On December 5, Jair Bolsonaro announced that he would endorse his eldest son, Flávio, in Brazil’s presidential elections next year. Few electoral campaigns have been launched under less auspicious circumstances.
At the end of November, the political fortunes of the Bolsonaro dynasty — the leading figures on Brazil’s far right — appeared to be spent. The ex-president languished in house arrest and was reputedly seriously ill. Flávio launched a public spat with his stepmother Michelle, Bolsonaro’s third wife. Another son, Eduardo, was in self-imposed exile in Florida, punctuating his pleas for US intervention with WhatsApp texts lambasting his father as an “ungrateful bastard.”
And then there was the jailbreak. On the afternoon of November 22, federal police rushed to Bolsonaro’s Brasília mansion, alerted by a malfunction with his ankle monitor. It emerged that the ex-president had used a soldering iron to tamper with his anklet, evidently in the hopes of escaping to Argentina while Flávio ran cover outside under the guise of a prayer vigil. Caught in flagrante, Bolsonaro blamed the episode on medicine-induced paranoia and shoddy sleep. Having violated the privileges of his genteel house arrest, Jair was promptly carted off to prison. And the Supreme Court announced it was mulling fresh investigations into Flávio.
The botched escape was widely thought to portend the end of House Bolsonaro — a decline cinched by Jair’s conviction three months prior for plotting a coupmongering three months prior. Since September, Brazil’s political right has jostled to appoint a successor capable of defeating Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2026 and welding together the country’s fractious far-right and centrist blocs. With Jair imprisoned and his family in turmoil, all signs pointed to the Bolsonaro dynasty running out of momentum. Polls put the ex-president’s disapproval ratings at 60 percent.
The ex-president had used a soldering iron to tamper…
Auteur: Tyler Antonio Lynch
