De Moraes orders Eduardo Bolsonaro's arrest and cancels his passport before the runoff

Justice Alexandre de Moraes of Brazil's Supreme Court has ordered the arrest of Eduardo Bolsonaro and cancelled his Brazilian passport, weeks before the 25 October runoff between President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Eduardo's brother, Flavio Bolsonaro. The order tells the former congressman to begin serving a sentence of four years and two months. If he returns to Brazil, the federal police are to arrest him.

The First Panel of the court convicted Eduardo Bolsonaro in June, unanimously, of coercion in judicial proceedings. The charge was that he lobbied the United States to interfere in the trial of his father, former president Jair Bolsonaro. The sentence was initially set in a semi-open regime. De Moraes has now said it should start at once. In the ruling he wrote that the defendant cannot benefit from his own wrongdoing by fleeing the national territory to an unknown location in order to thwart the application of criminal law.

Eduardo Bolsonaro has lived in the United States since 2025. He is the family's link to the Trump administration. He went with Flavio to a meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House in May. An arrest warrant executed only on Brazilian soil does not reach him in the United States unless Washington chooses to cooperate, and the order published this week does not include an extradition request. What it does immediately is void the passport. A Brazilian citizen abroad without a valid passport cannot renew travel documents through a consulate in the ordinary way, and a return flight becomes the moment of arrest.

De Moraes is the justice the Bolsonaro family treats as a political enemy. He chaired the inquiry that ended, in September 2025, with Jair Bolsonaro sentenced to 27 years for plotting a coup. That sentence is the backdrop to the coercion case. The June conviction said Eduardo tried to bring foreign pressure onto that proceeding. Thursday's step converts a sentence that had not yet started into a warrant.

The electoral calendar makes the timing the story. Datafolha's poll on Thursday evening put Flavio at 52 percent to Lula's 48, inside a two-point margin of error. The same day Flavio said in Brasilia he would not pick sides between China and the United States. He is the favourite in several readings of the race, and he is the candidate whose brother has just been told to report to prison. Flavio's campaign has argued that cases brought by de Moraes are political. The court has argued that the convictions are criminal judgments, reached by a panel, and that flight does not suspend them.

Courthouse News, citing the order, placed the decision on Wednesday. Al Jazeera, citing the Associated Press, reported it on Thursday. The difference is the filing date against the publication date. The content does not differ. Passport cancelled. Sentence to begin. Federal police to act on arrival. The semi-open regime from June is the part the new order changes in practice: a sentence that could have been served with daytime release is now an arrest warrant triggered by presence on Brazilian soil.

Nothing in the order changes the ballot. Eduardo is not the candidate. Flavio is. Voters on 25 October will have a court record, a cancelled passport and a brother in the United States to weigh beside prices, jobs and the 27-year sentence already imposed on their father. The warrant's legal effect is narrow. Its campaign effect is the thing de Moraes cannot sequence, and the thing the family will use.