00:00Welcome to the show. We start off with fresh news coming from Brazil this Thursday,
00:04where a majority of the Brazilian Supreme Court panel have voted to convict former President Jair Bolsonaro
00:10of attempting a coup to stay in power after his 2022 election loss.
00:15Three of the five justices ruled guilty on all five charges, while one has dissented.
00:21Bolsonaro is currently under house arrest and he faces a potential decades-long sentence
00:25once the final votes and sentencing are completed.
00:28Well, let's go straight to our correspondent in Brazil, Tim Vickery.
00:32Tim, what exactly has happened today?
00:36Well, yesterday there was a reprieve for Bolsonaro when the third judge, Luiz Fux,
00:41spent 13 hours outlining why he thought Bolsonaro was innocent on all charges.
00:47Only a temporary reprieve because very quickly on Thursday, the fourth judge, Carmen Lucia,
00:53found him guilty on all charges.
00:55The fifth judge, the fifth and final judge, Cristian Zanin, is giving his verdict at the moment.
01:01But there is already a majority.
01:03Bolsonaro has already been convicted.
01:06And tomorrow, the judges will assemble once more to decide the sentence,
01:10which goes from a minimum of 16 years to a maximum of 43.
01:14That's a massive sentence.
01:16And no doubt Bolsonaro and his team are fighting back.
01:20What does he have available to him?
01:22What kind of instruments does he have at his disposal to fight against any conviction?
01:26The usual jurisprudence in Brazil is that you need two of the five judges of the Supreme Court
01:36to dissent to have good grounds for an appeal.
01:38At the moment, he only has one.
01:40We're still waiting for Cristian Zanin to finish his verdict.
01:43But it looks unlikely that he's going to break ranks with the other four.
01:47So really, the focus now will move to Congress, where there are projects for an amnesty
01:52for political prisoners in Brazil, for all of those involved in the riots on January the 8th,
02:00including Bolsonaro and his fellow defendants, who've now been found guilty.
02:04One of their problems is that yesterday, Luis Fux, seen as the hope of the riot,
02:09he perhaps overshot a little bit.
02:10He went further than most had been expecting,
02:12finding Bolsonaro innocent, despite admitting that there were lots of things happening
02:17that would benefit Bolsonaro.
02:19How could he explain this?
02:20Well, his narrative was that the guilty parties were Bolsonaro's personal aide,
02:24who follows his instructions, and Bolsonaro's running mate.
02:28Now, it was expected that Luis Fux would argue for a reduction of sentence rather than innocence.
02:35And this verdict that he's put down, that it was all the fault of the butler,
02:39if you like, of Bolsonaro's personal aide and his running mate is a little bit left field
02:44and may a little bit have weakened the case of those in Congress who'll be pushing for an amnesty.
02:50But nonetheless, they will push.
02:51Now the verdict is in.
02:53The game switches to Congress, where Bolsonaro's supporters will push for an amnesty.
02:58Now, Tim, this is quite interesting.
03:00This was a January 8th coup attempt.
03:02There was, of course, the January 6th coup attempt in the United States.
03:06Lots of parallels that we can draw and similarities.
03:08And yet, Brazil have been able to do something here that the United States never could.
03:15Yes, it's a really interesting parallel, isn't it?
03:18I think there are two main reasons for the difference.
03:21One is the example of the United States, not only of the states, of a few authoritarian governments,
03:27including Venezuela on the left and many right-wing ones, where the separation of powers appears to be seen as an enemy and the judiciary are seen as a force to be dominated.
03:40So I think the example of the Trump government has perhaps hardened the resolve of Brazil's Supreme Court, especially as Trump has been bullying Brazil on this issue.
03:48But there's another factor, and that's the weakness of Brazil's party system.
03:52Now, that's often a problem.
03:54It means with so many political parties that governance in Brazil is often down to bargaining.
04:00But it does mean that it's easier to have a plurality of opinions.
04:04Alexandre de Moraes, the president of the Supreme Court, the hate figure of the Brazilian right,
04:08if you look at his political career, he's really a creature of the centre-right.
04:13In the United States, perhaps a little bit crude, but you may call him a kind of moderate Republican.
04:18In the States, with the dual-party thing, he would have been marginalised by the control of the Trump faction in the Republican Party.
04:26Brazil, more political parties, more plurality.
04:30It's been harder for the extreme right to take control of all three branches of government.
04:36I think that's probably a significant difference.
04:39That is a fascinating analysis there, Tim.
04:41Thank you so much, as always, coming to us from Rio de Janeiro, just on the back of that conviction for Jair Bolsonaro.
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