Jair Bolsonaro
Jair Bolsonaro spent twenty-seven years in Congress praising the dictatorship, won the presidency, and was convicted of plotting to keep it. He was an army captain who was nearly discharged in 1986 for writing an article complaining about officers' pay and for an alleged plan to plant bombs in barracks. He was elected to the Chamber in 1990 and re-elected six times, passing almost no legislation and becoming known for remarks about women, gay people and the military governments. In 2016 he dedicated his impeachment vote to the colonel who had run the unit where Rousseff was tortured. He won in 2018 with fifty-five per cent of the runoff, campaigning against corruption and crime, largely on social media, after being stabbed in the abdomen at a rally in September. His government loosened gun ownership, cut environmental enforcement, and saw Amazon deforestation rise to its highest rate in more than a decade. The pandemic defined him. He called it a little flu, attended rallies, promoted hydroxychloroquine, and Brazil recorded more than seven hundred thousand deaths. A Senate inquiry in 2021 recommended charging him with crimes against humanity. He questioned the electronic voting machines throughout, including to foreign ambassadors, and lost the 2022 election to Lula by under two points. He flew to Florida before the handover. On 8 January 2023 his supporters stormed the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace in Brasilia. The electoral court barred him from office until 2030 for the abuse of power against the voting system, and in September 2025 the Supreme Court convicted him of leading a plot to overturn the result and sentenced him to twenty-seven years.
- Lived: 1955 CE – ?
- Nationality: Brazilian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
