, remains a highly popular and influential figure among conservatives in Brazil and is seen as a likely challenger to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist, in 2026. Mr. Bolsonaro received 49.1 percent of the vote in the 2022 election, just 2.1 million votes behind Mr. Lula, in the nation’s closest presidential contest since Brazil’s democracy was restored in 1985 following a military dictatorship.A conviction would also be a clear and strong repudiation of Mr. Bolsonaro’s tactics to undermine the vote, and a warning to any political allies who might be considering a similar strategy.Mr. Bolsonaro’s rhetoric resembled that of former President Donald J. Trump, a political ally. But the results for the two men could prove very different. Just six months after leaving office, Mr. Bolsonaro is facing charges that could end his political career. At the same time, while Mr. Trump faces investigations into his efforts to question the 2020 U.S. election, he is still the leading contender to become the Republican Party’s nominee in next year’s presidential vote.The Background: Bolsonaro has long attacked Brazil’s elections.Mr. Bolsonaro spent years criticizing Brazil’s voting systems, claiming that they were vulnerable to fraud and that his rivals were bent on rigging them, despite a lack of evidence. His commentary led millions of his followers to lose faith in the election systems and believe that Mr. Lula stole the 2022 election.Despite Mr. Bolsonaro’s assertions, numerous reviews of the election results found no credible evidence of fraud.One week after Mr. Lula was inaugurated in January, many of Mr. Bolsonaro’s followers invaded and ransacked Brazil’s halls of power in a bid to get the military to take control of the government.Still, Mr. Bolsonaro did authorize the transition of power and, for the first several months of Mr. Lula’s presidency, receded into the background of Brazilian politics by temporarily moving to Florida. Mr. Bolsonaro is now back in Brazil and has been making more public appearances.His lawyers have argued that his speech to diplomats, which is at the center of this case, was an “act of government” aimed at raising legitimate concerns about the election’s security. They have noted that the diplomats cannot vote and argued that the speech didn’t interfere with the electoral process.Neither Mr. Bolsonaro’s lawyer nor his spokesman responded to requests for comment.What’s Next: Bolsonaro faces a trial — and many other investigationsAfter starting on June 22, Mr. Bolsonaro’s trial will likely continue in other court sessions scheduled for June 27 and June 29. The seven judges on the electoral-court panel — made up of Supreme Court justices, federal judges and lawyers — could decide the case quickly, with a simple majority needed to convict. The electoral court is scheduled to break for a monthlong recess in July.Regardless of the trial’s outcome, Mr. Bolsonaro faces 15 other cases in the electoral court, including those involving accusations that he improperly used public funds to influence the vote and that his campaign ran a coordinated misinformation campaign against Mr. Lula. A conviction in any case could also deem him ineligible for office for eight years.Mr. Bolsonaro is also a subject of a federal criminal investigation into the Jan. 8 invasion of Brazil’s government buildings. A top Brazilian prosecutor has accused him of encouraging the mob. A conviction in the case could lead to prison time. As part of the case, Mr. Bolsonaro testified in April before federal police.Letícia Casado More

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      Bolsonaro enfrentará juicio por denuncias de fraude electoral

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      El expresidente de Brasil está acusado de difundir información falsa sobre los sistemas electorales del país. Si lo condenan estaría inhabilitado para postular al cargo durante ocho años.La noticiaEstá previsto que el expresidente de Brasil, Jair Bolsonaro, vaya a juicio este mes por cargos de abuso de poder como presidente para realizar ataques infundados contra los sistemas electorales de Brasil. Si es declarado culpable, no sería elegible para postularse para el cargo durante ocho años.Un panel de siete jueces del Tribunal Electoral de Brasil decidirá el caso, que está programado para comenzar el 22 de junio. El tribunal pretende llegar a una decisión este mes, aunque el caso podría retrasarse si algún juez solicita más tiempo.Un partido político rival acusó a Bolsonaro de abusar del cargo de presidente cuando, menos de tres meses antes de las elecciones de Brasil el año pasado, convocó a diplomáticos extranjeros a una reunión, hizo afirmaciones falsas sobre los sistemas de votación del país y transmitió los comentarios en televisión estatal.El principal fiscal de casos electorales de Brasil recomendó que se impidiera a Bolsonaro presentarse a elecciones porque su discurso a los diplomáticos tenía la intención de socavar la confianza del público en las elecciones de Brasil.