There is arguably no statesman who cuts such a striking political resemblance to Donald J. Trump than Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president.
The two men built their brash political brands on insulting rivals, attacking the press, doubting science and vowing to unroot political elites. When they were each running for re-election, they both warned that only fraud could cause them to lose. And when each lost, they both questioned the results and helped spark attempted insurrections in their respective capitols.
Since then, however, their political paths have dramatically diverged.
On Monday, Mr. Trump is set to return to the White House. Mr. Bolsonaro has been invited to attend the inauguration — but he will probably have to watch from home. That is because Brazil’s Supreme Court confiscated his passport as part of sprawling investigations into what it says were his efforts to subvert democracy — probes that could land him in prison this year.
So why have the two political matches faced such different fates for similar acts?
A key reason: Brazilian institutions have responded to Mr. Bolsonaro far differently than their U.S. counterparts responded to Mr. Trump.
Here are three differences that have made an impact.
1. Bolsonaro was ruled ineligible
Perhaps the clearest contrast: Mr. Trump was able to run for president while prosecutors pursued criminal charges against him, while Mr. Bolsonaro has been ruled ineligible for the next election.
Six months after Mr. Bolsonaro left office in 2023, Brazil’s electoral court ruled that he could not run for elected office until 2030. The seven-judge panel — made up of Supreme Court justices, federal judges and lawyers — made the ruling based on Mr. Bolsonaro’s attacks on Brazil’s voting system during the presidential campaign.
In the United States, no such federal electoral court exists. Voting is run by the states, and candidates can appear on a ballot just by passing a few basic thresholds, including collecting a set number of signatures and having been born in the United States. When Colorado’s top court blocked Mr. Trump from that state’s ballot because of his efforts to hold on to power, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the ruling.
In other words, the Brazilian system empowers a federal court to determine who is fit for office, while the U.S. system largely leaves that decision up to voters.
2. Brazilian courts acted quickly and aggressively
The court ruling that deemed Mr. Bolsonaro ineligible is an illustration of another divergence in the approaches: The Brazilian judiciary has been faster and far more aggressive in its pursuit of Mr. Bolsonaro.
Just one year after Mr. Bolsonaro left office, Brazil’s federal police filed formal accusations in three separate criminal cases against the former president. The police accused him of overseeing plots to sell jewelry he received as state gifts, falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination records and trying to reverse the results of the election he had lost. Mr. Bolsonaro denies that he committed any crime and says he is being politically persecuted.
It took two years after Mr. Trump’s election loss for the U.S. Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to lead criminal investigations into the former president. That appointment came days after Mr. Trump announced he was running again in 2024.
There are wide expectations that Mr. Bolsonaro will be criminally charged and face trial this year. As for the four indictments against Mr. Trump, he was convicted in one case but the sentencing came after his election and he was given no punishment. It appears his other three cases may never go to trial.
The two nations’ Supreme Courts have played very different roles in the processes.
In the United States, appeals to the top court helped to delay the cases against Mr. Trump. The Supreme Court then threw some of the cases into jeopardy when it ruled that presidents were immune from prosecution for their actions carried out as president.
In Brazil, the Supreme Court — and, in fact, a single justice named Alexandre de Moraes — has been leading the investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro.
Justice Moraes’s position alone atop the investigations — in a role that is in some ways akin to both judge and prosecutor — has enabled the inquiries to move much faster as he ordered searches of Mr. Bolsonaro’s home and jailed some of the former president’s allies. But it has also raised grave concerns that, in his pursuit of protecting democracy, Justice Moraes may be doing more harm than good to Brazil’s institutions.
“From a U.S. sensibility, Brazil’s looks like a hyper-activist judiciary that’s willing to do things that most Americans would find very problematic and many Brazilians find very problematic,” said Scott Mainwaring, a Notre Dame political science professor who has studied how each country responded to its former leaders. “But the upside is that it has protected democracy.”
“On the other hand,” he added, “the U.S. judiciary was extremely slow in bringing these four Trump cases to trial.”
3. The Brazilian right offered tepid support
Immediately after the Jan. 6 riot on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, Republicans broadly denounced the violence and Mr. Trump for helping to spark it.
But three weeks later, the Republican congressional leader, Kevin McCarthy, flew to Mar-a-Lago and took photos with Mr. Trump. The Republican Party almost universally followed suit, shifting its own politics further to the right to align with Mr. Trump’s.
The Jan. 8, 2023, riot on the Brazilian Capitol has been met with a much clearer rebuke from the Brazilian right. Though some of Mr. Bolsonaro’s allies have criticized the multiyear prison sentences for many of the people who invaded Brazil’s halls of power, many conservative leaders have remained critical of the Bolsonaro movement’s response to losing the election.
That willingness to push back is partly because Brazil has a far more fragmented political landscape: Twenty-five political parties hold seats in Congress.
While the Brazilian right has not abandoned Mr. Bolsonaro, it also appears ready to move on, promoting several conservative governors as a potential candidate to challenge leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva should he run for re-election next year.
The differing responses from the U.S. and Brazilian right-wing movements is also a consequence of the nations’ divergent judicial approaches, said Malu Gaspar, a political columnist for one of Brazil’s largest newspapers, O Globo. “Trump was eligible,” she said. “Bolsonaro is already ineligible, so you talk to bankers and politicians and they say, ‘Why rehabilitate Bolsonaro?’”
And yet: Bolsonaro finds hope
Mr. Bolsonaro’s view of the situation is different: Don’t count me out yet.
In an interview on Tuesday, the former president said he hoped that his ineligibility ruling could be overturned, enabling him to stage a political comeback like Mr. Trump. “I am certain that if I’m eligible, I’ll be re-elected president,” he said.
His hopes are not that far-fetched. Brazil’s current president, Mr. Lula, was in prison just three years before he was elected in 2022; he became eligible to run for president again because a Supreme Court justice tossed out several criminal cases against him.
And two years after Mr. Trump left office — when he had his own series of encircling criminal investigations — expectations in the United States were low that he would rise again politically.
Now, on Monday, Mr. Trump will become the first felon to become U.S. president.
