In September 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was working a crowd in the south-eastern city of Juiz de Fora when a 40-year-old man pushed through and stabbed him in the stomach. Pictures of the candidate bent over in pain, in a T-shirt in Brazil’s football colours, were shared millions of times and run endlessly on television. He survived. The shock, the BBC reported, boosted his outsider image and helped carry him to victory weeks later.
Seven years on, Brazil’s Supreme Court has found him guilty of plotting a coup and sentenced him to more than 27 years in prison.
From the barracks to Congress
Bolsonaro began as an army officer. He left the forces after campaigning for higher military pay and being accused, then acquitted, of plotting a bombing as part of salary protests in the 1980s. A three-decade career as a congressman followed, seven terms in all. He built a name on incendiary statements and a defence of the military dictatorship that ended in 1985, and for years he was a regular on television talk shows, where he railed against democracy and praised authoritarian rule.
In a 1999 interview he said that as president he would stage a coup on his first day and “finish the work” of the dictatorship by killing 30,000 people, starting with the then-president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
Most of Brazil’s political establishment never took him seriously. The BBC’s former São Paulo bureau chief wrote that in July 2018, three months before the vote, pollsters, politicians and business leaders all told him the same thing: Bolsonaro led most polls but could not win. He had no major party machine behind him, and his support would fade once television campaigning began.
Why 2018 was different
Brazilians had just lived through five years of turmoil. Mass protests came in 2013, then a deep recession, the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the sweeping “Car Wash” investigation. That probe touched politicians across the spectrum but hit hardest the Workers’ Party of Rousseff and Lula, who governed from 2003 to 2010. In April 2018 Lula was jailed on corruption charges that the Supreme Court later annulled. To many voters, every politician looked compromised.
Bolsonaro, working mostly through social media, pulled together a wide coalition. It included middle-class and lower-middle-class voters fed up with the Workers’ Party, evangelicals who already made up more than 26% of the population, parts of the police and military, far-right militants, and business sectors unhappy with the economy. Probably most important, the BBC said, were millions of ordinary Brazilians who simply thought it was time for a change.
A presidency of fights
He turned the Brazilian right into a mass movement for the first time. Governing was harder. His cabinet had little federal experience, and he leaned on military officers for key posts. The administration was pro-business, aligned itself with Donald Trump’s United States, and weakened environmental oversight in ways that favoured agribusiness. Deforestation in the Amazon surged and drew international anger.
The pandemic was the real test. Bolsonaro opposed social distancing, joined crowds that ignored mask advice, called Covid-19 a “little flu” in March 2020 and, asked about the rising death toll a month later, said: “I’m not a gravedigger.” He later admitted regretting that remark. He resisted offers to buy vaccines and refused a jab himself. More than 700,000 Brazilians died of Covid-19 between 2020 and March 2023, and many specialists believe thousands of lives could have been saved with earlier distancing and immunisation.
His most formidable opponent was not a party but the Supreme Court, which struck down his attempts to block distancing and mask rules and rejected policies that would have eased gun purchases. Justice Alexandre de Moraes became his nemesis. At mass rallies in Brasília and São Paulo in September 2021, Bolsonaro called him a canalha, or scoundrel, and said he would leave the presidency only “arrested, dead, or victorious.”
Defeat, 8 January and the verdict
Lula won the 2022 election by less than two percentage points. Bolsonaro never acknowledged defeat, though he authorised the transition. Supporters blocked roads with lorries and hundreds camped outside army barracks demanding that the armed forces stop Lula’s inauguration. Later investigations showed Bolsonaro met military leaders to discuss a state of emergency to overturn the result. Two of the three chiefs refused, according to sworn statements. Police also found that a plan to assassinate Lula and Moraes had been printed inside the presidential palace by one of his aides. Bolsonaro denies knowing of any such plans.
He flew to Florida in the last days of 2022 and skipped Lula’s inauguration on 1 January 2023. A week later, thousands of his supporters stormed Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. The justices later saw it as part of a broader plan to remove Lula.
In July 2025, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods and called Bolsonaro the victim of a witch hunt. In August Bolsonaro was placed under house arrest. The Supreme Court convicted him on all five charges, including plotting a coup and leading an armed conspiracy, and barred him from public office until 2060. Allies in Congress were already negotiating an amnesty. A Lula administration official, speaking anonymously, warned that the Supreme Court would declare any such amnesty unconstitutional.