“Como el jefe de Estado hace críticas públicas, solo puede entenderse como una advertencia a los brasileños y al mundo de que los resultados de las elecciones no pueden ser vistos como confiables y legítimos”, dijo el fiscal, Paulo Gonet Branco, en un expediente legal que está sellado pero fue visto por The New York Times.El expresidente Jair Bolsonaro de Brasil habló en marzo, después de su derrota, en la Conferencia Política de Acción Conservadora en marzo en National Harbor, Maryland.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesPor qué es importante: una condena podría acabar con la carrera política de BolsonaroEl juicio podría trastornar la política brasileña al sacar a Bolsonaro, el abanderado del movimiento conservador de Brasil, de la contienda por las próximas dos elecciones presidenciales.Bolsonaro, de 68 años, sigue siendo una figura muy popular e influyente entre los conservadores de Brasil y es visto como un probable retador del presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, de izquierda, en 2026. Bolsonaro recibió el 49,1 por ciento de los votos en las elecciones de 2022, solo 2,1 millones de votos detrás de Lula, en la contienda presidencial más reñida del país desde que se restauró la democracia en Brasil en 1985 tras una dictadura militar.Una condena también sería un repudio claro y fuerte a las tácticas de Bolsonaro para socavar la votación y una advertencia a cualquier aliado político que pudiera estar considerando una estrategia similar.La retórica de Bolsonaro se parecía a la del expresidente Donald Trump, un aliado político. Pero los resultados para los dos hombres podrían ser muy diferentes. Solo seis meses después de dejar el cargo, Bolsonaro enfrenta cargos que podrían poner fin a su carrera política. Al mismo tiempo, mientras Trump enfrenta investigaciones sobre sus intentos de cuestionar las elecciones estadounidenses de 2020, sigue siendo el principal candidato para convertirse en el candidato del Partido Republicano en las elecciones presidenciales del próximo año.El trasfondo: Bolsonaro ha atacado durante mucho tiempo las elecciones de BrasilBolsonaro pasó años criticando los sistemas de votación de Brasil, alegando que eran vulnerables al fraude y que sus rivales estaban empeñados en manipularlos, a pesar de la falta de pruebas. Su comentario hizo que millones de sus seguidores perdieran la fe en los sistemas electorales y creyeran que Lula se robó las elecciones de 2022.A pesar de las afirmaciones de Bolsonaro, numerosas revisiones de los resultados electorales no encontraron pruebas creíbles de fraude.Una semana después de la toma de posesión de Lula en enero, muchos de los seguidores de Bolsonaro invadieron y saquearon las sedes del poder en Brasil en un intento de que los militares tomaran el control del gobierno.Aún así, Bolsonaro había autorizado la transición y, durante los primeros meses de la presidencia de Lula, pasó a un segundo plano en la política brasileña al mudarse temporalmente a Florida. Bolsonaro ahora está de regreso en Brasil y ha estado haciendo más apariciones públicas.Sus abogados han argumentado que su discurso ante los diplomáticos, que está en el centro de este caso, fue un “acto de gobierno” destinado a plantear preocupaciones legítimas sobre la seguridad de las elecciones. Señalaron que los diplomáticos no pueden votar y argumentaron que el discurso no interfirió con el proceso electoral.Ni el abogado de Bolsonaro ni su vocero respondieron a las solicitudes de comentarios.Qué sigue: Bolsonaro enfrenta un juicio y muchas otras investigacionesDespués de comenzar el 22 de junio, el juicio de Bolsonaro probablemente continuará en otras sesiones judiciales programadas para el 27 y el 29 de junio. Los siete jueces del panel del tribunal electoral —compuesto por jueces del Supremo Tribunal Federal, jueces federales y abogados— podrían decidir el caso rápidamente, con una mayoría simple necesaria para condenar. El tribunal electoral está programado para entrar en un receso de un mes en julio.Independientemente del resultado del juicio, Bolsonaro enfrenta otros 15 casos en el tribunal electoral, incluidos los que involucran acusaciones de que usó fondos públicos de manera indebida para influir en la votación y que su campaña realizó una campaña de desinformación coordinada contra Lula. Una condena en cualquier caso también podría considerarlo inelegible para el cargo durante ocho años.Bolsonaro también es objeto de una investigación penal federal sobre la invasión de edificios gubernamentales de Brasil el 8 de enero. Un importante fiscal brasileño lo acusó de alentar a la turba. Una condena en el caso podría conducir a tiempo en prisión. Como parte del caso, Bolsonaro testificó en abril ante la policía federal.Letícia Casado More

