On the day Jair Bolsonaro was taken into pretrial detention, the governor of São Paulo, Tarcisio de Freitas (Republicans), moved to the Federal Supreme Court on Saturday in favor of the former president, according to writer Lauro Jardim of Globo. He had at least one conversation with Minister Gilmar Mendes. The governor worked to return Bolsonaro to house arrest, and said that the former president did not want to escape.
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Tarcisio intends to visit Bolsonaro under the closed regime in the coming weeks, according to allies. A meeting between the two was scheduled for December 10, at Bolsonaro’s home, where he was under house arrest. The visit was approved ten days ago by Minister Alexandre de Moraes. With his pre-trial detention, all meetings of the former president with politicians and friends were halted.
Tarcísio will apply to be added to the visitors list of the Federal Police Control in Brasilia. In addition to Bolsonaro’s health conditions, one of the topics to be discussed should be the 2026 elections.
One of the governor’s allies states that Tarcisio should not deal specifically with his electoral plans, but rather state, regional and federal formations must be made, and that the time will come for the president to make some decisions. Tarcisio is the leading candidate to run in next year’s presidential elections as a representative of the Bolsonarians, but without the former president’s approval at the moment, he has publicly stated that he will run for re-election in São Paulo.
With the election scenario remaining undetermined, Tarcisio must maintain the position of the past three months, when he began publicly declaring that he would be a candidate for re-election in São Paulo – that is, that he would continue to “play idle” until the right-wing presidential candidacy is determined. The allies see two reasons to maintain this course: Bolsonaro’s arrest is very recent, and there is a “child factor”, which has great potential to cause confusion on the right.
In the São Paulo Legislative Assembly, lawmakers allied with the governor said he would continue to have “feet in both boats,” without setting a course for 2026, including measurements from daily national surveys. For one, Tarcisio knows he still needs Bolsonaro’s approval to run for president, and sees the path to reelection as “less expensive” than a national pledge.
Early Saturday morning, before details of Jair Bolsonaro’s electronic ankle bracelet violation were revealed, his allies sought the help of ministers from the Supreme Court to try to calm nerves and try to open a loophole to overturn the preventive detention order for Alexandre de Moraes, according to a blog article by GLOBO’s Malu Gaspar. They denied in talks that the former president had any intention or even circumstances to flee.
In these conversations, they claimed that the incident was a type of outbreak caused by the extensive use of medications to control pain and anxiety, and stated that Bolsonaro was very alone and without support at home.
The ministers contacted by the former president’s allies did not provide any clues about whether they would help him or not, but said they were astonished by the situation, which one described as “strange,” according to Malo Gaspard’s blog.
On Monday, upon arriving at a Grupo Voto event in São Paulo, Minas Gerais state governor Romeo Zema (Novo) stated that by trying to violate the electronic ankle bracelet with a soldering iron, Bolsonaro acted in an “extreme position” and maintained his rhetoric that the former president is a victim of political persecution.
-I see this as an extreme position because of what he is experiencing. But at no time, and we have to explain that, did he try to escape at any time, and we have to explain that. It even seems exaggerated to me. “You’re under house arrest while people are watching your house and you still have to wear an electronic ankle bracelet,” said the governor, who is trying to qualify to run for president next year.
Before the ankle bracelet episode, it was expected that Bolsonaro would decide between today and Thursday to send him to prison to begin serving his sentence of 27 years and three months in prison on charges of organizing a coup to remain in power, after his defeat in the 2022 elections.
But Bolsonaro’s behavior last weekend, when he confirmed to criminal police officers that he had tampered with his ankle bracelet in the middle of the night, prompted Moraes to change his plans, seeing the risk of escape and ordering his preventive detention in federal police surveillance in Brasilia.