The case of Saudi jewelry has divided the circle of Jair Bolsonaro.
A part of the allies defends that the ex-president returns to Brazil as soon as possible to avoid the “deconstruction of who, four months ago, had 50% of the Brazilian votes”, as a former palace assistant says.
Another wing considers that, by extending his stay in the United States, Bolsonaro would help to “cool down” the repercussions of the last scandal and would prevent President Lula from continuing to “use him to divert the focus of attention from the problems of the PT government”.
The two wings, however, agree on one issue: from an electoral point of view, Bolsonaro is the turning point — the ruling of the former captain’s ineligibility by the Superior Electoral Court is given as a fait accompli by advisers such as marketer Duda Lima, the former head of Secom, Fabio Wajngarten, allies of the PL and advisors to the former president in the party, such as General Braga Netto.
The action initiated by the PDT from the meeting in which the former president attacked the Brazilian electoral system in front of foreign ambassadors is in the final stage — as the reporting minister Benedito Gonçalves did not make any new requests to the parties, defense and prosecution are waiting for him to ask final arguments in the coming weeks, so that the trial in the TSE plenary takes place before Minister Ricardo Lewandowski retires and is replaced by Kassio Nunes Marques, appointed by Bolsonaro.
Faced with Bolsonaro’s imminent electoral impediment, the concern of allies is to preserve their political capital in order to transfer it to a successor in the 2026 presidential elections and take advantage of it in next year’s municipal elections. The president of the PL, Valdemar Costa Neto, dreams of seeing his contractor traveling around the country and gathering crowds around the city bandstands — the chief estimates that the PL could make up to 900 mayors next year.
It turns out that Bolsonaro is undisciplined, unpredictable and has already given indisputable demonstrations of a lack of appreciation for hard work. In addition, in the field of Justice, it collects four investigations in the Federal Supreme Court alone, not counting those that may be to come with the evolution of the jewelry case (the hypothesis of crimes of embezzlement and money laundering has already been announced by the Minister of Justice , Flávio Dino) and with the investigation that the Lula government promotes about its latest administrative actions, focusing on the dozens of confidential ordinances that sooner or later will end up becoming public.
If, as a political force, Bolsonarism is much more institutionalized than in 2017, when the former captain was successful at Brazilian airports wielding his imaginary gun, Bolsonaro, as an individual, is now following the inverse trajectory of the movement that bears his name. — as an electoral asset, it has proven to be a great aggregator of liabilities.
