The TSE judges the former president for attacks against the electronic voting system during a meeting with ambassadors in July 2022, three months before he was defeated at the polls by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
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In this Tuesday's session, the case's rapporteur, minister Benedito Gonçalves, was the only one to speak out and voted for Bolsonaro's political ineligibility for 8 years, associating him with “violent speech and lies” that put “in check the credibility of electoral justice”.
Gonçalves stated that the meeting with diplomats “served to incite a state of collective paranoia” through a “set of false or distorted information” about Brazil's electoral system.
He considered that the former president used “the prerogatives of public office and command of the Armed Forces to promote the intensification of institutional tensions”, even after his electoral defeat.
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Following the opinion of the Public Electoral Ministry in the first session of the trial, last week, Gonçalves voted to convict Bolsonaro for “abuse of political power and misuse of the media”.
After the first vote for Bolsonaro's ineligibility, the trial was suspended.
The trial is expected to resume in a third plenary session on Thursday, when the other six ministers will also speak.
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The possibility of postponing the trial is not ruled out if any of the magistrates requests more time to examine the case.
“Bolsonaro respectfully awaits the decision,” the former president’s lawyer, Tarcísio Vieira, had told journalists before entering the TSE room.
“The evidence is fragile for a sanction of this magnitude, of this severity, which would be a ban for eight years, of the ineligibility of the person being investigated”, added Vieira.
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Bolsonaro: 'I will not despair'
In his speech to ambassadors at Palácio do Alvorada in 2022, Bolsonaro stated without evidence that he was trying to “correct flaws” in the current electronic voting system with the possible participation of the Armed Forces.
The former captain stated that the supposed vulnerability of the system could serve to manipulate the electoral result against him.
The 68-year-old far-right politician denies having committed any crime, although he shows no confidence in an acquittal.
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“The trend, what everyone says, is that I will become ineligible,” declared Bolsonaro in an interview published this Tuesday by the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. “I will not despair”, “I will continue to do my part”, he added.
In Thursday's session, Vieira compared the case to that of the famous Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus, unjustly convicted in France at the end of the 19th century, asking that a similar “mistake” not be made.
Appeal to the Supreme Court
The lawyer anticipated that, in case of conviction, the defense will appeal the sentence to the Federal Supreme Court.
A political disqualification leavesaria Bolsonaro out of the next presidential elections.
“In 2026, if I am alive by then and eligible, if it is the will of the people, we will compete for the Presidency again,” Bolsonaro said last week.
The TSE's decision will be the first in a series that must still be taken in relation to the former president who responds to more than ten cases in the electoral court.
He is also the target of five investigations at the Federal Supreme Court, with penalties punishable by imprisonment, including regarding his alleged role as the intellectual author of the attack on the Três Poderes headquarters by his supporters on January 8 in Brasília.
