Brazilian democracy has spent the past three years in a near-permanent state of tension – a full-body clench against an ex-president who refused to accept defeat. On Saturday morning, those muscles tightened again.
Jair Bolsonaro, already convicted of plotting a coup and sentenced to 27 years in prison, was taken into preventive custody after Brazil’s Supreme Court said he had tried to tamper with his ankle monitor and was a flight risk.
It was one of the most extraordinary responses a democracy can deploy against a former leader. And yet, in Brazil’s current trajectory, it was not entirely surprising: Bolsonaro’s presidency and post-presidency have repeatedly forced the country’s institutions to operate at their limits.
For many Bolsonaro supporters, his preventive arrest was just the latest on a long list of injustices by a politicized Supreme Court. Right-wing protesters have railed against the court for years, but other Brazilians also share alarm that the judiciary has amassed unprecedented power.
The Supreme Court did not arrive at this posture overnight. It was pushed there, again and again, by Bolsonaro himself.
Long before pro-Bolsonaro rioters stormed government buildings in the capital, Brasília, on January 8, 2023, following his presidential election loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the country lived through a slow-burn confrontation between its institutions and a president who governed through destabilization.
Bolsonaro transformed the country’s digital landscape into a political weapon; his inner circle, investigators found, oversaw a sprawling machine of coordinated online disinformation. Judges, journalists, health officials and lawmakers all became targets. Threats escalated from online abuse to credible, documented death threats against Supreme Court justices.
That hostility produced one of the most important turning points of Bolsonaro’s presidency: the “fake news inquiry.” After prosecutors refused to investigate the networks coordinating those attacks, the Supreme Court invoked an obscure rule to open the case itself and authorized a justice to trace the entire ecosystem of digital militias tied to Bolsonaro’s orbit.
The move was unprecedented and fiercely criticized, but it became the legal architecture that allowed the court to confront the escalating threats that followed.
And then came the pandemic. For Americans, Covid-19 has largely receded from political debate. In Brazil, it never did. The sheer scale of the tragedy – overwhelmed hospitals, oxygen shortages, mass graves – still hangs over the country’s political landscape. And Bolsonaro’s response, or lack of one, became central to the institutional confrontation that followed. As Brazil turned into one of the global hot spots, he dismissed the virus as a “little flu,” fired health ministers, undermined vaccination efforts and promoted unproven drugs.
More than 700,000 Brazilians died, the second-highest toll in the world after the United States. In a country with a robust public health system, the deaths felt not just catastrophic, but avoidable.
It was the Supreme Court again that intervened, ordering the release of health data, securing vaccine access and affirming the authority of governors and mayors to enforce protective measures. In the vacuum left by the executive branch, the judiciary, in effect, became a guardrail for public health.
By the time Bolsonaro lost his reelection bid in October 2022, the confrontation between his movement and Brazil’s democratic system was no longer abstract. In the days that followed the January 8 attacks, federal investigators found a draft decree proposing a state of exception to overturn the election, intercepted discussions of deploying the armed forces and uncovered plots to assassinate Lula, his vice president and a Supreme Court justice. This plotting started immediately after the election, the investigators found.
Seen in that arc, Saturday’s preventive arrest is not an isolated moment, but part of a broader, uncomfortable truth: Bolsonaro’s actions repeatedly forced Brazil’s institutions to operate outside their normal boundaries, testing the very limits of the country’s democracy. The muscles used to contain him – legal, political, institutional – are still sore.
In the view of Filipe Campante, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies Brazil and comparative political systems, the young democracy’s institutions prevailed and emerged stronger – but the struggle also laid bare some of the system’s weaknesses.
“The protagonism the judiciary, and the Supreme Court in particular, has taken on comes from a deeper institutional imbalance,” Campante told CNN.
The Brazilian Congress has accumulated enormous political and budgetary power over the past decade, but it has also increasingly handed off responsibility when things get hard, he said. That dynamic was supercharged under Bolsonaro. Much of the political class, including parts of the mainstream right, didn’t want him or his family leading their camp, Campante explained, “but they wanted the votes” and were more than willing to let the Supreme Court “do the dirty work” of sidelining him.
That left the Supreme Court at the center of every major political collision of the Bolsonaro era. And Brazil has almost no precedent for what followed: a judiciary that opens investigations, authorizes raids and ultimately tries, sentences and arrests a former president.
These powers weren’t grabbed so much as they were pushed onto the court by a political system too polarized – and in some cases too self-interested – to act.
In Brazil, the branch least built for political combat has become the one doing the heavy lifting. The result is a system that, however lopsided it may look, reflects a democracy improvising in real time to defend itself.
Bolsonaro didn’t just strain Brazil’s courts – he strained its foreign policy, too. After denouncing the prosecution of Bolsonaro as a “witch hunt,” US President Donald Trump in August imposed 50% tariffs on imports from Brazil. But the US pressure soon faded, and Trump’s response to Bolsonaro’s latest arrest was a tepid, “That’s too bad.”
Trump’s initial reaction sharpened a comparison with the United States, Campante noted, referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. In the US, a leader can try to overturn an election, and “if you succeed, great,” he said. “And if you fail, nothing happens. You can just come back.” Brazil’s path, he argued, is messier, more improvised – but far less permissive.
The stakes now stretch far beyond Bolsonaro himself. While Supreme Court justices have acknowledged Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship that ended in 1985, “this is not really about the past,” Campante said. “It’s about signaling to all political actors that trying this is a bad idea.”
Accountability, in other words, is as much a reckoning as it is a warning system.
As the clock ticks down toward Bolsonaro’s final appeal deadline, Brazil is offering the world a lesson in democratic self-defense – one that is neither tidy nor comforting, but undeniably real.
The country is still bruised, unbalanced and improvising. But it has shown repeatedly that the cost of doing nothing would have been far greater.
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