Brazil’s democracy has been under near-permanent tension for the past three years, in a systemic grip on a former president who refuses to admit defeat. Saturday morning, those muscles tensed again.
Jair Bolsonaro, already convicted of coup plotting and sentenced to 27 years in prison, was placed in preventive detention after Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled he was a flight risk after trying to tamper with his ankle monitor.
This was one of the most unusual responses a democracy can deploy against a former leader. However, given Brazil’s current trajectory, this was not at all surprising. Repeatedly during Bolsonaro’s presidency and since his inauguration, state institutions have been forced to operate at their limits.
For many Bolsonaro supporters, his preventive arrest was just the latest in a long list of irregularities by the politicized Supreme Court. Right-wing protesters have railed against the court for years, but other Brazilians share concerns about the judiciary amassing unprecedented power.
The Supreme Court did not arrive at this position overnight. It was pushed there again and again by Bolsonaro himself.
On January 8, 2023, long before pro-Bolsonaro mobs stormed government buildings in the capital Brasilia after losing the presidential election to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the country was experiencing a slow-burning conflict between the president, who rules through instability, and his institutions.
Bolsonaro has turned the country’s digital environment into a political weapon. Investigators discovered that his inner circle oversaw a chaotic machine of organized disinformation online. Judges, journalists, health officials, and members of Congress were all targeted. The threats escalated from online abuse to credible, documented death threats against Supreme Court justices.
That hostility led to one of the most important turning points of Bolsonaro’s presidency: the fake news investigation. After prosecutors refused to investigate the networks coordinating these attacks, the Supreme Court launched the case itself by invoking vague rules, giving the justices the power to go after the entire ecosystem of digital militias tied to Bolsonaro’s orbit.
The move was unprecedented and heavily criticized, but it created a legal framework that enabled courts to confront escalating threats.
Then came the pandemic. For Americans, COVID-19 has largely receded from political discussion. That never happened in Brazil. The scale of the tragedy continues to loom over the country’s political landscape: overcrowded hospitals, oxygen shortages, mass graves. And Bolsonaro’s response, or lack thereof, was at the heart of the ensuing systemic conflict. As Brazil became one of the world’s hotspots for infections, he downplayed the virus as “a little flu,” fired his health minister, undermined vaccination efforts and promoted unproven medicines.
More than 700,000 Brazilians have died, making it the second-highest death toll in the world after the United States. In countries with strong public health systems, death felt not only devastating but avoidable.
It was once again the Supreme Court that intervened, affirming the power of governors and mayors to order the release of health data, ensure access to vaccines, and enforce protective measures. In the vacuum left by the executive branch, the judiciary effectively became a public health guardrail.
By the time Bolsonaro lost re-election in October 2022, the conflict between his movement and Brazil’s democratic system was no longer abstract. In the days after the Jan. 8 attack, federal investigators uncovered a draft statute proposing a state of exception to overturn the election, blocking discussions about deploying the military, and uncovering a plot to assassinate Vice President and Supreme Court Justice Lula. Investigators have determined that the conspiracy began shortly after the election.
Viewed from this arc, Saturday’s preventive arrest is not an isolated moment, but part of a broader, uncomfortable truth. Bolsonaro’s actions have repeatedly forced Brazil’s institutions to operate outside their normal boundaries, testing the very limits of the country’s democracy. The legal, political and institutional muscles meant to contain him are still feeling the pain.
Filipe Campante, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies Brazil and comparative political systems, said the young democracy’s institutions have become more widespread and stronger, but the struggle has also exposed some of their weaknesses.
“The dominance of the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court, comes from deeper systemic imbalances,” Campante told CNN.
Brazil’s Congress has amassed great political and budgetary powers over the past decade, but it is increasingly shifting responsibility when things get tough, he said. Its strength has further accelerated under the Bolsonaro administration. Many in the political class, including some on the mainstream right, did not want him or his family to lead the campaign, Campante explained, “but they wanted the votes,” and were happy to let the Supreme Court do the “dirty work” of sidelining him.
The Supreme Court has therefore become the center of every major political conflict during the Bolsonaro era. And there are few subsequent examples in Brazil of judicial authorities launching an investigation, authorizing a raid, and ultimately trying, sentencing, and arresting a former president.
These powers were never seized because they were imposed on courts by a political system too polarized and, in some cases, too self-serving to act.
In Brazil, the least organized branches for political struggle are the ones that do the heavy lifting. The result is a system that reflects how democracies improvise in real time to protect themselves, no matter how biased they may seem.
Bolsonaro has not only burdened Brazil’s courts, but also its foreign policy. In August, US President Donald Trump denounced Bolsonaro’s prosecution as a “witch hunt” and imposed a 50% tariff on imports from Brazil. But U.S. pressure quickly waned, with Trump’s response to Bolsonaro’s arrest being tepid, calling it “unfortunate.”
Campante referred to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, noting that President Trump’s initial reaction drew sharp comparisons to the United States. In the United States, leaders can try to overturn elections, and “it would be great if they were successful,” he said. “If you fail, nothing happens. You just go back.” Brazil’s roads are messier, more improvisational, but far less forgiving, he argued.
The stakes now go far beyond Bolsonaro himself. Although Supreme Court justices recognized Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship that ended in 1985, “this is not really the past,” Campante said. “This is sending a signal to all political actors that it’s a bad idea to try this.”
In other words, accountability is both a warning system and a calculation.
As the clock ticks towards Bolsonaro’s appeal deadline, Brazil is offering the world a lesson in democratic self-defense. It’s not pretty or comforting, but it’s definitely real.
The country remains hurt, unbalanced, and improvised. But it has been shown time and time again that the cost of doing nothing would have been far greater.
