Editing Jair Bolsonaro (section)

===President of Brazil===
One of the issues on which Bolsonaro had run for the presidency was reform of Brazil’s generous national pension scheme, which accounted for some 40 percent of total federal spending. In October 2019, largely in response to the efforts of the minister of economics, Paulo Guedes, Congress approved a dramatic overhaul of the system, which hinged on raising the minimum retirement age for men and women from ages 56 and 53 to ages 65 and 62, respectively. This restructuring, which had eluded Bolsonaro’s predecessors as president, was a big policy win for him.

Bolsonaro’s all-but-official championing of deforestation in the Amazon region proved to be much less broadly popular, though his reduction of the punitive powers of the country’s environmental agencies—which protected the Amazon rainforest and the interests of indigenous people who lived there—was warmly greeted by the business sectors that profited from the region’s exploitation. Bolsonaro’s government turned a blind eye to illegal logging concerns that clear-cut protected land and then burned the remaining trees to make way for cattle ranching and mining. However, in July and August 2019, when forest fires in the region were blazing at levels that had not been reached for some 10 years, there was an uproar both within Brazil and from an international community that was concerned about the impact the damaging of the rainforest would have on climate change. Bolsonaro responded by instituting a 60-day ban on fires set to clear land. He also deployed 44,000 military personnel to combat the fires and accepted the help of four firefighting planes sent by the Chilean government. By October the threat had abated, but some 2,930 square miles (7,600 square km) of rainforest had been deforested in the first nine months of the year. That Bolsonaro had shown little compassion for the indigenous people displaced by the deforestation and fires came as no great surprise, given his habitual disdain for them, a feeling that matched his frequently expressed intolerance of the LGBTQ community, which satisfied the prejudices of some of his supporters among conservative factions of Roman Catholics and Evangelicals.

Many observers accused Bolsonaro of egregiously misleading the country when it came to Brazil’s unsteady and ultimately tragically inadequate response to the spread of the potentially deadly COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, cases of which had originally been reported in China in December 2019. In March 2020, after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global pandemic, state and local governments in Brazil began instituting aggressive social-distancing and lockdown measures to combat the disease. However, despite being taken in advance of the pandemic’s onslaught on Brazil, these efforts were undermined by the federal government’s lacklustre response, which took its cues from Bolsonaro. He repeatedly downplayed the disease’s severity, mocked the mask-wearing that provided the first line of defense against the spread of the virus, and blocked attempts to lock down elements of the economy to try to contain the public health crisis. As a result, a Brazilian health care system that was generally well positioned to combat the pandemic ultimately faltered badly.

When he contracted the disease himself in July, during the first wave of the pandemic in Brazil, Bolsonaro continued to interact with others in public without wearing a mask or maintaining social distance. In addition, he claimed that he had benefited from taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug that not only proved to be ineffective against the virus but also had the potential to produce dangerous side effects. Though Brazil’s hospitals and health care workers were challenged, they weathered that first wave of the pandemic relatively well, and by August the number of virus cases and virus-related deaths had dropped dramatically. By November, however, a second wave of the virus had begun descending with a fury after many Brazilians relaxed their adherence to prevention protocols. The spiking spread of the disease was exacerbated by the slow rollout of the country’s vaccination program, which was not aided by the nay-saying of Bolsonaro, who speciously claimed that the vaccinations posed health hazards.

As the disease proliferated in Brazil, it mutated into a new, more easily transmissible strain, P.1, which spread throughout the country after originating in Manaus late in 2020. In the process, Brazil became the epicentre of a raging outbreak that began extending throughout Latin America. By mid-May 2021, more than 15,000,000 people in Brazil had contracted the coronavirus and more than 428,000 individuals had died from COVID-19-related causes. Even as the situation became increasingly grim, Bolsonaro persisted in downplaying the crisis. However, as his popularity suffered, he began to walk back some of his criticism of the prevention measures, especially after a Supreme Court judge dismissed the corruption charges against Lula in March 2021, paving the way for the popular former president to challenge Bolsonaro for the presidency in 2022, and later defeat Bolsonaro by a narrow 51 percent margin.

On January 8th, 2023, Jair Bolsonaro supporters [[2023 Brazilian Congress storming|stormed the Praça dos Três Poderes area in an attempt to overturn the election results]]. Soon after, Brazil's Supreme Court began investigating Bolsonaro for potentially inciting the insurrection.

On 30 June 2023, the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court barred Bolsonaro from running for public office until 2030 as a result of his attempts to undermine the validity of Brazil's 2022 democratic election, as well as for abuse of power with regards to using government channels to promote his campaign. The decision applies to municipal, state and federal elections for the next eight years. He was prosecuted for several allegations of fraud in the 2022 Brazilian elections and situations linked to the January 8 attack on federal government buildings. The decision came after a 5–2 vote in favor of conviction. Bolsonaro can appeal the decision, which he said he would.