Jair Bolsonaro
Overview
Jair Messias Bolsonaro (자이르 메시아스 보우소나루, born March 21, 1955 – ) is a Brazilian former military officer and politician who served as the 38th president of Brazil from January 1, 2019, to January 1, 2023. A leading far-right figure nicknamed 'Trump of the Tropics,' he faced international criticism during his tenure for expanded destruction of the Amazon rainforest and a failed COVID-19 response. After his defeat in the 2022 presidential election, he was indicted on charges of refusing to accept the election results and plotting a coup, and in 2025 he was convicted by the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court.
Main Content
Birth and Military Career
Born in 1955 in Glicério, São Paulo state, he spent his childhood in several small towns. In the 1970s, he graduated from the Brazilian Army's officer academy and served as an artillery officer; in the 1980s, he published articles criticizing low pay and internal military issues, which brought him into conflict with military authorities. After being discharged as a captain in 1988, he entered politics.
Political Career
He began his political career when elected city councilor in Rio de Janeiro in 1989, and from 1991 to 2018 he served seven terms as a federal deputy. In the Chamber of Deputies, he frequently stood at the center of controversy for defending figures from the military dictatorship era, making hateful remarks about minorities, women, and immigrants, and advocating looser gun regulations. In the 2018 presidential election, he defeated Fernando Haddad of the Workers' Party and was elected president; this is assessed as the first clear right-wing regime change in Brazilian political history since the end of the military dictatorship.
Presidency (2019–2023)
In the early part of his tenure, he pursued market-friendly measures, including economic deregulation, pension reform, and privatization of state-owned enterprises. In environmental policy, however, he sharply cut the environment ministry's budget and weakened oversight functions, causing Amazon deforestation to surge to record levels. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he characterized disease control as an 'overreaction' and opposed mask-wearing and social distancing; he himself tested positive in July 2020. During this period, Brazil became one of the countries with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the world.
2022 Presidential Election and the January 8 Events
After narrowly losing the 2022 presidential election to Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro did not explicitly concede defeat. He skipped the inauguration ceremony on January 1, 2023, and left for Florida in the United States; on January 8 of the same year, his supporters stormed Congress, the Presidential Palace, and the Supreme Court in Brasília in an unprecedented event. In June 2023, Brazil's Superior Electoral Court ruled to strip him of his eligibility to run for office until 2030.
Legal Risks and Conviction
The Federal Police investigated charges including a coup plot to overturn the election results, abuse of power, and forgery of private documents, and in November 2024 Bolsonaro and several close associates were indicted. In 2025, a trial on the coup plot charge was held in the First Panel of the Supreme Federal Court, where he was found guilty and sentenced to 27 years and 3 months in prison. He became the first president in Brazilian history to be convicted on coup charges.
Recent Developments
In 2024–2025, the Brazilian judiciary held Bolsonaro accountable with unprecedented severity over suspicions of an attempted coup. After the Federal Police's indictment in 2024, in August 2025 he was placed under house arrest with an electronic ankle monitor as a condition; in September of the same year, the Supreme Court's guilty verdict effectively ended his political life. Meanwhile, his support base remains solid, and his sons and the far-right camp are seeking a successor structure ahead of the 2026 presidential election. In Brazilian society, debate continues over 'the politicization of the judiciary' and 'defense of democracy,' and internationally, the case has become a representative example for studying far-right populism and cases of election refusal.
Related Topics
- [[Lula da Silva]]
- [[Brazil]]
- [[January 8 Brazil Congress storming incident]]
- [[Far-right populism]]
- [[Amazon rainforest]]