Brazil's highest electoral court on Friday banned the country's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, from holding public office for the next eight years after finding him guilty of abusing his power.
The decision bars Bolsonaro, who led the country from 2019 to 2022, from running for president again until 2030. He will be 75 years old at the time, meaning the court's decision likely makes a political comeback for the former president improbable.
In the majority decision, five judges on Brazil's Superior Electoral Court declared that "lies and misinformation propagated by [Bolsonaro]" had the purpose of "discrediting, without any proof, the integrity of the electronic voting machines, aiming to destabilize democracy itself," the court said in a press release.
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The move to ban Bolsonaro mostly stems from his controversial decision to summon foreign ambassadors to his residence weeks before the first round of the 2022 presidential election. At this meeting, which was broadcast on television, Bolsonaro "made baseless claims against Brazil's electronic voting system which caused a public outcry and were denounced by one supreme court judge as politically motivated disinformation," The Guardian reported.
Following his loss to current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro continued to spread unfounded claims of voter fraud and election tampering. This culminated in his supporters storming government buildings in the nation's capital, Brasília, in a scene reminiscent of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The court's president, Alexandre de Moraes, voted against Bolsonaro, and said in a statement that what he did was "prohibited conduct, and, when doing so using the position of president, public money, the structure of Alvorada and public TV, it is an abuse of power."
"This decision will end Bolsonaro's chances of being president again, and he knows it," Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University, told The Associated Press.
