The 69-year-old was handed five charges over the alleged bid to prevent his successor, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from taking office after a bitter election race.

The charges include allegations that he planned to poison Lula and shoot dead Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.

Bolsonaro denies wrongdoing and says he is the victim of political persecution.

The prosecutor’s advice will now be considered by the Supreme Court. If accepted, Bolsonaro and 33 others will be formally charged and will have to face trial.

The former president was banned from running for office for eight years after being accused of undermining Brazilian democracy by falsely claiming that electronic ballots used in the October 2022 poll were vulnerable to hacking and fraud.

The bitterly fought election was won by an extremely narrow margin by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – known more commonly as Lula.

Bolsonaro never publicly acknowledged his defeat and left Brazil for the US two days before Lula was sworn in as president.

On 8 January 2023, his supporters stormed government buildings in the capital Brasilia. Parts of the buildings were ransacked and police arrested 1,500 of the rioters.

Three months ago, the federal police released a report accusing Bolsonaro of playing a lead role in planning and organising an attempted coup – including by proposing the idea to key figures in the military – to stop Lula taking power.

The document charging Bolsonaro says the responsibility for acts that were harmful to democratic order lies with a criminal organisation led by Bolsonaro himself.

In practice, this means legal proceedings are beginning and Bolsonaro will likely face a trial.

One of the charges is for the crime of “armed criminal organisation”, allegedly led by Bolsonaro and his vice-presidential candidate Walter Braga Netto.

The alleged plot included a plan to poison Lula and shoot dead Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, one of Bolsonaro’s rivals, Attorney-General Paulo Gonet Branco said.

“Allied with other individuals, including civilians and military personnel, they attempted to prevent, in a coordinated manner, the result of the 2022 presidential elections from being fulfilled,” he said.

Brazilian media reports that the Supreme Court is expected to proceed with the trial later this year.

Reaction to the prosecutor’s decision shows that the divisions that have marked Brazilian politics for the past decade remain as deep as ever.

Government supporters are celebrating and saying the former president belongs in jail, while the opposition insist he’s innocent.

The focus now is on the impact the Supreme Court decision will have on next year’s presidential election. Recent opinion polls show record levels of rejection for President Lula.

Despite being banned from running for office, Bolsonaro remains a strong political force in Brazil and could use the trial as a platform for his agenda.

The Wall Street Journal reported late on Thursday that Bolsonaro is banking on Trump pressuring Brazil with sanctions to delay enforcing a court ruling that bars him from office until 2030 for baselessly attacking the country’s voting system before the 2022 elections he lost.

“Trump is back, and it’s a sign we’ll be back, too,” Bolsonaro said in an interview with the US newspaper.

Bolsonaro’s remarks come just days after Brazilian police released a report implicating the former president in an alleged criminal organisation designed to overturn the 2022 election that he lost to his left-wing rival, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Bolsonaro “planned, acted and was directly and effectively aware of the actions of the criminal organisation aiming to launch a coup d’etat and eliminate the democratic rule of law”, the report said.

The former army captain, who served as president from 2019 to 2022, has denied any wrongdoing and claimed to be the victim of a politically motivated witch-hunt.

Despite the coup accusations and other investigations against him, Trump’s electoral victory earlier this month in the US has injected new energy into Brazil’s far-right and stirred hopes that Bolsonaro can mirror his return to power.

Bolsonaro often expressed admiration for Trump during the Republican’s first term in office from 2017 to 2021, and he was widely dubbed “Trump of the Tropics” during his own presidency.

Similarly to Trump, who continues to say the 2020 election he lost to President Joe Biden was stolen from him, Bolsonaro spent months in the run-up to the 2022 vote in Brazil falsely claiming that the country’s voting system was vulnerable to widespread fraud.

Shortly after his left-wing challenger Lula took office in January 2023, thousands of Bolsonaro’s supporters who were angered over the election results stormed the presidential palace, Congress and the Supreme Court in the capital, Brasilia.

The attack drew comparisons to the insurrection in the US two years earlier, on January 6, 2021, when a group of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington, DC, to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory.

Guilherme Casaroes, professor at the Fundacao Getulio Vargas’s Sao Paulo School of Business Administration, said this week that Brazilian conservatives “are hoping [Trump] will use the threat of sanctions and other punitive measures to put pressure on Brazilian authorities to allow” Bolsonaro to run for president in 2026.

“Even if the threat of US sanctions doesn’t by itself change judicial outcomes in Brazil, a global chorus of sympathy for Bolsonaro may, in fact, help him politically in Brazil, fuelling a sense of grievance and popular desire for his return”, Casaroes wrote in Americas Quarterly.