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      George Santos signs deal to avoid prosecution over stolen checks in Brazil

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      A day after New York representative George Santos pleaded not guilty to charges in the US, he signed an agreement Thursday with public prosecutors in Brazil to avoid prosecution for forging two stolen checks in 2008.“What would have been the start of a case was ended today,” Santos’ lawyer in Brazil, Jonymar Vasconcelos, told the Associated Press in a text message. “As such, my client is no longer the subject of any case in Brazil.”Asked about the details of the non-prosecution agreement, Vasconcelos demurred, citing the fact the case proceeded under seal. The public prosecutors’ office of Rio de Janeiro state also declined to comment.Court records in Brazil, first uncovered by the New York Times, show Santos was the subject of a criminal charge for using two stolen checks to buy items at a shop in the city of Niteroi, including a pair of sneakers that he gifted to a friend. At the time, Santos would have been 19. The purchase totaled 2,144 Brazilian reais, then equal to about $1,350, according to the charge prosecutors filed in 2011.That followed an investigation opened in 2008 and Santos’ signed confession, in which he admitted to having stolen the checkbook of his mother’s former employer from her purse and making purchases, including in the store, and recognizing the fraudulent checks as those he had signed, according to the court documents reviewed by the AP.A judge accepted the charges against Santos in 2011, but subsequent subpoenas for him to appear personally or present a written defense went unanswered and, with authorities repeatedly unable to determine his whereabouts, the case was suspended in 2013. That changed after he won a US congressional seat and the subsequent flurry of media attention focused on his dubious credentials. Rio state prosecutors then petitioned to reopen the case.According to the terms of the non-prosecution agreement, Santos will pay 24,000 reais (about $5,000), with the majority going to the shopkeeper who received the bad checks and the remainder to charities, newspaper Folha de S.Paulo reported, without saying how it obtained the information. Santos attended the meeting virtually, the paper reported.Resolution of the case removes the possibility Santos might have been obliged to travel to another country to resolve pending charges; that could have been been complicated after he was forced to surrender his passport after recent charges in the US.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Wednesday in New York, Santos pleaded not guilty to charges he stole from his campaign and lied to Congress about being a millionaire, while collecting unemployment benefits he didn’t deserve. More

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      Bolsonaro Returns to Brazil, Ending Self-Imposed Exile

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      The former president returned to a tense political landscape in which he is under investigation for spreading election misinformation and for inspiring the Jan. 8 attack in the capital.BRASÍLIA — Jair Bolsonaro, the former right-wing president of Brazil, returned home on Thursday morning after a three-month self-imposed exile in the United States following his defeat last year in an election that tested the stability of one of the world’s biggest democracies.He returns to a series of investigations and could face arrest if charged over his role in spreading baseless claims that Brazil’s election system was vulnerable to fraud — despite reviews by independent security experts showing otherwise — and that the left was bent on stealing the vote.In January, Brazil’s Supreme Court said it would investigate Mr. Bolsonaro for inspiring the far-right mob that invaded and ransacked the country’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential offices on Jan. 8, underscoring that the former leader could soon face legal consequences for an extremist movement he helped build.Mr. Bolsonaro is the subject of five other Supreme Court inquiries, including for his handling of the pandemic, accusations of spreading misinformation and a leak of classified information when he discussed a hack of the country’s election agency to support his claims that Brazil’s voting system is unsafe.He also faces over a dozen investigations by the country’s electoral body. If convicted in any of those cases, he would be ineligible for office for eight years.The former president has denied wrongdoing in relation to the January riot, and has defended himself in other investigations into his conduct.The political climate in Brazil has been tense since Mr. Bolsonaro’s departure, with many of his allies calling for his return. For his part, Mr. Bolsonaro has been critical of the current leftist administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.During his time in the United States, which he largely spent in Florida, Mr. Bolsonaro met with conservative activists and pundits, appearing at various events, from the Conservative Political Action Conference to the opening of a burger restaurant.At the airport in Brasília on Thursday morning, dozens of supporters gathered at the arrivals gate to greet Mr. Bolsonaro, though he was prevented from meeting with them. Federal Police officials ordered the former president and his staff to use a separate exit for security reasons.Mr. Bolsonaro’s motorcade then took him to his Liberal Party headquarters, where he met with high-ranking right-wing politicians, family members and some of his staunchest allies.He received a warm welcome there from his colleagues and former cabinet ministers, who chanted “the captain is back” and posted photos and videos of his arrival on social media.“Welcome, Mr. President,” said Valdemar Costa Neto, the Liberal Party’s chair. “You have been missed. You will always be missed.”Mr. Bolsonaro then headed to a closed-door meeting with party leaders and right-wing lawmakers.In a short speech to conservative lawmakers, Mr. Bolsonaro hailed Florida as a model for Brazil. The state’s Republican governor and lawmakers have been advancing a conservative agenda on guns, education and other issues.“Our dream is to follow this North American state in many of the good things it has there,” Mr. Bolsonaro said. “The vast majority of actions are beneficial. That is the Brazilian state that worked.”He added: “Everything there is what we want to implement here too: freedom of expression, private property, the issue of criminality, the legitimate right to self-defense. The most important is freedom for people to work, express themselves and get on with life.”Despite the investigations hovering over him, Mr. Bolsonaro is set to take office next week as the honorary chair of the Liberal Party, the main opposition force in Congress to Mr. Lula’s administration.“I will not lead any opposition,” he told CNN Brasil in an interview published Wednesday, adding that he would simply “participate with my party” and that Mr. Lula’s government would be hampered by its own flaws. More

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      Counting votes and cutting violence

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      Counting votes and cutting violenceShattered glass at Brazil’s Supreme Court after supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro rioted in Brasília in January.Victor Moriyama for The New York TimesThe resilience of Brazilian democracy, in the face of efforts by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro to undermine the validity of the recent presidential election, is a story that has just about everything. Courtroom drama, baseless claims of voter fraud, brawls in the halls of power, and hopeful hints that democracy may not be as fragile as it has seemed in recent years.There has been, unsurprisingly, a lot of focus on the powerful individuals whose decisions ensured that the election result was respected, such as an aggressive Supreme Court justice and the leaders of its military. Their decisions were undoubtedly important. But focusing on a few people’s choices can obscure another important issue: the strength of Brazil’s democratic institutions — and how that affects ordinary Brazilians’ lives.I know that “institutions” can sound dry as a topic — a second ago we were talking about riots, now I’m conjuring visions of paperwork and buzzing fluorescent lighting — but stay with me here.Because I want to talk about a new paper about Brazilian political institutions by Camilo Nieto-Matiz, a political science professor at the University of Texas San Antonio, and Natán Skigin, a Ph.D. student at Notre Dame. It reads a bit like political science as scripted by Martin Scorsese — light on the paperwork, heavy on the murders and gangland politics. And although it is not specifically about Bolsonaro or the recent election, it offers important context about the conditions that brought the country into, and potentially out of, a democratic crisis.A surprising way to reduce violent crimeBrazil’s electronic voting system has made headlines around the world with the false claims by Bolsonaro, as president, that it was rife with fraud.But Nieto-Matiz and Skigin began studying the system years earlier, when Brazil first began rolling it out to districts across the country. They noticed that it seemed to be having a surprising effect: When electronic voting was introduced into a particular area, violent crime there quickly fell.“That was really puzzling,” Nieto-Matiz told me when we spoke last week. They had expected to perhaps find a relationship between electronic voting and particular policies: perhaps a benefit to illiterate citizens, whose votes were more likely to be counted under the new electronic system than the old paper one. But the decrease in violence seemed to happen almost immediately, before any new policies had a chance to take effect. What could account for that?When they dug a little deeper, they found that the new voting system seemed to make it slightly less likely for political parties that gain votes by promising goods or resources in exchange for support — what political scientists call clientelistic parties — to win elections. Those parties may have been more likely to rely on ballot fraud to win, the researchers hypothesized, which became harder once electronic voting was introduced.By contrast, so-called programmatic parties, which tend to mobilize support by promising to enact certain policies — for example the leftist agenda of the Workers Party, the party of the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — did slightly better under the new system. (Programmatic parties can have right-wing agendas, too. And no party is exclusively one model or another, but they tend to skew in one direction.)Nieto-Matiz and Skigin wondered whether there might be a link between violence and the type of party that prevailed in elections, so they set out to test that more rigorously — resulting in the current paper.They examined a set of local elections so tight that they were essentially coin flips, making the results as close to random as it would be possible to be in real-world politics. That way, they could be reasonably confident that differences were because of the type of party that won, rather than the underlying conditions in the district.The results were striking: When programmatic parties won, local homicide rates immediately fell. But when clientelistic parties won, violence in their districts actually got worse. And, once again, the researchers said, the effect showed up far too quickly for it to be the result of new laws or policies.One study isn’t enough to conclusively say why they found a correlation between programmatic parties and reduced violence, the researchers were careful to note when we spoke. But they had a hypothesis — and that’s where things start getting Scorsese-ish.They suggest that clientelistic parties are more likely to collaborate with local armed groups, which in Brazil include criminal gangs and paramilitary groups backed by landowners and oligarchs.Research has shown that clientelistic parties tend to have relatively loose internal controls on membership and candidates, which can make them useful vehicles for criminals looking to get into politics — something that other studies have found in India and Colombia. Additionally, gangs and paramilitaries can help get rid of political opposition, assist with election fraud, or deliver the votes of people from groups or areas under their control.By contrast, because programmatic parties need to maintain ideological discipline, they tend to have stronger institutional controls over who can be a party candidate or official. And they might also face more of a backlash if voters perceive them as corrupt or violent, because their appeal to voters is based on how well they enact their ideological agendas in office. That’s harder to do while mired in investigations or prosecutions for wrongdoing, which means they have less incentive to collaborate with violent groups.So the theory goes that, while individual politicians’ decisions might vary quite a bit, clientelistic parties had more of an incentive to enter into mutually beneficial relationships with gangs, paramilitaries or other violent actors. And that gave those armed groups more impunity and local power, which in turn increased violent crime.Which brings us back to the resilience of Brazilian democracy.Research has shown that over time, programmatic parties tend to crowd out clientelistic parties, because support for the latter tends to collapse as soon as they’re out of power and unable to distribute resources to supporters. Skigin and Nieto-Matiz’s work adds to that by showing how the process might also reduce the power of violent groups.“We should expect that those that those criminal actors or generally coercive actors, they should be either weakened, or, if they are able to survive, they are not going to be able to resort to as much violence,” Skigin said.Viewed through that lens, the broader story of Brazil’s democracy starts to look less like an episode of democratic crisis, and more like turbulence on a long, slow and still incomplete trajectory of democratization.And it suggests that the recent election, which saw the victory of a candidate for the Workers Party — the largest programmatic party in the country — may have implications for ordinary citizens’ lives that go far beyond his party’s policies or ideology.Thank you for being a subscriberRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.I’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to interpreter@nytimes.com. You can also follow me on Twitter. More